Exporting Photos

[wcstarks]

I have the most recent version of LR (6.14)

I have a catalog of photos I want to export.

I have the Keywords organized in hierarchies.

Personal names are organized in generational hierarchies, eg. children within parents.

Places are organized in locality hierarchies, eg. State > County > City

I now want to export these photos organized by their personal name hierarchies.

I would like to Select the highest level parent in the keywords and export all his photos and those of all his descendants, organized according to their keyword name hierarchies.

How is this done?

[dj_paige]

wcstarks  wrote

I now want to export these photos organized by their personal name hierarchies.

I would like to Select the highest level parent in the keywords and export all his photos and those of all his descendants, organized according to their keyword name hierarchies.

I'm not really sure what the output you want looks like. Specifically, when you export photos "organized according to their keyword name hierarchies", what exactly is the result? Is having the keyword hierarchies embedded in the metadata sufficient?

[wcstarks]

Ultimately, I want to get the photos into nested folders organized according to the keyword personal name hierarchies.  I don't expect that the export can do that.  However, I would like export all the photos in the top parent and all his descendants, at least into a single folder, where I can finish reorganizing them, I presume manually by keyword names.

So, I guess the answer is , Yes, the keyword hierarchies.  I guess what I should have said, I want to export only those photos from the main catalog who are the target person and all his descendants.

What happens if I were to select to export to a new catalog, as apposed to exporting to a folder on the hard drive?

[dj_paige]

In the case of a person and all his descendants, you run into problems with folders if a photo has two (or more) descendants in it. I suppose you could create two (or more) copies of the photo, and place them into the proper folders, but LR will not do this for you.

The best you can do toward this goal is to select all photos including or under the parent keyword, and export them all to a single folder. The rest would have to be done manually (and side issue: defeats the purpose and use of keywords, IMHO)

I don't see any benefit toward this goal by exporting to a new catalog.

There is a plugin that can mirror a collection hierarchy in an set of folders matching the collection hierarchy. Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s “Collection Publisher” Lightroom Plugin

[wcstarks]

These are historical family photos from the late 1800s through the 1900s.  These photos are scattered among a number of collections according to how I got them from various family sources.  I have assigned keywords to all the photos, including develop date (where known, to help figure out the event date), event date, names in hierarchies, and localities in hierarchies.  I need to reorganize these photos according to families as I export them, using the keywords.  I plan to keep group photos of a family at the parent level to avoid such duplication.

I see under Library Filter, I can have the keywords organized in hierarchies.  So, I guess that is how I select the target parent and all his descendants. I do not fully understand how best to perform the export. There seem to be a lot of options. I want all the metadata to go with the photos as I export them.   For Localities, I would like the full hierarchy to be exported with the keywords, not just the lowest level as it is now in the keywords.  I am not sure I know all the questions to ask.

[dj_paige]

I don't think that LR exports preserve Keyword hierarchies. For example, if you have United States->California->Los Angeles as the hierarchy, I think LR exports have the three keywords but there would be no indication of hierarchy.

When you export, the Metadata panel of the Export Dialog box should be set to All Metadata.

[wcstarks]

Concerning the localities, I have a plug-in from Photographer's Toolbox for bulk modifying the metadata.  I guess I will need to use it to add the upper levels to the localities.  Thanks for your help.

[wcstarks]

I did a sample export of several photos, and found that each photo includes the full hierarchies of all the metadata that are in hierarchies.  The keywords are in alpha order, so the jurisdictional hierarchies are not listed together in that order, but all the levels are there.  I see that this allows one to do similar queries in Windows that one can do in LR, when there are hierarchies involved.

When doing a query involving a hierarchy, one can query at any depth in the hierarchy and the query will display all the photos in that hierarchy from that level on down.  That being the case, I need to go back through the photos which do not show an individual, and insure that those photos, when needed, are associated with a most relevant individual, such as a photo of a relative's home, even when no one is in the picture.

And you are right, it is not as important to move pictures into various folders, as I had thought, as one can make queries that would, in essence, create virtual query folders.

I am going to make a separate post to suggest a new application, perhaps called LR Viewer, which would be freely distributed for viewing images, as is Acrobat Reader, for viewing documents.  I believe this is sorely needed, so others who do not and would not purchase or subscribe to LR, to more conveniently  navigate, query and view images than in Windows Explorer.  In the case of People tags, WE cannot see them at all. You may wish to look for that post.  I don't know how else to bring this idea to those who can do something about it.

[JP Hess]

Only problem is, you are using Lightroom 6.14. That is an end-of-life version of Lightroom that isn't going to be updated any more, ever. I hope you are aware of that.

[wcstarks]

Yes, I am aware of that.  However, as indicated before, my primary need for LR is to clean up images and add relevant metadata to current and scanned historical photos for distribution.  The current features of LR 6.14 are sufficient for these purposes.  I am not using LR for commercial purposes.  If I were, I would be subscribing to at least LR Classic.

There are many others around the world, who are also involved in genealogy and family history, who have similar needs as I do.  LR 6.14 is really adequate for these purposes, except for an issue with the People tagging interface in LR.

I have posted the LR Viewer proposal under the LR Classic forum.  It also describes the issue with the current LR People tagging feature. Since others outside of LR cannot see People tags created in LR, I am not using the People tag feature in LR.