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FeedbackCommunityMember
Inspiring
December 13, 2011
Open for Voting

P: Allow smart collections to reference other smart collections or library filter presets

  • December 13, 2011
  • 24 replies
  • 1398 views

It would be very useful if the smart collections could work recursively. What I mean is that the filters on the upper lever would work on all collections under that collection and the lower level collections could have additional filters

e.g.

| Landscape
| |- 5 stars
| |- marked red
Portraits
| |-John
| | |-5 stars
| | |-B&W
| |-Mary
|-5 stars
|-B&W

and so forth. This would make lot of organizing much more straight forward.

    24 replies

    johnrellis
    johnrellis
    Legend
    October 12, 2025

    Ther are tools other than collections for organization. LR provides a rich set of tools for organizing by metadata, most importantly keywords. Collections provide a single dimension for organizing your photos, while keywords and other metadata provide many dimensions.

    U
    upsidedownjim2
    Participating Frequently
    October 12, 2025

    Thanks! I commented and upvoted on that link. 

    U
    upsidedownjim2
    Participating Frequently
    October 12, 2025

    Thanks, good to know! Yes, I think it would be helpful to have it in smart collection criteria. 

    What confuses me about the UI/UX design of LR, to my understanding, is we aren't really supposed to work from folders for organization since it would move files around on the disk and Adobe created "Collections" in the first place for organization but I don't think they develop the concept and UI/UX further. I presume they need to devote dev time and money to flashier selling features like "AI removal" or "AI Denoise". Maybe change smart collections to "AI collections" and we'd see improvements 🙂 

    U
    upsidedownjim2
    Participating Frequently
    October 11, 2025

    I'm looking for smart collections to inherit criteria from its collection set or any smart collection can inherit criteria from a collection above it. 

     

    For my use, I'd like to have a organizational template for every shoot. So I can have as an example

     

    - COLLECTION YYYY-MM-DD_EVENT

    --01_ALL

    --02_Rejected

    --03_Picked

    --04_SLX1

    --05_SLX2

    --06_Export

    ----01_Instagram

    ----02_Print

    ----03_ETC

     

    Currently, I can duplicate the collection set but then have to manually update each smart collection with the new capture date. If I could just adjust the capture date on the main collection set it would save a ton of time. 

     

    In addition, the smart collection panel width is very narrow - i forget off hand if it can be widened but names get truncated quicky. Also, would like on phot import to add to smart collection template, update criteria. Save a few steps after import. 

     

    I know you can sort with folder and metadata but you have to manually reset these parameters and it wouldn't be  a standardized way to sort and process photos. 

    JohanElzenga
    Community Expert
    JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 11, 2025

    A smart collection set does not have any criteria. It's just a folder you use to organize smart collections. Smart collections can not reference other smart collections, so I don't think what you want is possible. Maybe there is a plugin that can do this, but I don't know any.

     

    -- Johan W. Elzenga
      U
      upsidedownjim2
      Participating Frequently
      October 11, 2025

      Thanks for the reply and info. Much appreciated! I had this in the ideas forum but think it got moved. I was trying to suggest a feature to Adobe.

       

       

      A
      annonshp
      Inspiring
      January 10, 2025

      Nested Smart Collections would be very useful in LrC. That is, allowing the "Source" for a Smart Collection to be another Smart Collection. 

       

      Benefit: simplified collection sets, faster to create, easier to maintain and reuse.

       

      Greatly Simplified Example

       

      Goal: publish photos to various consumer groups from one shoot

      Desired Collection Sets for exmaple

      1. Smart_Col_1: Source = Folder 1 + Pick Flag
      2. Smart_Col_pub1: Source = Smart_Col_1 + Keyword = XXX
      3. Smart_Col_pub2: Source = Smart_Col_1 + Keyword = YYY
      4. Smart_Col_not_pub: Source = Smart_Col_1 + NOT Keyword = XXX + NOT Keyword = YYY

      Etc.

       

      Yes, this can be accomplished with current functionality for this simple example, but to use this logic for multiple projects one has to edit 3 collection sets rather than 1. In actual use, I have many more smart publish collection sets. This is onerous, time consuming and frankly lame for a product like LrC.

       

      Better Alternative: implement Boolean logic statements; i.e., allow user to type Boolean statement and apply it your catalog database. But I suggested this years ago...

       

      johnrellis
      johnrellis
      Legend
      January 12, 2025

      [This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

       

      "implement Boolean logic statements"

       

      Smart collections do offer full boolean logic:

       

      Match All: AND

      Match Any: OR

      Match None: NOT

       

      You can get subexpressions by holding down Alt / Opt when you click the + button:

       

       

      T
      Thomas35104836ewl1
      Participant
      January 29, 2024

      It would be great if smarfilter could contain another smartfilter as condition. 

      This means, if smartfilter A contains condition 1 and 2 and I define another smartfilter B that uses smartfilter A like inheritance, then smartfilter B contains automatically all conditions of A. 

      Further more  conditions could be added then to B. If conditions change in A then they will be automatically applied in B.

       

      johnrellis
      johnrellis
      Legend
      January 29, 2024

      Many people have asked for this over the past dozen years. As a less convenient, partial workaround, you can use this trick to intersect two smart collections (find photos that satisfy both sets of conditions):

       

      1. Click on the first smart collection.

       

      2. Select all the photos (Cmd/Ctrl A).

       

      3. Click on the second smart collection. At this point, the selected photos are exactly those that are in both smart collections.

       

      4. Save the selected photos to the Quick Collection or a regular collection if necessary.

      K
      koontz2
      Participant
      November 5, 2023

      Hi

      It will be nice to be able to create smart collections inside smart collections 

       

      Poul

        Califdan2
        Califdan2
        Inspiring
        November 5, 2023

        That certainly would be convenient.

          F
          FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor
          Inspiring
          March 2, 2017


          As a Lightroom user, I want to create Smart Collections based on an existing Collection, so that I do not need to enter all the configuration details again.

          Background:
          I use keyword tags extensively to organize my photos, then I create Smart Collections based on keywords to work with those photos. Most of my Smart Collections are very similar to an existing Collection, except for one keyword change. It would be much faster, and less error prone to be able to create a new Smart Collection based on an existing Collection. For example: right-click on an existing Collection, and select Create Smart Collection based on this Collection, etc..

          thanks for considering it,
          Dan
          J
          jdphog2
          Participant
          July 4, 2016


          Smart collections are missing a point of indirection that would allow a single, potentially complex, set of search terms be reused in multiple collections.

          I define a number of complex smart collections as part of my workflow. In many cases, I would like to share common rules among a number of these collections. For example, I want to have a collection of favorites that meet certain requirements, and I want to share those same requirements, possibly with the addition of additional rules, in a publish smart collection. It is tedious and error prone to maintain the same set of selection criteria in two or more places.

          I imagine that this could be implemented either by allowing smart collections to refer to other smart collections or by allowing smart collections to reference library rule presets. You could also imagine library rules referring to other library rule presets.

          This enhancement would make smart collections and/or library rules so much more powerful. The current implementation does not exploit the full potential of the underlying database.

          Thanks for considering this.

          Jeff
          Timothy.Spear
          Timothy.Spear
          Inspiring
          October 8, 2014
          Alan,

          I would prefer sub query support with full inheritance, you will very quickly run into SQLLite limitations. Think of a situation where you want to have a template model with three levels of depth. Sub queries would be very difficult to implement in SQL Lit, but replication the and appending the where clause to each child object should be rather trivial. That was why I went for a simpler model. :D

          Tim
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