Grouping Smart Collections

I want to make a bunch of smart collections in Adobe Bridge CS6.
Is there a way to put the actual collections inside of some group hierarchy to keep things from getting unwieldy?
Thanks

reindeer4 wrote:
…I want to gather my assets into collections…
Therein lies the answer to your problem. You are in need of a DAM (Digital Asset Manager) or a MAM, (Media Asset Manager), which Bridge categorically is not. Bridge is just an image browser.
For a robust DAM, look into applications like WIDEN, ThirdLight, Canto Cumulus, etc.
Remember that Bridge began as nothing more and nothing less than Photoshop's browser.

Similar Messages

Lost all my keyword smart collection data

I temporarily turned off time machine for various reasons and something happened and I've lost my data I constructed to label clip keywords and group/smart collections etc.
Not sure if I can get it back. I hope I don't have to go back to lesson 3 and start over!
I do have a Final Cut Events folder and Final Cut Projects folder inside of the Movies folder on my HD.
Dave

I am sooo sorry! Looks like I failed to notice a name in the search/find box filtering the data.
My Bad.
But it does bring up the question of how to restore various backups of projects and events of Final Cut Pro X.
Dave

Lightroom Adobe Revel Smart Collections

Hi There,
when i first tried the export function from LR to Revel i was totally thrilled because most of the time i work with smart collections. i just upoaded them to Revel from LR. From time to time some of the photos belong to more of one smart group. that wasn't any problem until the last 3 or 4 weeks. LR just showed an infobox saying that i will upload a newer version from a photo that is already in my Revel Album. But now LR does not export any photo if it is already in another album. this is a big problem for me, because changes on certain photos will not be updated any more. it is really frustrating that adobe changed this feature because Revel (what i already pay for) becomes almost useless for me. Organizing the photos into Albums in Revel is no option, because i have them already organized in LR.
Anybody with the same problem? Any workarounds? Any official comment from Adobe?
Thanks,
Arne

Pasted from thread http://forums.adobe.com/message/5325344:
"I cannot now get a single image to upload to multiple albums in the same library"
In fact, Add one image to multiple albums is supported by Revel plug-in in Lightroom. Click the “Replace” button will allow the photo to go to multiple albums.
Yes, the prompted dialog is confusing.

Smart Collection as filter param

Hi,
I've created Smart Collection, which acts on my complete library.
But, at times I want to use the 'same criteria' defined in the smart collection - but confine them to a group of pictures, based on keyword/folder.
So, is it possible to add my 'Smart Collection' as a filter param.
Regards
Sajid

Make it into a filter preset (somewhat limited), and apply it that way.

"any" vs "all" when filtering SMART COLLECTIONS

Need help from the pros in this group. I've to teach a specific skill to some students tomorrow, and--I must admit--I'm a little lost. Can sometime provide detailed answers to me? I'd be much obliged.
I need to know the distinction between filtering between "any" and "all" in smart collections.
Basically, what does that mean? I mean, to me, filtering between, say, "any" clips with the a certain attribute would be the same as my wanting to see "all" of the same. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I can't wrap my mind around the concept.
The first choice of "all" vs. "any" is when you go into the first level of the filter, itself:
Then, you have the same options for each filter variable:
I've an excercise where I have students have to filter smart collections based on keywords and shot compositioin. And the devil is in being able to distinguish between "any" and all"
Any help for "any" or "all" of you would be greatly appreciated.

the words "any" and "all" do not refer to clips, but to criteria.
"any" means "or"
"all" means "and"
In your example:
1) you would set a smart collection for clips satisfying ALL of
- having the keyword "shoes"
- being favorites
2) similarly, but ANY (as in either or)
3) is a bit of combination of both; you have (two people or group) AND Favorites, so you need to set "all";
and in the people category choose "any".

Smart Collection features I don't see in LR4 beta and wonder why not

I've been playing with the new LR4 beta for all of 10 minutes now, and am disappointed to see that Smart Collections haven't moved forward at all.
Things I'd hoped to see:
In the Edit Smart Collection window, why when you add a new rule does it always default to "Rating"? How is that the most likely thing I want? Sure, make it the default for the first rule, but thereafter, I think it would be a lot more useful if it added another rule of the type on the line you pressed '+' on. That is, if I have a "Keywords...Doesn't Contain" rule and press the '+' button on that line, there's a better chance that I want another such rule than that I want yet another "Rating" rule.
Continuing the previous, I think the second rule added should follow slightly different logic. If the default Rating rule wasn't changed to a different type, the default for the second rule shouldn't be "Rating" again to clone the first rule, but rather pick the second most likely rule type. Does Adobe have usage statistics for people's Smart Collections to draw on?
For Keywords rules, there aren't negative operators to match all of the positive operators. So we have Contains, and Doesn't Contain, but we have Contains All and lack Doesn't Contain Any, and we have Contains Words but not Doesn't Contain Words. You can get the desired effect by nesting the positive version in a "None of the following are true" sub-rule, but this feels clumsy. Either give us a symmetric set of logical operators, or take away the negatives and give a clean way to negate arbitrary rules without nesting rules when not needed.
Nested rule sets aren't discoverable. I stumbled across this feature by accident, and only then because I knew how to do the same in iTunes. I'd rather see a third button to the right of each rule line that gave a way to create a nesting than the current magic Option trick. One of the great things about Lightroom is how discoverable most things are; you scarcely need the manual. This is a sharp corner than needs to be knocked off.
There's still no way to refer to one Smart Collection from another! iTunes has had this since approximately forever. It is very useful to be able to extract common rule sets from multiple Smart Collections and simply refer to it from others. We call this the DRY Principle in programming, and it's a Good Thing.
No new Smart Collection rule types. At minimum, I'd hoped to see rules for megapixels and pixel dimensions. I'd like to be able to find all the pics with a long edge 640 pixels or less, for example. Megapixels is actually less useful, because it can be fooled by high aspect ratio images. A banner 4000 px wide and 100 px tall is "only" 0.4 Mpx, but it probably doesn't need to be any bigger. (Yes, I'm aware of Jeffrey Friedl's plugin. He wants this built into LR4, too. )
We don't even get one new rule having to do with geoencoding. Just off the top of my head, I'd kind of like to have a Smart Collection that found photos taken within 100 feet of my home's lat/long and didn't contain the keyword "home". I have many such Smart Collections in a Collection Set called "Warnings", each of which automatically checks my photos for something that I often forget.
You can't reorder rules or move them into or out of groups. I have Smart Collections with a dozen or so rules, and some with logic nested three levels. When assembling such complex little beasts, it isn't always clear while building it what logic order will give the desired result. You have to iterate, and that often means taking a perfectly good rule and moving it somewhere else. Lacking the ability to reorganize the existing rules, that means creating a new "Rating" rule, changing its type to match, cut-and-pasting the match criteria [if text] and deleting the old rule. Pfagh.
That's enough for now.

Ooops, found one new Smart Collection rule: "Metadata Status". One. Want more.

Lightroom 5: AppleScript: action "AXShowMenu" in Smart Collection panel does not show context menu

We are developing a simple automatization tool using Lightroom 5 (the newest version of the CC) using AppleScript.
For some actions, we need the context menu in the Smart Collections panel, for example to import Smart Collection descriptions.
According to the documentation and various sources on stackoverflow and elsewhere, AXShowMenu should bring up that menu.
So far, I have not been able to make that context menu pop up.
Using UIElementInspector and UI Browser, I located the element which does have the AXShowMenu action attached. Based on the code provided by UI Browser, I got the following script, which I run from the Applescript Editor:
tell application "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5"
activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Lightroom"
set frontmost to true
perform action 1 of static text "Smart Collections" of group 1 of row 11 of outline 1 of scroll area 1 of window 6
delay 2
end tell
end tell
end tell
tell application "AppleScript Editor" to activate
Note that if you try to recreate this, the number of the window as well as the number of the row may be different. Also, the last line is just convenience, and not really relevant for the code.
In the Results window in AppleScript Editor, I have the following:
perform action 1 of static text "Smart Collections" of group 1 of row 11 of outline 1 of scroll area 1 of window 6 of process "Lightroom"
--> action "AXShowMenu" of static text "Smart Collections" of group 1 of row 11 of outline 1 of scroll area 1 of window 6 of application process "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5"
which means that I did invoke the action.
But … nothing happens.
Any insight, workaround etc. is highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Just for the records, I did ask the same question on Stackoverflow, and there I got an answer which does work. This solution uses a little Python program to really simulate mouse clicks.

How many smart collection?

I am doing a event where I will be shooting family portriat and allow the client to select the photo they want to be printed as a 8x10. My plan is to use star ratings to with smart collections to sperate the family portrait from mother & father pose or kids only pose. My dillima is that I want to create a collection for each client that will house there shot use to choose there 8x10. Can I create a smart collection for each client?

What you're looking for is a relatively common workflow pattern among professional photographers and it seems that everyone does this somewhat differently. If I'm to understand what you're looking for, it is to work on a series of photos from one familyphoto session and then separate them into individual sets for showing. There are a number of ways to do this. Here's my preference. I would import all the photos from one family session and put a title on all images as ["family name" sequence}. I would also put the family name as a keyword, or use 1aaa(family name) as a keyword to place it up near the top of your keyword list for development purposes. After developing the images for the family keyword, I would re-title all of the images with the name of the individual shown and add a keyword specifically for the person or persons in the image nested under the family name as follows: Family name >parent 1, parent 2, child 1, child 2, etc., and remove the 1aaa keyword. When it came time to show them I would select the appropriate keyword and use the Slideshow module to show only those specific to that keyword; or place each keyworded group into a separate collection (top choice in the Library menu) and show from there. As an image was chosen for purchase, I would assign a star rating to it and do one of the following when ready for production. I would either go back to the family keyword and sort by rating and produce from here, or set up a smart collection with two fields - 1-the family keyword and 2 the appropriate number of stars. When the job was complete, or I had more collections than I wanted, I would delete the collection, relying on the keywords to find them in the future.
David Gluckman
811 22nd St.
Pt. Townsend, WA 98368
360 379-0360

Groups, Smart Lists & Scanners

Anyone know what preference file contains the Groups, Smart Lists and Scanners?
I have a rather extensive collection of these I'd never want to loose.
Is that all kept in the ~/L/Prefs/com.applre.remotedesktop.plist ??

"Is that all kept in the ~/L/Prefs/com.applre.remotedesktop.plist ?? "
Yes it should be. Why don't you remove the file, start up ARD and see?

Export Smart Collection

Hi,
I've exported my pictures from Lightroom 2 as Catalog and copied them
over to another computer to work. Everything is fine.
Except, my Smart Collection, which was not exported ... Is there a way to export the Smart Collection and/or the (Regular/Static) Collections. I thought right-clicking on it should give me an option to export... but could not find the option to export my collection.
Thanks
Sajid

Hi Becky,
Yes, you can export ONE smart collection at a time, ... the issue is ...
I've 30+ smart collection grouped under 5 main tree heads, and its a pain to export each of these individually, so I'm looking for a way to export all of them at once
Thanks
Sajid

Adobe Bridge CC Smart Collections are not displaying all images in the folder

I'm having an issue with Bridge CC were I setup a smart collection to monitor my new photos. The folder contains over 300 photos, but is only displaying 160. The only condition I set is to have a minium file size of 10kb, so it should bring in all files since most are over 4mb. At first I thought it was a problem with the files themselves (permissions or something) but if I open the folder in bridge it easily displays all of the images easily. Any ideas?

I'm having an issue with Bridge CC were I setup a smart collection to monitor my new photos.
You might want to describe this workflow a bit more. Do you create this from an existing folder or are you adding new photo's?
A Smart Collection does not refreshes it self automatically. You either have to use the edit icon top right of the content panel to save again or deselect and select the collection itself to let it refresh the content.

I would like to see a "user order" sort option for Smart Collections

I use LR to set up Collections to use for web output and typically use key wording to organize which photos will be included in any web gallery. Right now I have to make that into a regular collection so I can rearrange the collection to appear the way I want to present things. I would prefer to be able to utilize Smart Collections so any photos I want to add will be included automatically when I set up the proper keywords. New additions should be at the end of the current order and the user should be able to move that around in the presentation order as desired.

I absolutely agree. I used a similar function in Aperature all the time. It was the main reason I originally chose Aperature over LightRoom till Lightroom came out with the latest edition that included Smart Collections, and was I disappointed to find that it wasn't as powerful as Aperature's Smart Folders options.
Both programs have their strengths and their weaknesses... and this time around I think Lightroom has the advantage, but Aperature still wins on Smart Collections customization ability and power.

Sudden ultra-slow importing issue in LR5.2 - possibly smart collection related?

I've been using LR for almost two years now, and have never seen this before:
This evening I wanted to import a series of images from my card reader using LR (just updated to 5.2 from the 5.2RC); I have ~240 images to import. I always have LR set to convert to DNG on import, and also to save a backup of the original raw file (NEF) onto a separate HDD at the same time. LR has always been pretty fast to carry out this process: normally just a few minutes are required for that amount of images (not including rendering previews once the DNGs are imported). However, today it's suddenly become painfully slow - as I type this, it's so far managed to import a mere 58 images, having so far taken about an hour and twenty minutes! Each image is being added one at a time, with a long pause before the next one clocks up in the 'current import' folder. I've never seen such slow performance with LR before.
I wonder if this is a bug connected to the final release of 5.2? I doubt it, as I would have expected to have heard about this by now, but you never know...
I have recently - in the past few days - set up a number (at least 80) of new smart collections that pick up raw images taken at specific focal lengths, as well as another set picking up specific apertures used for each raw shot in the catalogue (unlike the majority of my pre-existing smart collections, these new collections are purely there for interest really - nice to see which focal lengths are the most used for example - but don't serve as an aid to any specific workflow). In short, I've greatly increased the number of smart collections running in my catalogue. Would having a significant number of smart collections slow down the image ingestion process? For example, is LR updating individual smart collections on the fly as images are imported, and thus having to pick through each collection in order to complete the import (I'd always assumed that this would all be added to a central index in the catalogue that the smart collections feed from, but perhaps there are multiple indexes, one for each smart collection)?
I guess the other possible cause could be a corrupt catalogue, although both the catalogue integrity check and optimisation complete without a hitch and everything else seems to be fine.
I'm on Win7 x64, running the LR catalogue and previews from an SSD (with images stored on a separate HDD), with an i7 3770K CPU, 16GB RAM, and an AMD 5850 Radeon graphics card.
I'd be most grateful to hear the opinions of other LR users.
M

This just started happening to me as well. EVerything was fine and import was what I consider normal until 2 days ago. Had trouble with one camera which kept losing connection. I import from the camera directly...copy as DNG to an internal hard drive. Now all my cameras are importing at a ridiculously slow rate of speed. As far as I know I changed nothing to make this happen. Very odd and cannot find anything about it except for your post. Anyone else out there experiencing this?

"Smart Collection" criteria shortfalls

Hello,
While Bridge CC is almost a benefit to our studio, we're finding the "smart collection" criteria entirely crippling.   It's frustrating as there really are just a couple of tiny additions that would make Bridge a life saver to us.
What we're finding severely lacking in the criteria options:
"Path name"    - would be ideal for excluding any files with a specified folder name in the path.
"Newer than"    - x amount of days
"Media type"    - dropdown list of "Video" "Image" "Audio" etc.
"Extensions"     - space delimited list, rather than single file type (".PSD .PNG .JPG") etc
With just one or two of these options the smart collections could actually be useful.
Perhaps I'm just too new to Bridge, and there are workarounds, but certainly nothing obvious. (Filters keep getting reset, labels are binary etc)

What we're finding severely lacking in the criteria options:
"Path name"    - would be ideal for excluding any files with a specified folder name in the path.
"Newer than"    - x amount of days
"Media type"    - dropdown list of "Video" "Image" "Audio" etc.
"Extensions"     - space delimited list, rather than single file type (".PSD .PNG .JPG") etc
With just one or two of these options the smart collections could actually be useful.
This is a user to user to Forum and while these are very good suggestions you might also want to try and post it on the Photoshop family forum which is recommended for feature Requests:
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/
But be warned, don't hold your breath waiting for it to get realized. There have been tons of ideas for improvement and with Bridge already at version 6 the most changed result for the past 3 versions is that they removed functionality (AOM, Export panel and Sync windows) instead of adding improvement…

When developing an image from a smart collection "has no adjustments" it gets immediately deselected

I am wondering if this could really be the intended LR behaviour?
I start from a smart collection, one of the criteria is "has no adjustments".
Ok, as soon as I move the first slider in develop module, it no longer matches that criterion.
But that should be no reason for LR to force me to immediately stop the develop edits on the selected image.
It immediately unselects, and I stay in Develop module with a grey window and the message "no image selected". (It does not move on to the next image, which still matches the criterion.)
I would expect that when I return to Library module, it would return to the same smart collection where I started, but I would not find my last developed images there, as they no longer match the criterion.
But that LR grabs it immediately out of my develop selection?
Strange enough it stays the same, when I first explicitely selected all images while in Library/smart collection.
My expectation would be that I have this selection fixed to work on in Develop module. Similar to when I select any images from survey view and go to Develop module.
But no, the only workaround I found is:
Start from the smart collection, ctrl a to select all, then arbitrarily click on another collection withput this criterion - selection stays fixed - then move over to Develop module.
This is LR4.1 on Win7.
Definitely my functional specification would be: never take off an image from Develop unless the user moves on to another image.
So ignore from where an image was picked.
Would you consider this a bug? Or a "feature"?
Do you see the same in LR4.2 or 4.3RC? Behaviour on a Mac?
Cornelia

There is a feature request that has been around for a long time to be able to "lock" the contents of a smart collection so you can work on the photos in it, before "releasing" it for recomputed contents.
My workaround is to copy from smart collection to dumb (I encountered this so often that I created a 1-keystroke plugin mini-feature to help). Before that I actually used a private keyword whose presence was enough to hold a photo in a smart collection (set the keyword to work on photos, clear the keyword to release them). Then as long as you add that keyword as criteria to every smart collection you may edit in, and add the keyword to every photo in the collection that you may work on... - yuck.

Grouping Smart Collections

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