P: Ability to lock photos to prevent further editing

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm a relatively newbie to Lightroom and I think it is fantastic.

It does occur to me that pros who have been using Lightroom for a while understand all the issues about selections, settings, copying, pasting, synchronising etc etc.

Like many things in life the people who do things almost as second nature forget what it was like to be a beginner.

The one thing that has surprised me about lightroom is that I cannot find a way of indicating "I am happy with this - I just want to lock it to ensure I don't damage, amend or delete it" through my own incompetence.

[dzigakaiser]

Hey Yves,

can you link the article?

That's news to me and why would I not have the soft falloff preview when using a soft brush when it was always there before?:)

Maybe we talk about different issues, though.

[Yves-CH]

The field to search works!!!!

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/ps-redimension-of-brushes-and-pencils-on-scre...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thank you

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thank you

[Laura Shoe]

Thanks for the heads up, Jeff!

[Ash Mills Photography]

Interesting, looking forward to see the improvements to the new UI here...

[giancatt.stmoritz]

after 7 years of using Lightroom I have at present over 340’000 images in my Lightroom Classic version.
many more images rest on my 3 units of Drobo 5D which I have deleted out of the catalog of LrC to keep the catalog smaller.

while cleaning up to free disk space it is possible to make mistakes and delete images I need to keep for ever or especially when deleting older images out of the LrC catalog where I do not really remember the story or I did not yet Flag properly during my learning period. 

example: I make a book with a few hundreds of images in Lr.
months later l happen to accidentally delete some images while not beeing on the book module. 
this should not be possible as long as my book is still kept in Lr. 
or l mark some images one day for ever to be kept and months later l accidentally delete some of them while cleaning up my forlders. should be blocked by Lr as I am working in Lr.

of course I have the images flagged, coloured, starred etc. I have 2 full backups to my RAID system. I backup catalog every day etc.
I know and do Flag images to keep them or Flag images to XX them. but in fact even a Flagged image to keep can be easily deleted. and I know I can block images from deleting via the OS of my computer. but I am not talking about this.

of course I know I can go to my backups and search for the deleted files and copy them back to the original drive. but sometimes the work is very time consuming.

my wish after all these years of using Lightroom ?
Adobe programmers to make an additional FLAG to BLOCK an image from intentional/unintentional deleting preventing so deleting an image. only after the FLAG has been neutralised the image can be deleted. It should be a normal Lightroom FLAG. in the same spot as the other flags are shown. and make a FILTER command for this BLOCK FLAG.

I think it is an easy programming step to help all the users of Lightroom to prevent deleting images by mistake.

what do you think ?

btw: I am a professional photographer serving media with images.

Giancarlo Cattaneo, Switzerland

[Manny_Pandya]

When I shoot a multi-day event for a client, I often edit a handful of images very quickly to deliver as fast as possible for their immediate needs (this is known as delivering "dailys"). I then go back the next day or two and edit the rest of the photos and deliver them separately.

Sometimes, when I come back to edit the remainder of the photos, I have already edited an image in a certain way that is different from how I'll edit the rest of the images, so that I wouldn't want any synchronized image adjustments to apply to those "daily" specific photos I've already edited and delivered to the client.

I would like to "lock" individual images from any later adjustments having an effect on that image. This would avoid any mistaken edits that I didn't want to happen. The worst is when you've accidently editied something and you can't get it back or remember how you edited it. The image "lock" would be extremely valuable.

[Maruhana]

Fully agree LR should have a lock image option, but Adobe is becoming increasingly weird with LRC / ACR / PS.

Meanwhile - did anyone try simly locking image and xmp in the Finder?

[JON0195]

I only work with RAW images in Lightroom.  In the past, I have accidentally deleted my catalog and had to start over with a new catalog and lost my changes made to my RAW files.  Is there a way to "lock" or prevent changes being made to the RAW file after you have worked on them?  This would prevent changes being wiped if you had to start a new catalog.

[JohanElzenga]

Yes, there is, but not the way you think. It's called 'catalog backups'. Make a catalog backup daily, or better still, set it to make a backup each time Lightroom Classic quits (you can always skip a backup if you did not make any changes). And store the backups on a different drive.

[Ian Lyons]

Are you saving the setting to an XMP sidecar or DNG? If not then the only place they're stored is in the catalog. So, a lock, which doesn't exist, wouldn't be of any help.

[Conrad C]

There is no way to lock edits, but you are not the only one who wants it: There is already a feature request for locking images over in the Ideas section here. (Edit: This post was moved to this discussion from another thread.) You should vote it up. It was added 13 years ago, so it seems like other features and bug fixes have been higher priorities. Its 134 user votes ranks it on the third page of the Ideas section, just to give you an idea of how users have prioritized it. Because that’s the thing…any idea can be great, but it always competes with everybody else’s ideas for available resources. If you really want it to happen, you might want to get a bunch of other people to vote it up.

This would prevent changes being wiped if you had to start a new catalog.

By @JON0195

There are existing solutions for that. One is catalog backups, which you can do two ways. Lightroom Classic has its own backup feature, but if your Mac is already using Apple Time Machine you can just use that. If the catalog is ever lost, simply roll back Time Machine to the last time you had a good catalog, and restore it. I cannot count how many times Time Machine let me get back files I screwed up or accidentally deleted this morning or last month; automatic hourly backups are a total life saver.

Another workaround is to save a raw file’s metadata out of the catalog to XMP (Metadata > Save Metadata to File), then use the macOS Finder to lock the XMP sidecar file, then move that file to another folder. If the edit in the catalog gets lost, put the XMP sidecar file back in the same folder, and then in Lightroom Classic, select the image and apply the metadata from the external XMP file (Metadata > Read Metadata from File). (If it is not a raw file the metadata gets written into the file itself; in that case just restore the file from a backup. Again…maintain up-to-date backups, that’s why both Adobe and Apple provide backup tools at no extra cost!)

But the catalog backup is a superior solution because it stores much more than just the image edits. If you applied anything beyond image-specific edits, such as adding it to collections, or saved slide shows, print jobs, and books, or you made virtual copies of it, that information is not stored in individual image metadata, only in the catalog. So only a catalog restoration would restore all Lightroom Classic information about the image.

[Lumigraphics]

Save to a sidecar file. Always. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Yes, the catalog stores other data. Doesn't matter.

Oh and make backups. If the catalog gets corrupted, you have a backup.

[johnrellis]

Moderators, @Rikk Flohr: Photography, please merge with this popular Idea:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-ability-to-lock-photos-to-prevent-further-e...