i rely heavily on the Search bar in Aperture to find my Folders and Projects. Will I be able to search the same way to find names of Folders in Lightroom? I’m still using Aperture while watching videos about Lightroom online in preparation to make the move.
The ability to search/filter for folders like you can in Aperture is not available in LR. There is a way to do something similar using smart collections, but it’s more like a poor workaround.
That capability does exist for Collections, though, having just been added in LR6. Strange they didn’t add it for folders at the same time. (But the LR designers have done a lot of strange things when it comes to the DAM aspects of LR.)
So when making the switch to LR consider the other available ways to search, perhaps using collections and metadata.
Jim,
i was hoping that I was missing something but I expected as much. Now I understand what everyone on this site is moaning about Lightroom. Hope Joseph has an workable solution in his videos. I will wait to see. Thanks for reply.
Susan
Encountered the same problem. Search capabilities of Aperture are still unmatched.
If you open the “filter” tab on the grid/library mode. You can search for text. If you type the name of the folder the pictures reside, the photos will be shown. Then you can right-click and ask LR to show the folder where the photo resides. It works but not as great as Aperture.
Example: If you are looking for someones' birthday photos. If you type birthday, all photos from all folders named birthday will show. You would have to browse all those photos until you get the ones you are looking for. Ideally it would also filter the folders so you could just look at the folders structure like AP.
Anyways, will send a request to Adobe. I bet they will listen better than Apple.
Rafael
http://www.mydarkroom.ca
Rafael,
What you say is true, but also what you describe is really a totally different feature. As you indicated, you are searching for the photos contained within one or more folders rather than searching for the folder names themselves. This feature is also “fraught with peril”. Here’s why. When you perform a search this way the results returned include any folder where the full path name contains the search term even though the full path name may not be displayed in the LR folder panel. So you can end up with a lot of unintended photos contained in the result. The same is true if you use a LR smart collection in this way.
In Aperture, everything listed in the Library panel is a container that, in general, has no relation to the actual file system folders containing the photos. So when you do the search in Aperture you are searching/filtering the container names. This is not the case in LR where the Folders panel lists the actual file system folders, and the full path name may not be included in that displayed list of names.
The only containers in LR are in the Collections panel, and LR6 added the feature to search/filter that panel as I indicated earlier.
“Anyways, will send a request to Adobe. I bet they will listen better than Apple.”
I wouldn’t count on it. This, and many, many other features and bugs related to the DAM side of LR have essentially been ignored for years. The LR developers have seemingly placed their priorities on the image processing features of the application, not the DAM features. Strangely though, they have consumed resources to include poorly designed features like the Book module instead of focusing on the Library module.
So how do you search for photos? Tags? Will I have to tag all my projects with the name of my project before moving them to Lightroom?
Susan
Hi Susan,
Honestly, you haven’t provided enough information to give you a specific answer. You indicated in your first post that you “rely heavily on the Search bar in Aperture to find my Folders and Projects”. But this doesn’t really indicate how your Aperture library is organized. So I’ll generalize.
Searching for photos solely based on Aperture projects and folders may not be the best approach, even in Aperture. Also take into account that Aperture folders and LR folders are two completely different things. How are you using keywords and other metadata to organize your images in Aperture, if at all?
In Aperture. if you are currently organized using a physical folder as a project that same approach will likely work in LR. Back in my LR days, I used file folders like I used Projects in Aperture. It worked fine.
You also have the ability to use LR Collections and Collection Sets to organize your library. (Collections in LR are roughly equivalent to Albums in Aperture.)
One approach in LR is to use folders as the equivalent of Aperture’s projects, and to use Collections as a “I need access to these photos for a while:” But most importantly, use of keywords and other metadata in LR (and any DAM software for that matter) is the best approach.
Also consider this… Aperture isn’t going away immediately. Continue to use it, but try to replicate your efforts in LR to learn LR’s paradigm for managing images.
Hope this helps.