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Question

Customizing thumbnail view in Lightroom Classic?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 21, 2024
1 reply
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Is there some way to alter the thumbnail view in Lightroom Classic to display more useful info? For example, I don't feel a need for a big, and arbitrary, image number showing next to each thumbnail. More useful would be the image name.

And since I work with many external drives and want to know which drive contains a selected image, having the option to display the file path for the selection would speed things up vs right clicking for a finder view to see the path in an error message. And it woud be more helpful for me than something All Photographs or Previous Import.

Thanks!

macOS

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Conrad_C

Community Expert

What you want for the grid thumbnails is, in the Library module, choose View > View Options, almost the same command name that customizes the grid/list views in the macOS Finder.

Note that View Options can be different for Compact Cells or Expanded Cells. The option name for the useless big number is Index Number, you can see that I disabled mine. I have also customized the info that appears in all four header locations for an Expanded cell.

If you were asking about the thumbnails in the Filmstrip, right-click that and a context menu pops up; on the View Options submenu you can control some thumbnail options such as Index Number.

G

gbebermanAuthor

Known Participant

This is wonderful. Thank you. Two more questions:

1. Is there a way to change the size or color of items as they are displayed. Here is a screen shot of the black on grey I see:

That's tough to read.

2. My understanding is that LRC takes the first frame of an imported videa as a thumbnail for the reference to the vidoe. But, that thumbnail is displayed for me only when the drive with the video is attached. Is there any way to have video posters that persist?

Thanks again!

Gary

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Hi Johan

Thank you for your excellent descriptions. Manually creating the poster frame will be helpful. I'll find some Adobe suggestions box and offer the idea that LRC contain an option to create them automatically.

On the Go to Folder in Library option: I very much liked the interface. But, I'm not sure it fixes my problem.

We used MediaPro, and plan to use LightRoom, as the index to our imagery. Everything from a shoot is kept together on a drive in a folder named after that client and the shoot timeframe. When that drive is filled up with multiple shoots, we duplicate two backups and index one of them in LRC. All these drives are organized in ways that are mostly, but not perfectly, chronological.

Let's say the photographer is pitching a project and says images from a particular client should work. She's not specific about which shots. So, we need to review lots of shoots. Our workflow has been to search for the client name and other criteria (MediaPro allowed a parametric search I don't see in Lightroom. But, I'll soon try metadata filters to see how well they work). Each drive had its own unique Mediapro catalog file. Mediapro also allowed search through all of the catalogs in a folder. Using that feature, only the catalogs for drives with that client's jobs would pop up with results. But even in the few examples when we had multiple drives in a catalog, it was easy to see which drives contained images for that client by scrolling through them. The path for a selected image was right in a window.

In LRC, I do not have that option for multiple catalogs. Even if I did, there is no cross-catalog search and only one can be open at a time. So, I will keep all my drives in one, or a few, catalogs, and search for that client's name. I get a large number of images and scroll through them to look for different images that might fit the photographer's proposal for the new job.

I can use "Show in Finder" to ID the relevant drives. But, that will have me doing it lots for the same drive as shoots tend to be thematic and there is no path display in LRC.

"Go to Folder in Library" allows me to focus on one drive. But, it also excludes all of the other candidates that might work for the proposal. And there appears to be no "back" button to restore the original search and my position in it. So, I start over.

I'm guessing this is another one for the suggestion box. That is, unless your experience has more insights.

Thank you very, very much.

Gary

I'll find some Adobe suggestions box…
By @gbeberman

That’s the Ideas section that you can click on when you’re at the top level of the Lightroom Classic community here. If Adobe starts to act on a posted idea, they assign a status to it such as Started or Released. Some of your ideas might already be in there with votes and discussions.

In LRC, I do not have that option for multiple catalogs. Even if I did, there is no cross-catalog search and only one can be open at a time.
By @gbeberman

Yes, these are some of the ways in which Lightroom Classic is inferior to Media Pro, which I also used to use. In most other ways I think Lightroom Classic is far superior to Media Pro, but I miss those Media Pro features too. Even though Lightroom Classic is built on top of a database, there are some very basic functions supported by most databases that Lightroom Classic simply won’t do, such as searching through multiple databases at once.

I do advocate using a single catalog in Lightroom Classic, but because there have always been valid cases where multiple databases are better, those things should be possible. But, I think it’s a matter of priorities…some of these are really good ideas, but the product team usually has something they consider more important to allocate resources to first.

…there appears to be no "back" button to restore the original search and my position in it.
By @gbeberman

There are Go Back and Go Forward buttons, in the Filmstrip. These are also available as menu commands (Window > Go Back/Go Forward), so you can also use the keyboard shortcuts shown in the menu for those commands. So use the way that’s fastest for you.

Go Back/Go Forward (and actually any change of sources) does maintain the currently selected item…if that item exists in both locations. But it’s very easy to screw this up. For example, I can select an item in search results and use Go to Folder in Library (I do it by right-clicking the item so I don’t have to go all the way up to the menu bar), and the item remains selected when the source is changed to the item’s folder. If I simply Go Back, that selection is maintained and I am back to where I was in the search results, no problem. But if I select another item in that folder that is not in the search results, and then I Go Back, because the item that is now selected is not in the search results, Lightroom Classic says “well, the selection isn’t here so I’ll just go to a default selection” and now I have to remember where I was in those search results.

So if you want to streamline this process a little, as you Go to Folder and then Go Back, just be mindful of not changing the selection if you want to maintain it when you go back.

To summarize, for me, the streamlined way is:

1. Right-click an image and choose Go to Folder in Library.

2. In the Folders panel, note the currently selected folder, taking care not to change the selected item.

3. Press Option+Command+Left Arrow key to Go Back to the selection results.

Obviously everything would be better if Lightroom Classic always remembered the item that was selected upon leaving any source (folder, collection, search results…) and restored that selection upon re-entering that source. But it does not do that, and people have complained about that here before.

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