Smart Collection from several external HDs

The ability to select from more than one external disk when creating collections would be most welcome.

You may want to add a feature request for this option, maybe something as the possibility to add another disk criteria with a plus sign as it is already in the find criteria.
You can however create a smart collection for one disk, fill in the desired find criteria and after that action create an other new smart collection and choose another device using the browse option. (the first time the disk starts indexing, depending on the amount of content this can take a while). Using new smart collection does not change the find criteria so you only have to save it.
Then you can drag the content of each smart collection to 1 new simple collection. Hope this is a workaround that is useful for you :-)

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Best way to merge multiple iPhoto libraries from several external hard drives into one, while deleting duplicates?

Problem: My wife and I both have MacBook Pros (MBPs). We take a lot of pictures and import them into iPhoto. When the storage capacity of our MBPs gets full, I have been moving our iPhoto libraries into external hard drives, which are now multiple (3 or 4). The problem I now realize we have been making, is that once the iPhoto libraries were copied onto the external hard drives, we were only deleting about half of the photos in each iPhoto library remaining in our MBPs (because we wanted to keep some of the important ones in our hard drives). Once the storage capacities of our MBPs got full again, I would repeat the whole process again and again. In essence I now have several large iPhoto libraries (each about 80 GB), each with multiple duplicate photos, divided among several external hard drives. And I am running out of space on my hard drive again. So what is the best way to:
a) merge all of these iPhoto libraries into just one, while simultaneously being able to delete all the duplicates? (or would you not recommend this?)
b) prevent this from happening again?
Thanks. BTW I am using OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 and iPhoto 8.1.2 (2009)

If you have Aperture 3.3 or later and iPhoto 9.3 or later you can merge libraries with Aperture.
Otherwise the only way to merge Libraries is with the paid ($30) version of iPhoto Library Manager
The Library Manager app can be set avoid duplicates.

How do I regain control of large collection from several sources

OK, I admit that I am very particular about orgnisation.
Have read loads and watched many 'how tos' for Aperture, I really struggle with iPhoto because I really don't think in dates only. I also have a collection of photos sent by friends, tucked in weird places on my old computer that I have been popping into a folder on my mac called collected photos. Altogether we're talking about 1300 photos.
As an ex-librarian I want to find a way to get a great library structure in Aperture that will not drive me crazy like iPhoto has.
I fear that this will be difficult in Aperture, because the meta data seem to be totally separate from the projects/file/album structure.
What I would wish to do is to create a tree structure with folders/sub-folders and sub-sub folders. IE Landscape>rural>water>sea
Can this be done?
If so, could you please explain how I can do it. Many thanks for your time.
All the best,
Derby

Welcome to "Digital Asset Management". :-)
I don't have a similar iPhoto>Aperture library here now for reference, but I'll try to explain what you've got and what you might do with it.
First, I think your import process brought each iPhoto Event over as a Project. Maybe with the same names as the iPhoto Events. Image 'files' can only be in one Project. The Aperture model is that you have a Master and one or more Versions. (A Master is actually the first Version of an image, too.) If you drag a Master or any of its Versions from one Project to another, they all move.
Remember that Aperture keeps one Master file and a Version is a set of 'instructions' or Adjustments to the Master, it is not a separate file. Versions of a Master remain in the same Project.
Since iPhoto had Original and Modified images and they were two separate files, when you imported your iPhoto Library, it brought over both image-files and they are each now a Master and they should have Keywords like iPhoto Original and iPhoto Edited. (Look in the Metadata tab). Offhand I've forgotten whether the conversion to Aperture also put the pairs of images in Stacks, but that's a topic for another discussion.
Aperture doesn't have "Events", so I'm not sure what you meant when you asked about finding images in both Projects and Events.
You can rename Projects by just clicking twice on their title and typing in a new one.
You can put images (Versions) into Albums. They are still in only one Project but can exist in more than one Album. Albums can't contain Projects, just Versions of images. If you right-click on a Version, you can pick "Show in Project" if you want to see where the original is. To remove a Version from an Albums, you can either "Remove from Album" or "Delete Version". The first doesn't actually delete any images, the latter puts the image into the Trash. (Note that trashing a Version doesn't delete the Master until it's the last instance.)
You can organize Projects and Albums into Folders, independent of where the Project is, meaning that you can organize your Projects by each year or by a particular vacation trip (e.g. Europe at the top level and then Countries underneath). Then, perhaps, you can have Albums of photos of cathedrals, boats, food, ad infinitum.
Keywords, Faces, and Places are orthogonal to all of the above, and you can still pull out all the photos of any of those (like you might have in iPhoto) by searching or smart folders.
Chapter 3 of the Aperture manual can answer most any question regarding the above discussion. I guess I should also caution you to _not_ empty the Trash in Aperture until you've got a good handle on Chapter 3.

Smart Collections BCS4: Multiple drives???

Hello everyone,
I am trying to create a Smart Collection that gathers images from several external HDs. It seems I can only select one drive...
Anyone managed to work this?
Thanks for any help.

You may want to add a feature request for this option, maybe something as the possibility to add another disk criteria with a plus sign as it is already in the find criteria.
You can however create a smart collection for one disk, fill in the desired find criteria and after that action create an other new smart collection and choose another device using the browse option. (the first time the disk starts indexing, depending on the amount of content this can take a while). Using new smart collection does not change the find criteria so you only have to save it.
Then you can drag the content of each smart collection to 1 new simple collection. Hope this is a workaround that is useful for you :-)

How do I add or delete photos from a SMART collection?

In LR3 I recently created a Smart Collection from color flagged photos. Now I want to add a few, and delete a few. How?? The obvious method are not allowed with SMART Collections..... Thanks for any input -

Hi,
If you select ALL images that are in your Smart Selection that you wish to keep in a collection, then create a new 'Non-Smart' Collection, all the selected photographs are automatically added to your new Collection (well, they are in LR 3.3RC on Windows 7). You can then delete the 'Smart' collection, and add / delete photos to your new collection as you wish.

Can't view smart collections on a different computer

I've generated about a dozen smart collections from photos on an external drive. This was done on my laptop.
When I try to view the smart collections with the drive mounted to my desktop, I get the error message "collection target folder cannot be found". Sometimes it will say to purge the cache, which I've done several times, but to no avail. I realize the smart collection data is on the laptop's hard drive. Is there a way to put it on the same drive as the photos?
When I go back to the laptop, everything's fine again. Is there a way to view the collections on both computers?

Is there a way to view the collections on both computers?
I'm not sure but I think this is possible. Bridge is very user specific and a collection and a smart collection is nothing but a bunch of aliases. While the files are on the same disk the other end is different.
You might copy the collection file itself (on a Mac: user library / application support / Adobe/ Bridge CSxx / collections to the other system in the same location but besides I still don't know if this would work it is also a bit of a PITA to keep searching and copying those files.
My workflow would be to create new folders on the external disk and select the collection in the content window. Then use select all and copy (or move, whatever workflow suites you) the files to those new location. Those new folders could be selected in both machines. Not ideal but for the moment I can't think of anything better

Restoring iTunes files from an external HDD?

I recently began receiving S.M.A.R.T. warnings of imminent failure from my hard drive, running XP SP3. I copied my Music folders and iTunes folders to an external drive just before my computer failed. Checked the external drive and everything was there...Audible books, iTunes Audiobooks, music (both purchased and ripped from CDs), TV series and quite a few movies. So I was feeling fairly confident that I had saved my extensive and expensive iTunes multimedia Library.
Purchased a new hard drive and installed Vista, SP1 64 bit Home Premium on two WD drives striped in RAID 0 without incident, installed iTunes and began the task of moving my collection from the external HDD back to my computer. I used the "Add Folder to Library" choice in iTunes as my preferences were set to manage my manually manage my downloads.
All went well and after quite awhile I had most of my collection moved into iTunes on the new hard drive. Then the rot set in. I disconnected and removed the external hard drive and settled down to play some music. Instead of music, I received an error message. An exclamation point appeared in front of the track I wanted to play and the message in a box said, "The song (title inserted) could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to try to locate it?" I hit cancel and tried several other titles until it sunk in that while the titles appear in iTunes, they won't play. Also much of the information in "Get Info" is grayed out, however, the size and type of the file is displayed along with bit rate and sample rate, but no music will play.
Next, I reattached my external hard drive where I had stored the files before the hard drive failure and magically, every single song, book and movie played perfectly.
So...I need some help in how to move not only the titles but the content from the external drive to the new install of iTunes. First post, I hope I'm in the right forum. If not, please direct me there. Thanks and all the best, Daisy

I did not rear all but the "add to library" is where the problem resides. You should have just copied your files to the hard drive (assuming this is the SOURCE you want itunes to point at) then use "add to library.

Bridge CS5 won't let me create Smart Collection

Hi all -
I am working with CS5 on a PC (Windows 7 Professional/64-bit) and Bridge will not allow me to create a Smart Collection. We want to use Bridge to sort graphics based on the type of graphic they are. We added keywords to the files and can use the filter to sort, but it would be nice if anytime a "timeline" keyworded graphic was added to the folder that it was added to that collection.
I go to the Collections panel, and click on the "Smart Collections" button, fill in my criteria, but when I hit Save nothing happens. All I can do is cancel out of the window. I have tried it on a couple different computers in my office and they all have the same issue. Same thing occurs if I do a search and try to hit the Smart Collection button there, nothing happens. It rolls over, but no action occurs when I click on it. Am I missing something here?

Have all of your Folders been properly Indexed in Bridge?
Select the Parent Folder which holds image files on each of your HDs;
Go to Tools / Cache / Build and Export Cache . . . Export Cache to Folders; and check the box to Export Cache to Folders.
This operation may take quite a long time (you might choose to leave it running over-night) but once done, I think that you will find that making Smart Collections from Keywords works really quickly -- even when files are scattered in multiple folders over many different HDs.

Bridge smart collections

I downloaded CS6 but my Smart Collections from PS CS5 extended did not come through. How do I bring the collections to PS CS6?

Here is the location of collections C:/Users/user name/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/BridgeCS5/
You should be able to copy and paste this file.

Smart Collection by Collection Sets?

Hey all,
Quick question on creating a Smart Collection within a Collection Set:
Here's the deal:
I have a collection set. In it, I have a collection of about 358 photos. From there, I rated the photos. I then tried to create a Smart Collection from within that Collection Set, searching for photos that are 3 stars or above as my only criteria. I targeted the Collection Set as the place where the Smart Album should be created. (So it's Collection Set > Collection and Smart Collection)
The issue is, with 3 stars and above being the only criteria selected, it is picking 3 stars and above from across my entire library, (returning about 17,000 photos that meet this criteria).
I only want "3 stars and above" from this particular collection set, but without having to add additional criteria (I am coming from Aperture, and this was easy to do by "Project." )
Is there a way to do this in Lightroom per collection set? I added a keyword as an additional criteria, and with 2 rules, it works the way I would like, but I really was hoping that Smart Albums could search by Collection Set and not across the entire library.
Any tips?
Thanks!
GG

GG,
Smart Collections always work on the entire catalog. You'd have to include the collection name as a additional criteria to achieve what you want.
Beat Gossweiler
Switzerland

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.

Smart collections appearing in wrong catalog

I have three seperate catalogs on my desktop, each with different collections, clients etc. Generally I'll use 'import from another catalog' when I want to import a new shoot from my laptop. This works great, however sometimes I find that all of my smart collections from another catalog suddenly appear in the catalog that I am using e.g I'm using my Sculpture catalog, I import a new sculpture shoot. It imports and shows up fine but so does 20 smart collections from my Portfolio catalog. The 'alien' Portfolio smart collections obviously show as holding 0 images (as the images are where they should be - in the Portfolio catalog). Is it something to do with a preference file that all catalogs access?

I broke my catalogs up because I had two specific clients that I wanted to keep seperate because my folders systems got a bit confused and I could get my head around it all better. Also I thought I had too many images in one catalog (I've got 136,746 images at present). Anyway I have joined them together again and am enjoying the ease of finding everything. However I still have another 'shoot' catalog on my laptop which I use both for tethered shooting and for lecturing which is still giving me problems. I have just exported a shoot as a catalog and imported it into my laptop/shoot catalog to show to students tomorrow and again it has carried collections over from the host catalog. It's really annoying to have to delete all the empty collections. Maybe if I just import the raws without the editing it won't do it, but don't really want to have to re-edit everything....

LrPhoto:getContainedPublishedCollections() to work with Smart Collection

I have customized the original flickr publish plugin to suit my liking and to model the behavior of Flickr especially the Photostream and Photosets concept. I love the improve plugin i created very much. When I started to work with smart collections to publish my photos to flickr.most of the functionality and behavior of flickr I had created breakdown as I rely heavily on LrPhoto:getContainedPublishedCollections() to interconnect each photoset (collection). Apparently this function doesn't work with smart collection. My question would be
1. For the next update of lightroom, I hope to see the function LrPhoto:getContainedPublishedCollections() to also work with Smart Collections.
2. For the time being is there any alternative way to reference smart collections from a LrPhoto?
Thank you very much..

Hi lawren,
I am give u info what i know...
T-code : smartform.
Parts of smartforms
1) global settings- form attributes : which will contain header data.
                              form interface : parameters that are required to generate function module.
                              global data: here we can create type and data.
2)pages and windows : without main window we cant creat a page.
    main window
    secondary window
    copies window
    final window
3)smart style   :     paragraph format and charcter format
looks like Most of them is navigation ....

Can Disk Utility get SMART status from external drives?

I recently updated my backup plan with a NewerTech quad-interface dock and a WD Caviar Green hd. I'm using the FW800 interface to connect to my iMac (10.6.7) Everything works perfectly, as expected. I noticed, though, that Disk Utility cannot report the SMART status on the new WD drive. DU simply says "Not Supported" under SMART Status.
Is Disk Utility telling me that it doesn't read SMART status from external drives? Or is it telling me that the new drive doesn't support SMART (which I would find highly unusual)? And, if it's Disk Utility that can't read the status, are there any third-party apps that can report the SMART status on an external drive?
Thanks,
JimC

Unfortunately I cannot speak to the NewerTech enclosure, but in principle it appears to be possible to have SMART information displayed even for external drives if the enclosure's bridge controller chip allows it.
My experience:
I've used two MacPower Pleiades FW800/400/USB/eSATA enclosures for several years and I've now supplemented them with two additional inXtron enclosures. They all work as expected daisy-chained to the iMac.
The interesting thing is that the inXtron enclosures came with a CD with some software on it ("Smart AP") which is not available for download, notably a Dashboard Widget for displaying actual and maximum temperatures, total hours of operation, start/stop cycles, drive model and serial number.
This widget is complete garbage, though – it is a nauseating nightmare of extreme over-design at the expense of even basic usability:
http://www.inxtron.com/information-center/smart-ap-for-external-hard-drives
To make matters even worse, it can only display the above information for the first external drive connected.
BUT: This Widget internally calls a command line utility which does the actual parameter retrieval, and that one can be called from the terminal as well.
So after installing the software from CD and effectively discarding the Widget, I checked out the command line utility in the Terminal and found that this utility actually reported data about ALL my enclosures, both the inXtron and the MacPower ones (there seems to be firmware compatibility across these):
(The '$' is supposed to be Terminal's bash prompt – type in only the rest of the respective line.)
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 1
29 50 13 8
53 67 645 15829
52 53 90 7105
51 52 18 13
Each line reports the following for one connected enclosure:
[temp] [maxtemp] [cycles] [hours]
The drives are reported first USB, then FireWire drives, each in the order of first connection / mounting.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 2
WD-WCA**************
WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
WD-WMA**************
WDC WD30EZRS-00J99B0
Each drive gets two lines reported, first the drive's serial number ("***" blocking out my exact ones), then the drive model.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 3
29 50 13 8
WD-WCA**************
WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0
53 67 645 15829
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
52 53 90 7105
5TE09***************
ST31000333AS-00MMMB0
51 52 18 13
WD-WMA**************
WDC WD30EZRS-00J99B0
This combines both of the above.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 5
disk4
disk1
disk2
disk3
This reports the mounted disk names (referring not to the volume names but to the internal Unix names as in /dev/[drive]); Numbering is in connection / mounting order, the actual sequence is as always USB drives, then FireWire drives.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 6
USB
1394
1394
1394
This reports the connection interface for each drive in the same sequence as all other commands.
$ /Applications/MacpowerAP/GetSMART 7
MPT934DS1.20.0104.00
MPT934DS1.20.0104.00
This might report the firmware revision or something like that.
These are the commands I know about, and they apply only to the "Smart AP" software supplied with current inXtron enclosures, but it may be possible that other brands use it as well.
I have not been able to identify information about the self-test (early(?) failure warning), but it might be contained as well in the data reported above.
As always, your mileage may vary and you should never do such experiments without FIRST making sure you've got backups of your data and that such backup is not connected during experimentation!
Maybe this can help some people getting the information they need; And maybe there are similar capabilities with other enclosures. At the very least it demonstrates that with the proper firmware in the enclosures themselves and some software on the Mac it IS possible to get at least some of the SMART information from the drive in an external FireWire- or USB-connected enclosure.
None of that is fed into the system's "official" SMART mechanism, though, so no luck using standard mechanisms or applications for it. It's strictly a command-line affair (deservedly disregarding the mishappen Widget).
Good luck!

Sorting compressed from uncompressed PSD/PSB files in Bridge/smart collections?

Is there any info (metadata or something) one could use to sort uncompressed from compressed PSD/PSB files in Bridge?
Something that could be used in filters for smart collections would be nice.
Ty in advance.

Thanks for the quick reply, CP
FYI, the file is a photographic panorama based on several .CR2 photos taken in July, 2012 and processed in CS5's camera RAW/Photoshop. Beyond the metadata, here are no fonts or text in the file.
1. I changed Maximize ...File Capability from "Never" to "Always" and the flattened file saved and loaded OK, though I can't figure why given Adobe's description of this option. "If you work with PSD and PSB files in older versions of Photoshop or applications that don’t support layers, you can add a flattened version of the image to the saved file...". The file saved in this manner is ~8% larger and is not my preference as a routine since I've TB's of photo files. By the way, out of thousands of .psd/.psb files, the one being discussed is the first to give me the error.
2. I've tried saving/reloading the file on another computer with Win XP Sp3/CS5...again with Maximize Capability OFF. Same problem. Turn ON Maximize Capability and it works. As with the Win 8 machine, Bridge could neither create a thumbnail or read Metadata.
3. I've purged the Bridge Cache, made sure there were no old PS page files, reset PS preferences, and disabled my 2 plugins with no change in the problem. Windows and Adobe progs are all updated. Saving to a different HDD has no effect.
The problem occurs on 2 computers (Win XP/Win 8), two versioins of Photoshop (CS5/CS6), and "Maximize" On/Off togles the problem. My guess it is a bug in PSD processing routines.
If I can't find a fix, will keep with Maximize ON and deal with the larger files that result...the cost of insurance, I suppose.
Thanks again

Smart Collection from several external HDs

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