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Question

P: Move to Folder Shortcut

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
December 29, 2024
2 replies
579 views

As we are about to hit the new year (2025) and in light of the recent post by ADOBE describing their roadmap for productivity improvements - here are two simple changes that would improve my productivity especially when culling a set of random photographs (aka the most recent download from my phone or camera).

Both of these to stop the endless and tedious scrolling while hunting for a destination Folder or Collection in the left sub-panel

1. In Library, right-click move to "Favorite Folder"

2. Similarily, right-click add to "Favorite Collection"

We can already desingate favorites for collections and folders - just trying to make them easier to access without losing the focus on the folder/collection you are presently in.....

JC

MacOs 15.2 Sequoia, Mac Studio M1-Ultra 64gb/2TB

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I agree that #2 is already there in the form of the Target Collection feature. I use it with its keyboard shortcut, so after telling Lightroom Classic which collection I now want to be the Target (favorite) collection, I just hit the B key and the image is added to that, which I think is faster than right-clicking. It also makes it super fast to add to the target collection when culling with the keyboard, just keep pressing the arrow keys and when you select an image you want to add, hit B, without lifting the hands from the keyboard*.

For folders (#1), because there is no target folder feature, one way to save time is, similarly, use the hotkeys that label/flag/rate. For example, when going through images, if one gets selected that should go to the “favorite” folder press for example the 7 key to mark it yellow (the shortcut for Photo > Set Color Label > Yellow*), then after reaching the last image, just filter on yellow so that you only see the images marked yellow, and then just select all and drag all those images at once to the folder you want.

*Sure, if you prefer right-clicking you could right-click the image and choose Add to Target Collection or Set Color Label > Yellow, but either is more work than just hitting the B or 7 key, respectively.

J

jimcamelAuthor

Known Participant

To both Brian ans Conrad (sorry for the late'ish reply) - the notification had gone to my Junk, oh well.

I agree with both of you - but the point is to have multiple entries in the drop down.

I want drop downs so that I can Add to Favorite Collection (from my list of established favorite Collections) and similarily multiple destination folders from my current list of favorite folders. These populate via the existing capability for Favorite Collections and Folders - it's just that they are in a drop down.

The key, gang, is to reduce the interminable scrolling in the left sub-panel to hunt and peck for the designated Collection or Folder I am trying to distribute the images to.

So, to make it clear, here's the scenario....I have a whole bunch of images I've shot on my iPhone in the last couple of weeks - random, all sorts of stuff and people and things, maybe 50 to a 100 - and now I am sitting down to LrC (sorry Brian, LrC not Lightroom). I select them all in the Photos app and do a command-alt-E which exports the un-modified originals to the folder in LrC I have designated as my autowatch folder - and then they all get imported to my LrPhotos folders in LrC. Now I have a lot of images I want to distribute to their forever Folder homes and Collections within my Catalog and I am simply looking for a faster way to navigate this. In a proper world we would have the UX capability for multiple open instances of the sub-panel so we could manage multiple folders with drag and drop....but I doubt that kind of user-interface change is in the cards.

Constantly changing the + Target Collection is not a solution to simply cherry-picking from a short'ish list of favorite collections. Same for folders if that existed.

jc

Conrad_C

Community Expert

There is no question that Lightroom Classic is less flexible with file sources than other solutions, mainly because Lightroom Classic allows only one content browser window. It’s true that when we work with files in a Mac or Windows desktop, or Adobe apps such as Bridge, Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects…we get to set up multiple windows or panels that represent multiple folders or virtual sources (folders, collections, bins…). But not in Lightroom Classic or Lightroom. So I agree with a lot of what you’re saying.

Until Adobe decides to let us easily view multiple folders or collections in Lightroom Classic, we have to work around it.

Based on how you described your scenario, it might be possible to hack the single Collection and Folder views a little. For example, you might look into using the color labels and Collections/Folders panel filters.

I have the same problem of looking at images and wanting to organize them somewhere in my long lists of collections and folders. I’ve been using right-click > Add Color Label to Folder/Collection to mark sources that I’m particularly interested in working with at the moment or all the time, like the ones marked green are all-time favorites. That helps spot them quickly when I’m scrolling the list.

While thinking about how the filter field in the Folder and Collections filter field might help, literally 2 minutes ago I realized for the first time that there’s a drop-down options list for those filters. The Folders filter menu lets you filter on Favorites and Color Labels, as well as as folder names. If you choose Favorites, now only your favorites appear in the list. If you need to restrict the list to some arbitrary or temporary grouping of folders or collections, assign a color label to those and then filter on them. So, this is one way to quickly cut down the list to just the sources you want to focus on, and I’m going to start using it.

The Collections filter menu is slightly different, it lets you filter on Synced Collections and Color Labels as well as collection names.

B

brianmatiash

Community Manager

Couldn't you just mark a "Favorite" collection as a Target Collection and add photos to it using the B key or right-clicking and selecting 'Add to Target Collection'? I guess I'm not sure what you're asking for if it's different than the Target Collection feature (aside from the fact that you can't set a folder as a target folder, just collections).

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