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Participant
April 2, 2020
Open for Voting

P: Field "File Size in MB" should be available as a filter in Organizer

  • April 2, 2020
  • 11 replies
  • 2954 views

The field "File Size in MB" is listed in the Metadata of each file/photo.

It would be a functional help if this field should also be available in the Filters visible in Organizer.

This funtion would enable user to filter and sort all files/photos which have a material size.

After visualization user can conclude to remove (after backup to external HD) these large files in order to save some space on internal HD.  Actually this can only be done in Explorer and search afterwards in LR file by file.  It would be a great time saving procedure.

11 replies

skyrunr
Inspiring
October 10, 2025

Not quite.  Pixel Resolution is not the same as PPI (scaling.)  Pixel count is the actualy resolution of the image.  The file size is impacted by compression and color depth.  When you change PPI you DO NOT change pixel resolution unless you resample the pixels/file.  A 2000 pixel image at 100dpi will print with the same resolution (quality) as a 1000 pixel image at 200ppi.  Basically, PPI changes your ruler.  I work with National print labs.  The 300ppi lab requirement is twice what most photo printers actually print at.  Then you're faced with limitations of DPI when you're printing.

I want to know which images have crops or are excessively large in my catalog for archiving and file management purposes.  I also want to know which images are small, have large crops, and might need super resolution.

Cheers!

John Leseky
Participant
October 9, 2025

PPI number alone has absolutely no effect on the file size on the disk or the pixel count. Easy enough to check. In Photoshop open any image, go to Image and Size, uncheck Resample, and change the PPI value to whatever you want. The file size or pixel count will not change. What would change file size and pixel count is resampling (upsampling) if you increase the pixel numbers for width and height. PPI is just an instruction for the output device driver (monitor, printer, whatever) but it does nothing to the pixel data on the computer. You may want to match the file PPI to the size of the print (for example) so driver or raster processor doesn't mess with it but there is no guarantee it won't anyway.

What affects image size greatly are non-vector masks and layers containing bitmapped data. In complex edits with many layers they can make the file size on the disk several to tens of times the pixel dimension size so in these cases pixel count is not very helpful. Then there is the file compression too. We need file size on the disk. 

Participant
September 7, 2024

I left Google Photos because it didn't allow for subfolders. Now I will leave Lightroom because I can't sort by size. Plain stupid.

Participant
March 18, 2023

I absolutely agree tha LR shold have this possibility. I am not a geek and using different apps is time consuming.

Known Participant
December 2, 2022

So, the "implementation" problem here is that these goodies aren't saved in the LR catalog, the lrcat file, which is in fact just an SQLite database, in a readily accessible format.

 

Each image/file has in that dabase -- obviously? -- an entry with its Adobe Camera Raw settings saved. However, very few of those parameters are stored in a way that allows them to be searched efficiently. Generally, the ACR settings are a text blob. Some of them are broken out into additional tables and indices, but not many of them.

 

Lightroom's ACR settings aren't (I think?) stored as JSON, rather as some kind of nearly-JSON but "string," and the relatively recent enhancements to SQLite for JSON queries probably don't apply. Oh, if only they did.

 

It wouldn't be much of a stretch for users to be able to filter on, say, images with Texture < -25, but it seems to me (naively and perhaps incorrectly) that the schema used by LR is basically REALLY OLD.

 

By the way, SQLite is one of the coolest things ever to be released upon the world, and if you are an SQL-curious nerd who hasn't heard about it, you should check it out. It has uses, and is used in ways, you would never expect.

Bob Somrak
Legend
December 1, 2022

Get AnyFilter as @johnrellis stated above.  It has filter capabilities that will NEVER be provided by Adobe.  

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB
Known Participant
December 1, 2022

Lightroom needs this. I absolutely agree.

johnrellis
Legend
October 31, 2022

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

 

The Any Filter plugin can filter by file size:

 

 

Bob Somrak
Legend
October 30, 2022

You can create smart collections for Long Edge

 

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB
skyrunr
Inspiring
October 30, 2022

I have also had the need to search for cropped dimensions (with RAW or even bit depth) which would also help.  Even "longest" edge would help as I use that for exporting settings.  I was specifically running image enhancement on older images.