In my quest to track my photos out in the wild, I’ve settled upon an efficient but slightly–less–than–ideal solution: drag the photos in question from Lightroom (both the filmstrip and grid will work as drag sources) to my destination of choice. I’ve settled upon a VoodooPad document with one page for each publication; dragging photos from Lightroom into VoodooPad will result in a link back to the file, wherever it happens to be located on my computer. I include any relevant publication information that I wish to catalog alongside the link back to the file. Here’s one page that illustrates my simple solution:
While this home-brew solution isn’t exactly rocket science, it should serve me perfectly. Well… almost perfectly. There’s always a catch, and it happens to be that when clicking on the link to open the image (or by opening it via any another method, such as the Finder) Lightroom thinks you are trying to re-import the image, rather than simply revealing it within Lightroom. It turns out that Lightroom is smart enough to not re-import it, but it chooses to take pre-emptive action to notify you that the photo is not being duplicated with the following dialog:
There are a few snags with the “Problem with Importing Files” dialog, depending on how picky you happen to be:
- first off, it’s not always a “problem”: opening your images from outside of the application shouldn’t be considered a problem;
- from an interface perspective, clicking either the “OK” or “Cancel” button results in the same result (of nothing happening) when only one photo is being “imported”;
- and although clicking the “Show in Library” button doesn’t re-import the photo — which makes sense — it will automatically activate the Library module, thereby disrupting you if you happen to be doing something other than applying metadata to your library.
In choosing to show the image in the Library, Lightroom will take the courtesy to create a temporary collection containing the existing photo(s) for you, as illustrated below:
None of this procedure is broken, per se. But in an ideal world the “re-imported” photo would be loaded into whichever module is active — rather than throwing up a dialog box and then activating the Library — to avoid interrupting your workflow. However, Lightroom is still relatively young and let’s be honest: this behaviour isn’t the end of the world. I am hoping that this behaviour gets tweaked in an upcoming release but until then I’ll be clicking a few more buttons than necessary.
That's perfect! Not sure why I didn't think of using stacks for this; so far I've only been using stacks for virtual copies of the same photo. Thanks Thomas!
I might be missing something with this, but why would you want to do something so counter intuitive given the capabilities of LR?
For images that have been tweaked and submitted to magazines as TIFF or JPEG why don't you just save them in the same directory path as the original and in LR, stack them together?
The advantages of this include:
1. You have all versions of a photo with the original image
2. Because it is in the same directory path, it gets backed up when you back up your photos
As for keeping track of what photos go where - how about creating a Collection called Magazine Name here - Submission Month here?
Honestly, I can not see why you would add those steps into your workflow which is actually outside of LR.
But dragging an image straight into VoodooPad results in a link to the image on your filesystem being created; this can be confirmed by control-clicking on the link and viewing its properties. Clicking on the link is equivalent to double-clicking the linked-to file from the Finder.
The you method recommend is similar to Yojimbo's (and many other applications that make use of a "master library") "Copy Item Link" feature outlined here by John Gruber for Leopard's Mail application. Even if the linked-to image doesn't exist on your hard drive when the link is opened, Lightroom should be able to determine which master file is being referred to based on the link that was opened and open its preview (in the same way that Mail can resolve the link "message: " to the original item that it refers to).
And as for triviality, Lightroom's got some mojo that makes this feature seem pretty basic :).
When you drag a file from Lightroom to the desktop you get an unedited copy of the original image. When you drag an image from the desktop to VoodooPad you get a link to the image.
You're not just experiencing problems with Lightroom's behavior. You are experiencing problems with the interaction of Lightroom and Finder. I don't think that Lightroom can or should be fixed to change this behavior. You are just using drag and drop for something that it isn't really appropriate for.
I think the answer is a new command in Lightroom, something like, "Copy link to edited image to clipboard." Once you do that you could paste the link into VoodooPad. Adding this feature might not be trivial. Remember the image you are looking at in Lightroom may not exist physically on your hard drive. It might be that Lightroom is creating the image on the fly from the original and your editing instructions. How do you make a link to something that doesn't exist?