Lightroom Collection Question

[ArtofRetouching]

I cant find an answer to this, hoping a lightroom 5 user has an answer, Google not helping. I'm new, and fighting my way through its oddities.

If I tag an image red, with 5 stars, and put it into a collection, it shows in one collection, and 2 smart collections. While this physically works fine, my question is how can I see which collections it's actually in? It does not seem to highlight all 3, showing where it's located. While I'm at it, it doesnt highlight the folder structure either, to manually find it's home.

This is just strange to me. I would expect to have 4 highights, and have none. How do I know anything relevant about this file's organization?

 

[Tom Mann]

Unfortunately, I can't help you. I use LR a lot, but I'm still on v4.4, and am not a big user of their concept of collections.

The reason is that, as far as I know, "collections" are a proprietary concept unique to Adobe LR. If, as I have already done a couple of times in the last 10 years, switched to a different digital asset management / archiving system, or, if Adobe, at some point in the future, decides to change the details of how they implement "collections", with around 250k images in my archive, I don't want to be at their mercy.

Instead, I render to real images output going to different customers (hard disk space is cheap), and simply add a unique term to the keywords field of these to allow me to retrieve that particular group of image renders. Doing it this way, I can search on the equivalent of "collections" using almost any DAM system including Extensis, or even something as low end as Picasa.

Just my $0.02,

Tom

 

[Tom Mann]

PS - BTW, I think that my DIY system to tag collections can do exactly what you requested: Show all the "collections" that a particular print is in, ie, all files (and their locations) that have a particular collection-oriented keyword.

T

 

[ArtofRetouching]

I spent a week investigating the current DAM landscape, and it's worse than ever. MediaPro is crash prone (the one we are leaving), ACDSee would not read all our RAW formats, Aperture took 35 minutes to import 300 images before I force quit. Plus Aperture is barely supported anymore (and no demo. What's up with that?!?)

Extensis and Photo Mechanic havent been updated in forever. CDFinder changed names, but still did not work very well in it's new role. Cumulus does too many things, and not focused. Capture One 7 would have been our best option, but that also took 30+ minutes to import 1000 images. Sorry, I have other things to do than wait for import.

Lightroom was able to be tricked to work over a network drive, supported our hundreds of thousands of images, and was otherwise quick to use.

It's just this sorting that seems to perplex me. Well, that and the fact that Collections can not be exported back to the images was another strange issue. thus backing up what Tom Mann said about Catalog Sets being a cross platform issue. MediaPro will export to the JPGs, but Lightroom wont read it. Or the colors. So I need to work around that using keywords.