P: Collections and Publish Services disappear

[Nonacresu]

Using LR Classic CC.

I just transitioned from a 6 year old Lenovo W510 laptop to a Dell XPS 15 Touch. I immediately noticed that Collections and Publish Services were missing in LR on the Dell. Just gone. There is a huge black space instead. I reached out to adobe.forum for help and tinkered while waiting. Meanwhile, I stumbled across an interesting behavior: If I closed Folders, Collections and Publish Services appeared! Yay! But when I re-opened Folders, Collections and Publish Services vanished again. I use all of these extensively, so this is a huge annoyance and inconvenience.

I was advised to removed/re-install LR, but there was no change in behavior. It turns out that LR has some inexplicable/undocumented limit as to how many folders it can show (!). How I know: I have 627 folders and about 15 or more were expanded. That is, each was showing their numerous sub-folders. I closed all the sub-folders so that only the 627 main folders were listed under Folders and Collections reappeared (!). But not Publish Services. That remained missing. Next, I closed Folders, collapsing all my folders and Published Services appeared (in addition to Collections). Of course, when I re-opened Folders, Collections appeared (but not Pub.Serv.). It will be incredibly annoying/awkward to have to play games opening and closing Folders to get access to Collections and Publish Services and vice versa, going forward. I am massively disappointed. It gets worse ...

I ran into a similar problem with the Keywords List a couple of years ago. I discovered, on my Lenovo W510, that the list only showed my keywords through the letter P, even though I have many others that go all the way through to the letter Z. Oddly/amazingly, LR only shows keywords about halfway through the letter D on my new Dell XPS 15 Touch! So the vast majority of my keywords can't be found or seen or edited.This goes to explain why I didn't encounter the limit on folders on my Lenovo. Something about LR Classic CC and the Dell limit folders and keywords to a greater degree than on the Lenovo. Bizarre. Infuriating. Disappointing. I'm really quite angry that I spent 4+ hours figuring all this out, wasting time of a number of other LR users, including Victoria Bampton, and having to writing this "conversation." 

[rmoorlag]

First: I do not have an answer to all your questions.

However i noticed your sentence "If I closed Folders, Collections and Publish Services appeared!". This is LR behaviour i set myself deliberately by rightclicking the Folderbar or Collections bar and choose the 'Solo mode' option. 
I don't think thats the issue here but it's worth checking it out.

[rmoorlag]

LR only shows keywords about halfway through the letter D on my new Dell XPS 15 Touch! So the vast majority of my keywords can't be found or seen or edited.

You know that you can search (filter) for a certain keyword? This way you can continue editing them.

Another way (maybe) to keep track is to use the 26 letters of the alfabet as 'parents' where all keywords starting with a certain letter reside,

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

I'm searching my email archives and I can't find any track of this conversation John. Was it on a forum instead? I'm just looking to find the rest of the surrounding conversation, and what's already been tried.

The keyword list length is a known issue that's been around for years https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/i_cannot_access_the_whole_keyword_list_to_edi...

I haven't come across it affecting collections and publish services before, but I'd guess most people have a folder hierarchy rather than an incredibly long list.

[Nonacresu]

Hi Victoria. I posed this question on one of your videos and you suggested that I pose it here, on feedback.photoshop. I also posed the question on forums.adobe.com (here: https://forums.adobe.com/message/10015164#10015164) but don't read all that unless you need to kill time. I'll summarize here. First about keywords ...

I used keywords extensively and have a great many. Of course, I have no idea how many because I can't see most of the list. Frustrating.

The really weird part: My old Lenovo W510 laptop shows many more keywords than my brand new Dell XPS 15 Touch. The Lenovo  showed keywords through the letter P. The new Dell only shows keywords about halfway through the letter D. So the vast majority of my keywords are now invisible. Very bizarre.

But this appears to explains why I didn't encounter a limit on folders on my Lenovo. The Lenovo (Windows 7) lets me see more than the Dell (WIndows 10).

As for the panels on the left: I have 627 folders in Folders (and several to many sub-folders under each folder; and sometimes sub-sub-folders). And I intend to add more in the coming years (each folder represents a project), so I am now worried that eventually I won't be able to see them all. (I am adding about 50-60 folders per year.) Do you have any suggestion who I can contact at Adobe to request that they fix this limitation? Thanks again for your help. -John

[Nonacresu]

Hi Roelof. Thanks for your help. I don't use solo. But I double-checked to make sure that I didn't accidentally enable it. (I hadn't.) See my response to Victoria for an explanation of my issue.

[Nonacresu]

Yes, I know that I can search for keywords, but life would be so much easier if we could simply see them rather than having to play with work-arounds. 

I will research how I could use the alphabet method that you suggest. That might be a good work-around. Thanks for that!

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Ah, maybe that was Laura or Julieanne then. I haven't got any videos (or at least, nothing public!)

Does the Dell have a HiDPI screen, and the old one have a standard resolution screen, by any chance?

The last time I checked with an engineer, it was a Windows OS limitation. It's not specifically the number of keywords or folders, but the number that are visible at time, so changing your folder/keyword hierarchies slightly would be the least frustration solution.

Here's the right place to post it though, as some of the engineers might have some ideas for alternative workarounds on newer OS's.

[John R Ellis]

This is a long-standing Windows LR bug: a number of LR's panels are limited to a maximum of 32K pixels on a side.  See here for the bug report on the Keyword List panel, and the Help article explaining the workaround:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/i_cannot_access_the_whole_keyword_list_to_edi...
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/lightroom-doesnt-display-all-keywords.html

It's simply not accurate to call this a "limitation" of Windows -- Adobe just "forgot" to do what every software developer has to do when making long scrollable lists on Windows.  The maximize size of a window at the lowest software layer in Windows is indeed limited to a maximum height of 2^15-1 pixels (32K pixels). Software that presents long, scrolling lists to the user must repaint the window with the current view into the list.   Most software uses higher-level libraries that do this for the developer. 

But Windows LR implemented its own user-interface controls rather than use such libraries.  While some parts of LR, such as Library grid view, do the necessary repainting, other parts don't, including Keyword List, Collections, and Folders, and these parts are limited to a maximum size. LR doesn't even warn the user about such limits!

The solution, not a "workaround", is for Adobe to do what they should have done ten years ago, completing the implementation of the internal user-interface controls used for scrollable lists.   Every software developer has to do this, either directly or by using an existing library.  It's pretty shameful for Adobe engineers to blame this on Windows rather than acknowledge they chose to cut corners.

Imagine if Library grid view were limited to just 150 rows of thumbnails, and Adobe blamed that on a "Windows limitation"!  Silly, right?  But that's precisely what Adobe has long done with the Keyword List, Collections, Folders, and other panels.

[John R Ellis]

"My old Lenovo W510 laptop shows many more keywords than my brand new Dell XPS 15 Touch. The Lenovo  showed keywords through the letter P. The new Dell only shows keywords about halfway through the letter D."

Most likely this is because your new computer's screen is higher resolution, with the fonts used in Keyword List being much taller (in pixels).   As explained above, the maximum size of the Keyword List panel is 2^15-1 (32,767) pixels, so increasing the pixel size of the fonts reduces the total number of lines shown.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Brilliant background, thanks for sharing John!!

[Sunil_Bhaskaran]

Thanks for the feedback.
We are investigating this issue.

Thanks,
Sunil

[Nonacresu]

Thanks for the explanation. Shame on Adobe for forcing people waste their valuable time explaining all this to others. 

[Nonacresu]

Sunil,

Any progress? 

[FrostyOfTheNorth]

Is there an update to this?

I've run into what appears to be a related issue.  Please see https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/missing-folders-in-library-folder-view.

[remov_b4_flight]

In Lightroom Classic 9.0 , One huge collection set is expanded,
But cannot to scroll to tail of collection set.

[John R Ellis]

See here for details about this bug: 
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/bug-that-causes-collections-and-publish-servi...

As John Beardsworth explained in the unmerged topic, the workaround is to organize the collections into hierarchical collection sets and keep most of them collapsed, such that no more than about 1500 lines of text in the Collections panel are showing at any one time.  And/or use the Filter Collections search box at the top of the panel.

[John R Ellis]

@Rikk Flohr: Photography, please consider merging this thread with the the much older bug thread "Fails on large keyword lists":

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-fails-on-large-keyword-lists-windows-only/id...

and changing the thread's name to "Fails on large lists of keywords, collections, folders, Metadata browser columns", since it's the same underlying bug.