If you have been using Lightroom since it’s inception it might seem absolutely natural to you and finding images is as simple as using the efficient and simple filters. If like the 90% of photographers I have worked with, Lightroom seems to have it’s own nascent (and petulant) brain that apparently throws your images away, then this article below might make some sense of Adobe’s enfant terrible and its unruly behaviour. At any rate, it might at the very least stop you from throwing your iMac through a window.
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The first trick is knowing where the images are in your actual computer and Lightroom has several ways to identify this:
- Right click on the image inside the Library view of Lightroom and click on ‘Show Images in Finder’ - This is only really useful if you already know you have the image and it is in Lightroom, but you have no idea where Lightroom put the original photo, probably your RAW, in the first place.
- By far the best way I find in figuring out what Lightroom can see and what it doesn’t is by going to the Library mode and looking at the Folders Menu in the left hand panel. Hover over a folder and right click, then go to ‘Show Parent Folder’. What this does is turn the folder you were hovering over into a sub-folder and its parent folder appears above. To describe this a little more thoroughly; all the files in the computer are ordered into separate subfolders under broader folder or directories. So if we look at the folder name of your pictures folder for instance, it would look something like this: MacHD|Users|YourName|Pictures (if you are using a windows machine there would be a C: directory somewhere there as well is all likelihood). At any rate, when you import directly into Lightroom is doesn’t necessarily show you all the parent directories/folders. This means you can end up having multiple folders of the same year or name. These folders may actually be in completely different locations, but Lightroom muddles this up by putting them all in seemingly in the same folder. By clicking on Show Parent Folder on all the top level folders in Lightroom you can actually see where the folders reside on the computer.
- The single most common telephonic question I get from photographers (and I mean at all hours) is ‘Lightroom can’t see my photos, it’s lost lost them!” The easiest way to find out where those photos are, or if they are indeed lost is to go to the top most folder in your folder tree (possibly the Pictures directory), right clicking and selecting synchronise folder. What this does is compare the images in Lightroom with those on the computer (in the requested folder) and import images which haven’t been imported into Lightroom. It also scans for metadata changes and removes images that are not associated with an image in the computer. The dialogue box that appears when you click on synchronise folder allows you to select what you would like to happen. So, if you don’t want metadata to be changed, you can opt not to tick that box. Most usefully though is that by synchronising the folder you get your files on the computer aligned with the files in Lightroom.
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Of course there is also the possibility that you do indeed have the actual images already in Lightroom, but in a different folder. Once again, performing a synchronization makes a good start towards figuring out where the actual images are. Sometimes it will take a little bit of graft to clean up your library. However, as much as photographers will curse Lightroom from time to time it does not automatically delete your photos, hide them or unnecessarily squirrel them into different folders to the ones that you originally chose. A simple fix to most people’s problems is to sort out where the original photos are and then get Lightroom sorted.
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There are a few ways in which to keep your Lightroom catalogue neatly ordered:
- Personally, I use a chronological file structure for all my RAW files in the computer itself. These are then imported into the Lightroom catalogue. If I have a logical layout of where my original files are, then it makes it lot easier to work out when there is a disconnect between Lightroom and the originals. I have a post on this in Post-Shoot Workflow.
- Then, when I move files, I use Lightroom to do the lifting. Yes, it can be slower than simply moving the files using the operating system, but by moving files using Lightroom, it maintains the sync between the Lightroom catalogue and the original files. This minimises the amount of exclamation and question marks you are going to see in Lightroom (Remember, Lightroom can only ‘see’ what is imported into it, so moving files in the backgrounds breaks the connection that was made on import whereas moving files within Lightroom maintains that connection).
- Do a regular synchronisation on frequently used folders. This just keeps Lightroom up to date with any changes you have made in the background, whether purposely made or inadvertent.
Lightroom is most certainly not the best tool out there, but for the majority of photographers it is one of the most versatile cataloging applications available. The fact that it is now bundled in the Adobe Photography CC package makes it that more attractive (and significantly cheaper than Phase One’s Capture One Pro). If you can understand how it works it becomes less of the enfant terrible and more of a jack-of-all-trades. It cannot and will not automatically remove, discard or delete files (despite what some exasperated photographers will proclaim in a flurry of expletives). It will only follow instructions, and it needs decent instructions from the user to be able to work most efficiently. By following some of the tips above, hopefully it will be a little easier to figure out where those image actually are, and assist in getting your library of images back into some state of order.
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