D
dfawkes
Guest
Hi.
I've been using LR for a couple of years, mostly working with folders which until recently satisfied my needs as a low volume shooter. My YYYYMMDD folder structure has served me well where I mentally worked on things by date, but now I shoot more volume and variety, shots on a particular date don't neccesarily 'go' together and so this crude organisational approach doesn't work so well now. I'm also aware that the use of collections brings a lot more organisation and power and naturally want to go down this route anyway.
However, I want to rely entirely on smart collections rather than regular collections, mostly because these are based on metadata and therefore easy to recreate (rather than being arbitrary), and also to enforce proper organisation (rather than just chucking images into collections).
Does anyone have a good way of using smart collections to organise their catalogs? I'm mostly concerned about sensible use of metadata to create the smart collection in the first place. I was thinking there are a few approaches:
- use "in folder" criteria (bad!) or "taken date between" to create smart collections of particular shoots. This would be fairly analagous to using the folder view, and so wouldn't really give me much benefit (although I wouldn't have to move folders under parents to group them), and I'd still have the problem of mixed up photos from a shoot (i.e. it may have been taken on that date, but the data isn't the attribute I'm interested in).
- use collection keywords (e.g. Collection:Scotland trip 2''9"). This seems a bit like using dumb collections, but using keywords (rather than LR's database) to make the collections persistent. I can see this approach working quite well, but it seems clunky and not in the spirit of smart collections! I also might want to switch off those keywords when exporting, etc.
- use "proper" keywords - keyword the images appropriately, and create smart collections from those. This might require heavy keywording and there's the possibility of proliferration of images into collections I don't want them in through poor use of keywording. Sloppiness would completely destory this whole approach, and I don't want to have to design and plan this in huge amounts of detail to avoid that happening.
- use a combination of metadata and keywords to provide better control over what images appear where (so e.g. "date taken=2''9" and "country=Scotland"). I'm presuming this is the 'correct' approach, but there's also the possibility that you might want to have some collections by date ("Scotland 2''9"), whereas others ignore date ("All abstract"), meaning that the criteria for the collections is variable and difficult to track (so you might need to check and change the criteria often to make sure images appear as you expect - with the possibility of images falling between collections).
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way of organising using smart collections? I've heard much that says "use them" but no sugggestion on how to use them and provide a consistent approach to using them.
Whilst on the subject, there's a few things that bother me about collections that I thought I'd list in case anyone has a workaround for them (or if I'm using them wrong):
- no stacks (seems a common complaint)
- in regular collections, flags are local. I like how they are global in smart collections (my preferred way, like folders), but sometimes I imagine I want to have my cake and eat it - typically I flag/reject to indicate if the image is worthy of further consideration, I do this in the folder view currently, but the flag doesn't end up in the collection. So I'll use a smart collection for global flags (to indicate don't worry about this photo in any collection), but then might want to use local flags later when refining images for a particular use. I'm aware I could use ratings to help here, I haven't quite got my ratings approach sussed (typically a flag and no rating would be snapshot, flag and one star would be average shot, two stars good shot, etc). Maybe I should move all my ratings up by one such that anything without a rating should not be used at all.
- smart collections aren't hierarchical, major issue IMO. If I create a "Full shoot" smart collection, I would then expect to define a smart collection on that collection such that I can have sub-collections for "work still to do", "best shots", etc. I could use regular collections within the collection set for this, but they don't dynamically update / are not persisent outside of LR. I find I have to recreate the top level smart collection criteria in every sub-collection also (and you can't copy and paste smart collections, annoying). Worse, if I change the criteria in the top level, I then need to remember to change the criteria in all sub-collections otherwise they are out of sync. This seems so obvious to me I can't believe LR doesn't support it (it almost does with the "in collection" criteria, but that only applies to regular collections?).
If anyone has any suggestions on how best to use smart collections to move away from folders, but allows me to work in a similar-ish way but with better organisation I'd very much appreciate it. (I know I can come up with a system that will work for me, but I can't imagine I'm the first to wonder this and would prefer to tap into the extensive knowledge and experience of others to implement the best practice!).
Thanks in advance.
I've been using LR for a couple of years, mostly working with folders which until recently satisfied my needs as a low volume shooter. My YYYYMMDD folder structure has served me well where I mentally worked on things by date, but now I shoot more volume and variety, shots on a particular date don't neccesarily 'go' together and so this crude organisational approach doesn't work so well now. I'm also aware that the use of collections brings a lot more organisation and power and naturally want to go down this route anyway.
However, I want to rely entirely on smart collections rather than regular collections, mostly because these are based on metadata and therefore easy to recreate (rather than being arbitrary), and also to enforce proper organisation (rather than just chucking images into collections).
Does anyone have a good way of using smart collections to organise their catalogs? I'm mostly concerned about sensible use of metadata to create the smart collection in the first place. I was thinking there are a few approaches:
- use "in folder" criteria (bad!) or "taken date between" to create smart collections of particular shoots. This would be fairly analagous to using the folder view, and so wouldn't really give me much benefit (although I wouldn't have to move folders under parents to group them), and I'd still have the problem of mixed up photos from a shoot (i.e. it may have been taken on that date, but the data isn't the attribute I'm interested in).
- use collection keywords (e.g. Collection:Scotland trip 2''9"). This seems a bit like using dumb collections, but using keywords (rather than LR's database) to make the collections persistent. I can see this approach working quite well, but it seems clunky and not in the spirit of smart collections! I also might want to switch off those keywords when exporting, etc.
- use "proper" keywords - keyword the images appropriately, and create smart collections from those. This might require heavy keywording and there's the possibility of proliferration of images into collections I don't want them in through poor use of keywording. Sloppiness would completely destory this whole approach, and I don't want to have to design and plan this in huge amounts of detail to avoid that happening.
- use a combination of metadata and keywords to provide better control over what images appear where (so e.g. "date taken=2''9" and "country=Scotland"). I'm presuming this is the 'correct' approach, but there's also the possibility that you might want to have some collections by date ("Scotland 2''9"), whereas others ignore date ("All abstract"), meaning that the criteria for the collections is variable and difficult to track (so you might need to check and change the criteria often to make sure images appear as you expect - with the possibility of images falling between collections).
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way of organising using smart collections? I've heard much that says "use them" but no sugggestion on how to use them and provide a consistent approach to using them.
Whilst on the subject, there's a few things that bother me about collections that I thought I'd list in case anyone has a workaround for them (or if I'm using them wrong):
- no stacks (seems a common complaint)
- in regular collections, flags are local. I like how they are global in smart collections (my preferred way, like folders), but sometimes I imagine I want to have my cake and eat it - typically I flag/reject to indicate if the image is worthy of further consideration, I do this in the folder view currently, but the flag doesn't end up in the collection. So I'll use a smart collection for global flags (to indicate don't worry about this photo in any collection), but then might want to use local flags later when refining images for a particular use. I'm aware I could use ratings to help here, I haven't quite got my ratings approach sussed (typically a flag and no rating would be snapshot, flag and one star would be average shot, two stars good shot, etc). Maybe I should move all my ratings up by one such that anything without a rating should not be used at all.
- smart collections aren't hierarchical, major issue IMO. If I create a "Full shoot" smart collection, I would then expect to define a smart collection on that collection such that I can have sub-collections for "work still to do", "best shots", etc. I could use regular collections within the collection set for this, but they don't dynamically update / are not persisent outside of LR. I find I have to recreate the top level smart collection criteria in every sub-collection also (and you can't copy and paste smart collections, annoying). Worse, if I change the criteria in the top level, I then need to remember to change the criteria in all sub-collections otherwise they are out of sync. This seems so obvious to me I can't believe LR doesn't support it (it almost does with the "in collection" criteria, but that only applies to regular collections?).
If anyone has any suggestions on how best to use smart collections to move away from folders, but allows me to work in a similar-ish way but with better organisation I'd very much appreciate it. (I know I can come up with a system that will work for me, but I can't imagine I'm the first to wonder this and would prefer to tap into the extensive knowledge and experience of others to implement the best practice!).
Thanks in advance.
