Hard Core Monday

Here is the Techno-Geek Alert. Those not interested in Lightroom... Cya tomorrow!

If you are still here this is a process in Lightroom that has similarities to iTunes library and play lists. You can look at this way. The Library is the database holding all the information about the contained images, The folder is physically where the images are stored. The Catalog is like the iTunes Music Library, it's all there, you just don't necessarily know where and what you have unless you look through all the stuff. Collections on the other hand are very much like the play lists in iTunes. The hang up is how to get rid of bad images when you are never going to look at them again. Read on!

What we have here is what Lightroom looks like just after an import from a card.

You can see that 13 images have been imported in the Previous Imports Catalog. This is the ideal time to go through the images and do your picks and rejects, keyword, and possibly rate the images.

Once you have made your picks and rejects you can go to the Photo menu and select Delete Rejected Photos, or use the keyboard shortcut of Command-Delete (Ctrl-Del on Windows) and accept the Delete from Disk option. The images are removed from the drive and sent to the trash. It does not however remove any files from you backup folders. That can be another post all together.

Like I said, that is the ideal way to take care of house cleaning. All too often though we make an import to get the images onto the drives and come back later to work with them. From here on we will cover deleting images after a successive import has occurred. Below you can see the Para Glider Collection has been crearted with 13 images. The same 13 images that are in the Previous Import Catalog.

This next scree capture is simply to show that once an import has been accomplished, the Previous Import Catalog is cleared and the new imported images have a temporary place to live. Notice the 1 in previous Import and 13 by the Para Glider Collection!

Now we are picking, rejecting, rating, and color coding our images in the Para Glider Collection. Here is where Lightroom gets a little funky. Flagging only resides in the current Catalog or collection. You can see in the two images below how this is reflected. The upper is the Collection and the lower is the All Photographs Catalog. Notice how the star rating and color coding transfer but the picks and rejects flags do not.

SIDE BAR

If you try to Delete Rejected Photos while in the Collection it will only remove them fro the collection and not the disk.

The next tow screen captures illustrate the quickest way that I have found to delete images from the hard drive when originating in a Collection.

1. Open Collection
2. Flag images to be deleted and rejects (X)
3. Filter for Flagged as Reject (the black flag)
4. Select ALL (Cmd-A)
5. Change to All Photographs Catalog
6. Flag images to be deleted and rejects a second time (X) as these images should already be selected.
7. Delete rejected photos (Cmd-Delete)
8. Accept Delete from Disk

The selected images in step 4 above remains selected when you change to the All Photographs Catalog.

Every application has its quirks and idiosyncrasies but Lightroom is just a dynamite application for image management. Possibly Adobe could add one option in the removing from a catalog dialog window. My vote is for what you see below!

Cya.. Doug