Obvious Way to Tell How Many Files are Selected?

Question

I’ve been trying my best to love Lightroom, and I get close, but there’s one problem that I just can’t get past.
Five minutes ago, I tried to export one photo, and I ended up exporting 52 photos.  This happens all the time. If I had a dime for every time I exported 500 photos instead of 1 photo, moved 500 photos instead of one photo, etc, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Anyway, I deleted the 51 extra exports, synced the folder, got everything where I wanted it, then … exported 52 photos again.
Sigh.
The only way I’ve been able to avoid this is in the past is by obsessively pressing Command+D.  When I’m trying to do anything, I pound these two keys like there’s no tomorrow, but of course, I have to re-select the files I do want to perform actions on.
I kept thinking I’d get used to it, but I’m still having problems to no end.  Unless I look very, very closely, I can’t tell if photos are selected or not, and if an entire screen full of photos are selected, they all look the same, so I really can’t tell.
That’s the background, now my questions if I may:
Is there any way to get a dialog box before performing actions on multiple photos?  Something that says, “this action will be performed on 1,871 photos, do you want to proceed?” or something to that effect?
Ironically, it already does this when I want to delete something, which is great, but no such luck for any other actions.
By any chance, is there something I can do to make the number of photos I have selected, more obvious?
I know this is not a bug or program flaw, it’s a flaw with how my brain works with the program, but if I could figure out a way to make them work together , this application would be pretty awesome.  As it is, I spend more time undoing mistakes than I do organizing and editing photos.
Thank you very much for any help.

Answer 1

I am so pleased to read your post and realize I'm not the only one that gets tripped up by this! I've bee using LR extensively for more than two years now and even today, just now, I wanted to export ONE file, and the highlighting onscreen appeared to indicate I've selected one file, but turned out it was dozens of files. Now... when I'm simply exporting copies of files to another folder it's not a dangerous situation. BUT! It is very dangerous if one wishes to delete a file or several files and you think those are the only files you're deleting. Many, many times I have caught this in time, fortunately. To me this is one example of how the experience of software designers do not well understand how the end user will understand a program. Professional photographers are very specific with everything they do and don't want a program tripping them up continually. This obvious confusion over which files are actually "selected" needs cleared up.
I read the responses to your post and find them dissatisfying. Please, Adobe, test your software with actual working photographers and not just Adobe engineers who may also happen to be amateur photographers.