Question about sorting images in Lightroom and/or Photoshop.

I've been a fan of Aperture since it came out and still use it. Until last week dam it. I recently made the mistake of letting Photo open my Aperture library and Photo took control of the Aperture Library and killed it. YES I HAVE A BACKUP. The native Apple Photo App BLOWS.

So I figured I had a copy of Photoshop Elements and Organizer 15 which I bought on sale last year from B&H and have used the editor often to do stuff you can't do in Aperture, so why not give that a try.

I created a catalog in Organizer only to find that YOU CAN NOT SORT OR FILTER BY FILE TYPE! So now I cannot easily separate my JPEGs from RAW as they live in the same directories on my hard drive (filed by shoot date). If I modify the file locations OUTSIDE of Organizer the Catalog File would have to be rebuild.

I found a post on Lightroom Queen that basically confirms my CONCERN that this same issue lives in Lightroom, i.e. Cannot sort by file type. The Canon product Digital Professional 4 is another file browser I have used and you can sort by file type and can "Fuse" the JPEGs and RAWS to only show one thumbnail for the pair. This is slick. But you cannot do much with the photos LOL. At least if you move stuff outside of Digital Professional it does not mess anything up.

So, this is the nut of my question. Does the full blow, pay by the month, Photoshop let you sort by File Type within it's organizer????

If not then I am going to clean up my Photo folders the old fashion way, all 26,000 images with combinations of Tiffs from the old negative scanner days, JPEGs, RAWS, PS, etc and THEN create my Catalog file with PS or Just go back to Aperture.

I am so disappointed in Organizer 15. Such a chump program.....

Mike

Excellent...thank you for quick reply.


Can you FILTER by file type also?

Mike

I have been using LR since version 3. You can sort/organize your photos by any parameter you choose in LR. Camera, camera serial number, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, Mode, filename, any text in the filename, file type, date (year, month, date), rating (star, flag, color), keyword, location (county, state, city, GPS), aspect ratio, flash on/off/fired, and more.

I can't imagine a better photo organizing/filing system than LightRoom. It also does about 95% of my photo editing.

Aronis wrote in post #18984207
Excellent...thank you for quick reply.


Can you FILTER by file type also?

Mike

Yes. That is pretty much the answer to any question that starts with, "Can Lightroom... ?"

I just saw your comment about "can't do much with photos" in DPP 4. That makes no sense to me. I use DPP 3 and 4. What is it that you can't do in DPP.

BTW, LR can do raw and jpg (of the same photo) as one preview, or not, also.

Aronis wrote in post #18984207
Excellent...thank you for quick reply.


Can you FILTER by file type also?

Mike

Yes:

HOSTED PHOTO
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PentaxShooter wrote in post #18984214
I just saw your comment about "can't do much with photos" in DPP 4. That makes no sense to me. I use DPP 3 and 4. What is it that you can't do in DPP.

BTW, LR can do raw and jpg (of the same photo) as one preview, or not, also.

I did not see much editing functionality, I'll have to check again, perhaps I just did not look closely enough LOL. I am really trying to find a solution that I can depend on for the next 10 years. LOL. I think the key is to clean up my file folders.

Levina de Ruijter wrote in post #18984215
Yes:

Hosted photo: posted by Levina de Ruijter in
./showthread.php?p=189​84215&i=i61804215
forum: RAW, Post Processing & Printing

And yes:

Hosted photo: posted by Levina de Ruijter in
./showthread.php?p=189​84215&i=i216924967
forum: RAW, Post Processing & Printing

Most excellent......

Mike

(this forum is so good!, thank you all for your input)

I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish in the long run - for example, trying to find a database-managed application for images (a "DAM") or if you just want to be able to quickly sort and filter your images across multiple folders and drives to find images of a particular format (JPEG, TIFF, raw files with a particular extension), images acquired with a specific f-number, ISO or camera model, etc.

The Finder in the Mac OS will do all of this and will do it very quickly. Just open a Finder window and start your search by typing a particular keyword or search or filter term in the search bar (the bar with the magnifying glass). Then you can choose to search in just the location of the finder that the window is referencing, or across your entire computer, etc. You can add search criteria to refine and narrow your search, etc. and you can add to the available search term categories to assemble the terms and criteria that suits your needs. This is all built in to the Finder and is indexed continuously so it is very fast.

See screenshots for examples of a search for Fujifilm raw files that were shot at 23mm with the GFX 50s after 1/1/2019.

This approach does not require one to import images into a database and does not require one to use Lightroom - you can manage your images with the built-in tools in the Finder and you can use whatever editing or raw conversion application that you want. You can also add keywords and tags to the files in the Finder and search and filter on those additional criteria. For example, you can select all of the raw files in a folder of images you took on a vacation to the North Pole and create a new tag for all of those selected images called "North Pole" - in the Finder you can search for all of the images tagged "North Pole" and it will return all of those tagged image files. You can assign files multiple tags as well.

The Finder is an extremely powerful tool for organizing, labeling and searching/filtering files. Give it a shot.

kirk

And...

And...

If you care about adding searchable, descriptive metadata labels to your image files, you can copy a shoot from your card to a hard drive and then select all of the files that you just copied to your drive and tag them with whatever descriptive labels you want to help with future searches. You can even group files by their tags when viewing those files. This is similar to a "Smart" collection or some similar DAM approach, except it is based in the OS, not a proprietary database in a particular image-editing application. In the attached screenshot, I tagged some images with "Awesome" or "Medium Format" or "North Pole" and told the Finder to group the search results by tags. The last three files in each group (DSCF9641.RAF - DSCF9643.RAF) contain all three tags - they show up in all three groups.

In other words, the Finder in Mac OS does pretty much everything the DAM in Lightroom does, except force you to import images into Lightroom - or use Lightroom.

When you develop a search that you use over and over again, you can save it so you can call up that search quickly. You can also use the Automator application to, wait for it ... automate searches!

kirk

Because "tags" are OS specific, other applications may not be able to see them. If you want to use the tags that you added to files in the Finder in the context of other imaging workflows (like EXIF data) then you can use EXIFTool to transfer your tag data into EXIF fields in your files - see:

https://prepression.bl​ogspot.com …-vs-keyword-metadata.html

for a discussion of this topic and how to do it.

Here is an Apple support page with more basic information about using Tags:

https://support.apple.​com …nd-folders-mchlp15236/mac

Good luck!

kirk

kirkt wrote in post #18984264
Because "tags" are OS specific, other applications may not be able to see them. If you want to use the tags that you added to files in the Finder in the context of other imaging workflows (like EXIF data) then you can use EXIFTool to transfer your tag data into EXIF fields in your files - see:

https://prepression.bl​ogspot.com …-vs-keyword-metadata.html

for a discussion of this topic and how to do it.

Here is an Apple support page with more basic information about using Tags:

https://support.apple.​com …nd-folders-mchlp15236/mac

Good luck!

kirk

Thank you for your input and the time you took!!

Perhaps I was not so clear in my description and thus the setup for my questions. I think my main question was answered re: filter and sort abilities in Lightroom and Photoshop (and it looks great).

I am quite familiar with using the Finder for this. I was just more interested in knowing for sure before I proceed to next level of software purchase, that if from WITHIN the Lightroom or Photoshop (unlike what you cannot do with Photoshop Elements Organizer) if you can sort as you can in Aperture. And you can. It was certainly not a deal breaker since I like Photoshop and had an ancient copy from the CD rom days, I have just not had the need to migrate yet.

But to be complete, here is an example screenshot of what I mean. From Aperture you can display a table of the file names and data, then choose a column to sort, etc, admittedly file type is not there (I thought it was, my bad).

While I was just trying to learn Elements I was in the process of uploading to Smugmug a few more photos but wanted to be able to just see the JPEGS since some of my folders contained both RAW and JPEG files in the same folder (after import from my camera). So you can image going through a folder of 50 images and seeing double (thumbnail for each the JPEG and the RAW), and I just wanted to export the JPEGs to keep it quick. LOL.

What I discovered that once the Catalog file was created for Elements, if you change any of the folders on the Mac Harddrive then the Catalog file would get messed up. So if I went and created separate folders under each date and put the JPEGs in one and RAW in the other (AFTER creating my Catalog) I would have to have the program repair the catalog. Not a big deal I guess. But since in Lightroom or full blown Photoshop I was showed I can filter by type as shown above, it becomes a moot point. And if I leave my disaster file folder mess as is it won't be an issue.

Anyway I just spent about 3 hours cleaning up my directories using the Finder and DPP4. The folders are still a mess since at some point I changed from Year-Mo-Day to Year_Mo_Day and such and there are a lot of TIFF files from scanned negatives, but I got rid of empty folders and deleted some junk images etc.

My goal was to migrate away from Aperture since its no longer supported and move to the big boy software. I was taking a baby step with Elements since I already own it.

Mike

You're welcome - just be aware that you will have to import all of your images into Lightroom (if that is the route you choose) so that Lightroom's database can manage your files. This may take a long time (let it run overnight) and will lock you into using Lightroom to sort and filter.

Adobe Bridge will permit you to do similar kinds of machinations, without a database.

kirk

I have tried using Bridge to do this type of sorting, using Keywords for example, and compared to doing the identical search in Lr it takes many thousands of times longer. The database has the advantage that it is optimised for these types of search operation. When using the file system to search it has to open each and every file to read the metadata from it, when you have 85000 images to search that takes a lot of time. Especially since I can have the Lr catalogue file sitting on my SSD, while the actual CR2 files are sitting on my HDD storage.

Now I'm running Win 10, so I don't know how much more efficient OSX's files system is for these searches than Windows. But I'm going to bet that for a significant number of images, especially living on spinning disks, a database system will be significantly more efficient, even though you have to import the images into the database first, and need to keep the images location up to date.

Alan