Smart Collection

[dk khattiya]

Lightroom Classic is automatically collecting all my images to the Smart Collection, how do I stop that?

[Ged_Traynor]

Moved to the Lightroom Classic forum from Using the Community

[dj_paige]

Show us screen captures that indicate this is happening, exactly what you see. Please use the "Insert Photos" icon to include your screen captures; do NOT attach files.

[Ian Lyons]

If you didn't create the Smart Collection, then it's one of the 5-6 installed by default. The only way to stop these or any other smart collection is to delete any you don't want /need.

[JohanElzenga]

There is no reason to want to stop it. A smart collection is just a list, that is generated based on criteria. You can compare it to demographics. If you are 35 years old, then you are automatically listed in "People aged 30-40" and not in "People aged 40-50". If you have no use for a certain default smart collection, like @Ian Lyons said, then just delete it.

[dk khattiya]

If I delete the images in the smart collection it deletes the imagess in the folders which I do not want to do..but I have 149,000 images in a smart collection which is bound to take up space that I don't want occupied...

[JohanElzenga]

Delete the smart collection itself, not the images. Right-click on its name in the collections panel.

BTW, smart collections do not take up extra space. Like already explained, they are just a 'list' of existing images. It's the same images, just selected by certain criteria and presented in a different way.

[richardplondon]

Say there are 100 people. You find out that 20 of those 100 people are currently aged 30-40.

So now there are (at least) two lists you could look at: the list of everyone (=100), and the age-group list (=20). These two lists show 120 entries in total, but all these entries are drawn from the same population of 100 people, with some repeating on more than one list.

Then one of them has a 41st birthday, and one dies aged 38, and nobody has newly turned 30. So now there are 18 members of that 30-40 age-group, and now the "list of everyone" shows 99 members.

[Bob Somrak]

You can not delete images from a Smart Collection so they are not deleted from your Folders either.

[JohanElzenga]

You can not delete images from a Smart Collection so they are not deleted from your Folders either.

By @Bob Somrak

You can if you know the notorious 'splash delete' keystroke combination. I doubt that the OP knows that one, so it does indeed sound like he deleted the images from their folder and not from the smart collection.