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Using Lightroom the right way?

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Biff

Active Member
Joined
Sep 7, 2018
Messages
545
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
8.3
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I guess, I unfortunately have used Lightroom in the manner it should not be used and have saved the edited photos on the drive (instead of saving / exporting them only if need be / for a special purpose) and wasted some storage.

Does one have to flag / mark or filter each new photo repectively each new edition to be uploaded, shown on one's website, galery and if need be to automatially export them and / or upload them? What is the best method to do it?

And I want to use Lightroom as it should be used from now on, so without saving / exporting the images before one needs them. Until now I always have assigned a filter (and / or crops or / and guide lines, etc.) to an image / edition, saved / export the photo and removed the filters (and / or crops or / and guide lines, etc.) and assigned another filter (and / or crop or / and guide lines, etc.) and saved / exported it agaom and so on. So, I think, I could not use Lightroom with this catalog how it is desinged to. Should I start with a new catalog?
 
Use Virtual Copies for processing images in different ways. You can have a different copy for each alteration and it takes up now space (hence 'virtual'). You can create copies individually or as an entire collection. Right click > Virtual Copy or tick Make New Virtual Copies in the Library > New Collection dialog
 
I am not certain I fully understand your existing workflow, but if you are editing images, then exporting them and re-importing them into your catalog, then I would concur with rustyLr on using virtual copies as an alternate work flow. If you need to create multiple copies of the same image for different purposes, there are may ways to do so with virtual copies. You could color code them for specific uses, or you could create collections and add the specific copy to a collection. I think that you will find this a bit easier and taking up less space. Also, you can re-edit a virtual copy without a loss in IQ when exporting. If you edit an exported image, it will have been saved twice from the original version, and quality can suffer.

--Ken
 
Yes, I use virtual copies already, thank you, but unfortunately not in the right way.

then exporting them and re-importing them into your catalog,
Sorry for my bad expression, no, I do not re-import them, I just go respectively went back in the history and give images a new filter, crop, guide lines and such.
 
The use of virtual copies combined with Publish services might be helpful. Although just using a Publish service itself might be enough you can define a number of options to process all the images in a given Publish Service.

Depending on where you want to send the images that may already be a Publish plugin for that. If there in not one then you can always use Publish to Hard Drive (included with Lightroom) or one of the variants such as the Collection Publisher or Folder Publisher (Jeffery Friedl) to create and maintain selected and reformatted processed images on one of your hard drives separate from your Lightroom catalog (i.e. not imported back into LR).

The Publish maintains a connection in the catalog so that as you may update and edit you can republish to update these external images or add new images. Publish services can use Smart Collections as well so that you can take advantage of that as well.

One thing to keep in mind regarding Publish Services is that they do not automatically republish as edit or add images to the services. You have to periodically republish each service in order to make the changed appear in the target of that service. If you don't have very many this is easy to do but if you end up with a lot there are also some tools in Jeffery Friedl's bag-o-goodies plugin that help automate the updates.

For a simple example I use the Collection Publisher to publish selected collections to DropBox as a way to share with friends and family. The Collection Publisher exports the selected images using the size and format rules of the Publish Service into a sub-folder of my DropBox root folder on my main system. DropBox then takes those images and uploads them to the DropBox servers. And I can share the resulting DropBox URL with others.

Hopefully this has given you some new ideas for how to leverage Lightroom to help you manage and share your images.

-louie
 
Yes, many thanks for the ideas, -louie.

I want to publish the photos own my own webiste, at the moment I do not have any idea what script / gallery system I want to use. I assume, such a gallery automatically - or most of them or might - offer a publish add on, may be for Lightroom.

And many thanks for the links, I will have a closer look at those scripts.
 
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