Not sorting Virtual Copies by Label Colour.

[MrDill]

I label certain images certain colours as I go through and edit them. When trying to sort my images by colour labels I noticed that some of them were left behind even though they had colour labels selected for them. I also see that the one's that were left behind are Virtual Copies. Is there a way around this?

If there is no way to make this work, is there another option instead of making Virtual Copies? I usually make the virtual copy when I am significantly cropping, or need a horizontal and a vertical.

Thanks.

[dj_paige]

Do you mean "filter by color label" instead of "sort by color label"?

[MrDill]

View > Sort > Label Color

[Just Shoot Me · Accepted solution]

MrDill  wrote

View > Sort > Label Color

That is not the way to Filter images by color label, IMHO.

That option will place all images that have any color label first in the grid view but does not filter by the color itself.

And does not work correctly for Virtual Copies.

The VCs are left next to the original and not moved to the front, top, first images in the grid view or film strip.

You should use the Filter Bar, Attribute option and select the color label you want to display. As shown in my screen shots.

What is your reason for setting the Sort: order to Color Label?

[johnrellis]

View > Sort > Label Color

When you sort photos in LR, you're ordering all the visible photos by some attribute, such as Capture Time, FIle Name, or Label Color. When you filter photos in LR, you're restricting the photos displayed to only those that match the filter criteria specified in the Library Filter bar.

When LR sorts a photo that's in a stack, it always sorts the photo according to the attribute of the top photo in its stack. So if the top photo is labeled red and the bottom photo is green, then the bottom photo will be sorted as if it were red!

Your virtual copies are likely still stacked with their masters, so they're getting sorted by the colors of their masters.

(The sorting rules of stacks are actually much more complicated, depending on whether the stack belongs to a folder or a collection and which source is currently active -- LR stacking is weird.)

For your workflow, filtering is likely to be more useful than sorting. To filter by label:

You can save the filter settings as a preset to make it faster to call them up -- click on "Custom".

[johnrellis]

...and you can filter by color (as opposed to the text label) by doing:

[Just Shoot Me]

Working here without problems.

LR window with no Filter applied. Color label applied to both VCs and Originals.

Filter for Blue label only, which are all VCs.

And for both Blue and Green labels.

So I'm not sure what is happening on your system.

I suggest you restart your computer and test. It you still have the same problem then reset the LR preferences and test.

[JohanElzenga]

When you create a virtual copy, it normally gets stacked with the original. Stacks sort as a whole, so if you want to sort your virtual copies independently from the originals, you have to unstack them first.

[Just Shoot Me]

JohanElzenga  wrote

When you create a virtual copy, it normally gets stacked with the original. Stacks sort as a whole, so if you want to sort your virtual copies independently from the originals, you have to unstack them first.

No you don't need to Un-Stack them.

See my screen shots above. I made some VCs, assigned color labels to the VCs and then used the filter bar to Filter by the color label.

Only with the Sort:  order option set to Color label do the VCs stay next to the Master files for them and any Master/original files that have a label set on them get moved, Sorted, to the front, beginning, of the Grid view and the Film Strip.

[JohanElzenga]

I was talking about sorting, not filtering. Stacks sort as a whole, so if you want to sort VC’s independently from their masters, they should not be stacked with those masters.