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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

G

gbebermanAuthor

Known Participant

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.

Conrad:

My initial feeling is to agree with you that LRC is a superior product. I suspect, however, that more effort has gone into making it a convenient and effective image editing tool than an index to a very large collection of images.

Still, I SO APPRECIATE your suggections. Command-option-left arrow is just wonderful. Thank you. And I love how I can see the drive and path using the Go To Folder in Library option. It's very much like one way I could have seen it in Media Pro. I still think there's room on the screen for the path. But, that's for the Ideas section.

One more question, if you don't mind, especially since you're a former Media Pro user. When does performance max out based on catalog size and how do you organize multiple catalogs? I have indexed about 12 of the 118 drives in our archives (which are of varying size). This has put about 350K images and videos into the current catalog. I suspect I'll hit a performance limit well before finishing all of them.

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