Can you "color" pictures before importing them?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 7, 2025
2 replies
695 views

Hi, can you "color" pictures before importing them? I'm used to Photomechanic and I'm a sports photographer and I want a quick way to throw away the ones you don't want before importing.

macOS

S

Seaquence

Known Participant

Im a sports photographer who uses Photomechanic to cull images, before importing to LrC, as it's a much quicker way to compared to the unfortunate lag time involved when tapping through images in LrC. You can star rate or colour rate in Photomechanic, then from the top menu choose Edit- Select Star Rating (or colour class) images you chose. Then under Image - Edit Photos With - Lightroom Classic, which will take you to the LrC imort window and you choose the folder you want them to go in, as normal. Search this on Youtube if you have trouble.

E

ExUSA

Legend

You would need to do this in Bridge, which is a file browser rather than a database. You can rate, label, delete, and move photos in Bridge before importing to Lightroom.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

It doesn’t have to be done in Bridge. It’s fine to pre-cull in Photo Mechanic (as many pros do) because in terms of culling, Photo Mechanic does exactly what Bridge does: It lets you browse photos while using presets and shortcuts to assign star ratings and other metadata, writing it to XMP metadata sidecar files, which makes that metadata available for Lightroom Classic import.

Upon import, Lightroom Classic wil see the XMP sidecar files and read in the IPTC-standard ratings metadata it finds, whether it came from Bridge or Photo Mechanic or any of the other apps that save user-added metadata in a form that Adobe apps recognize. For example I just tried editing star ratings of images in the open source photo organizer XnViewMP, and because that app writes the metadata changes into XMP files, both Bridge and Lightroom Classic display those ratings.

That’s the only requirement: Are you culling in an app that writes industry-standard IPTC metadata into XMP sidecars? If the answer is yes, Lightroom Classic can probably read it in on import.

dj_paige

Legend

Are you talking about Lightroom Classic?

Are you talking about culling photos, or does the solution have to involve some sort of "color"?

If you are talking about culling in Lightroom Classic, yes LrC offers the use of embedded previews so you can quickly cull the photos you don't want, there's no "color" associated with this. See for example: https://darkroomphotos.com/lightroom-classic-new-embedded-previews/

Fotograf CrilleAuthor

Participant

Yes, it's Lightroom C I'm talking about. Can you sort by Color or something else before importing? If so, can you help me and explain. In photomechanic, you do the sorting directly and "throw away" the ones you don't want.

[Mod: Editing post for a better reading]

dj_paige

Legend

Please do not write such that we have to keep scrolling to the right to read your message. Just type your text into editing window where your message goes.

So the solution you are looking for has to involve some sort of color before importing? Culling is not the goal?

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