I’m developing a real respect for the people who make their living in tech support. They are the ones on the front lines who constantly have to figure out if a problem is a bug, a user-error, or simply an unappreciated software feature.
Last week, for example, while talking to a group of photographers from the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), I got another one of “those” questions. The questioner thought there was something wrong with his version of Lightroom because he couldn’t make multiple selections in the filmstrip and apply a color tag to them all. I assured him that he should be able to and proceeded to use my computer to demonstrate.
1. For non-contiguous images hold the command key (Mac) or Ctrl key (PC) and click on the images you want to select. To select multiple images sequentially, choose the first image, then hold the Shift key and then click on the final image in the sequence.
2. To apply a color label to the selected images in the filmstrip, right-click (or CTRL+CLICK) on one of the selected images and choose Set Color Label from the contextual menu.
This procedure worked fine, and I was able to show how all the selected images was similarly color labeled. With a little prodding, however, I learned that the questioner was actually in the Develop module when he ran into trouble. But that shouldn’t make a difference, I said. More back and forth and it became clear that he was actually right-clicking on the main image in the preview window and trying to apply the color label to all the images from there. I tried this, and sure enough, even though multiple images were selected in the filmstrip, the color label was only applied to the one in the preview window.
Whew, problem solved. But that begs the question? Is this the way the program should actually work? I’ll leave that for others to comment on.
The logic is that if you're in Develop, you're focused on a single image.
If you're in Loupe view, you're also focused on a single image.
If you're in Grid view, you're focused on multiple images. Only in Grid will metadata changes affect multiple images.
At first I thought it was the "bug" that I keep coming up with, but appears to be just how Lightroom was designed. When selecting multiple photos in Grid view, you CAN NOT do multiple selections of single photos and a range of photos like you can in Windows Explorer, Bridge, or nearly every other file browser program I've worked with. Specifically, selecting a photo, Ctrl + click to select and additional photo, Ctrl + Shift + click a few photos later to select a range of photos in addition to the first single.
If it's a bug, I wish Adobe would fix it. If it's by design, I wish they'd reverse it!
This can be demonstrated by selecting several images in the filmstrip while in Develop mode. If you right-click on the main image, one of the options will be to create a virtual copy. If you do it on the selected images in the filmstrip it will offer the plural.
Contextual menus are executed on the selection (that's how I've always seen it). So I'd say this is a bug.
The questions is whether this one is even worth mentioning. File it and move on. There's a good workaround!
Yeah, I found this out the hard way as well and it causes a bit of finger-trouble. This seems an arbitrary choice, though I can hear Mark Hamburg's voice now rattling off the rationale for it. This is for sure one place where LR needs to unify its interface.
The key is "contextual" in contextual menu. You right click on the image on the Preview, the commands in the menu apply to just that image. You right click on the image on the film strip, the commands in the menu apply to the selected images in the film strip, and so on.
Yep, the key is using the contextual menu from the filmstrip, and not from the preview window, regardless of whether you are in the Develop module or in the Library Loupe view.
It took me a while to realize that from the Library Module, you need to be in the Grid view and not the Loupe view to add a keyword to multiple photos from the filmstrip.