Hey Gang!
A few days ago I finally started tackling a project that I've been putting off for some time!
I've had several years worth of photos that have been kept in an LR1 catalog, tens of thousands of photos dating back from my first digital shots in late '01 to when I upgraded to LR3, I think in the middle of '10 somewhere.
My task has been to take a year at a time in LR1, organize all my photos into my current directory/file/folder structure (including a lot of renaming things) and to put all my photos into Lightroom Collections and, where I was neglegent, to apply keywords to them.
That took time, but as I went I developed little routines which helped things to go smoothly over the hours and days!
Then I had to learn how to Export as a Catalog and then in LR3 to Import as a Catalog. That took a little bit of learnin', but then became pretty routine, even though exporting and then importing a year worth of photos can be a bit time-consuming
!
One nice thing is that, as I hoped, the exporting and importing process did a great job of both "converting" between LR1 and LR3, but also of bringing the collections and keywords neatly into LR3! There has been very little "cleaning up" to do!
But last night things got more complicated!
From sometime in '10 until not that long ago, I was using my laptop as my "main" computer, due to the fact that my grandson was staying with me and, for lack of space, was camped out in my "study"/home office (and staying glued to my workstation for games and such). So, I just used my laptop for business and my photography (it also has LR3 on it).
The problem is that I didn't have a good system set up for going to the workstation and just taking up the shoots that I had worked on with the laptop over the months. I do have a "shared" drive where I did move folders of shoots over from the laptop, but until recently I didn't have the time on the workstation to figure out how to smoothly move them into the workstation LR3...
Well, the work I did with the LR1 catalog transfer gave me both an understanding of how to work with this stuff and also the motivation to attack it as I was wrapping up the LR1 stuff, so...
But it gets complicated, because I now have to go over '10 and '11 shots on the laptop, and many/most of those shoots have also ended up in the workstation, folders have been scattered, and somehow a lot of folders/photos have this "tag" in the workstation saying that metadata was not successfully transferred, but this must have been from some months ago from saving metadata to files on the laptop and then reading the metadata from files on the workstation. I don't remember the details and how things might have gotten messed up, and I've taken a lot of shoots off the laptop and so no longer have all the photos available to it, and dang, it's frustrating because I don't know a "clean" way of removing those tags without doing away with all the editing work that has been done by either the laptop or the workstation!
And then, another interesting thing came up that frustrated me and that is in retrospect funny!
I noticed that in a lot of my folders, photos in the filmstrip had this reddish color in the "borders". The fact that I was coming across the "metadata" problem with so many folders/photos led me to "naturally" assume that the two issues were related, even though many of the photos did not have the metadata tag!
Well, so last night I was plowing away trying to figure things out. But at one point I noticed something -- at the right side in the little toolbar down just above the film strip you have the "Filters" toolset, and included in the filters are the color "labels", including the color "Red"!!!
It clicked that maybe, just maybe, I was looking at photos that had been "labeled" Red! I say maybe, because I'm not in the habit of using the colored labels!
But I had noticed that as I was going through this project that occasionally as I was rushing through things I'd accidentally click a number and stars would show up! I don't use stars either, but I quickly figured out that clicking "Zero" would remove all stars, I just did't know the shortcut for removing labels, and when I tried to do it on the batch by selecting the batch then clicking on the Red label to unselect it, that would only remove the label from the "active" image.
Well, eventually I found that holding down either the Ctl or Alt key would work for the batch! Then it was going to the All Photographs, Ctl-A/Select All, click the little filter for the Red label so that only they would show, and then remove the label!
Like I said, it was frustrating but now in retrospect I can smile and share the story!
Oh, and now that the episode is over, I checked and found out the shortcuts for the labels start at "6", after the flag shortcuts of 0-5! Well, groovy, but I still don't use them...
