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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I know this question was about a ago, I just ran across it. If you are afraid to overwrite your the changes, not to worry. You don't need to lock your precious edit. Just go to the the develop model and click on the history panel under the preset panel. Everything you have done is recorded there. Every change you make to an image is recorded to the history panel. You can make a virtual copy of the state you your edits are in, and experiment from there.

Give it a try, if you have't done so. John

[areohbee]

History panel doesn't solve the problem, nor does undo. The problem is when changes are made inadvertently and not realized immediately. Snapshots help, but you still have to realize the photo was changed inadvertently, and then you have to revert one-by-one.

Note: locking protects against metadata changes too, not just develop adjustments.

[BumbleBritches57]

Good idea, instead of having to compare time stamps, and file sizes. Suprised I didn't think of this tbh.

[Guest]

please give us a feature to protect images from accidently changing them.

something like a lock button that protects images from changes made in LR.

it has happend a few times that i accidently selected an RAW image and synchronized it in LR, only to notice later in PS (and after some time spend on editing) that i have exported a version with the wrong develop settings.

once i think a RAW image is FINAL (in LR) i would like to lock/protect it (at least from changes in the LR develop module).

if i then try to edit/synchronize it, a warning message should come up.

[AMM]

YES!! I think you can make a custom label "Final" but it would be nice to have a flag like symbol all in place.

[areohbee]

Amy - thanks for the idea:

Ability to assign a custom label when locking added to ChangeManager @v5.6+.

R

[Frozen60mick]

Not really, because snapshots exist within the develop history of a single image and doesn't show up when there are multiple virtual copies of an image and/or multiple psd edit files from round tripping to photoshop. You can't see a snapshot status or name from the grid either.

[areohbee]

Yet another shortcoming of snapshots as work-around, this happens:

* edit to satisfaction
* snapshot
(time goes by)
* edit some more (on purpose, not realizing it's "final")
(time goes by)
* make an inadvertent or test edit, or just decide this round of edits not good.
* notice and return to snapshot, thus *losing* previous round of on-purpose edits.

In case the point still isn't clear: having a snapshot doesn't do any good unless you know:
* whether changes have been made since the "final" snapshot, and
* whether those changes were on purpose, or inadvertent.
and often "we" *don't* know those things.

Rob

[native_photo]

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I would really appreciate this feature...

Marking as Final - And more importantly "Locking" from further edits preventing accidental edits without "unlocking" MAKES GOOD SENSE. It's a good idea!

Of course there are alternate methods that are sort of substitutes, but they don't Lock the image.

Like Rob said: ""Snapshots DO NOT protect from accidental further editing (nor does any other method of marking a photo as final). - you can accidentally edit, further, any snapshotted (or marked) photo, and never know you did it, export it, send it to client, and *maybe* one day in the future, realize you did it, but maybe not. That's not "protection", in my book.""

[native_photo]

Locking from further edits & preventing accidental edits without "unlocking" MAKES GOOD SENSE. It's a good idea!

This idea goes hand in hand with this topic: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

[Mathias17]

What if users could create new custom metadata tags, one of which could be "FINAL".

Users could then use this specially-made custom metadata tag for only the images they want to deem as final.

[areohbee]

SImply tagging files as "FINAL" is the easy part. e.g. a simple (possibly non-exporting) keyword will do it.

So, it seems to me, it's the locking part that is the biggest subject here.

PS - I use a label for "FINAL", instead of a keyword, so it's visible in the thumb.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big-time supporter of custom-metadata, since one may want to add a to-do note if *not* final, or add some finale notes if *is* final..., which is also easy enough to do with CustomMetadata, *but* that metadata needs to be promoted to first-class citizen in order to be a thoroughly satisfying solution - e.g. saved/read from xmp.

[areohbee]

I was recently shocked to find a bunch of photos missing (I know I inadvertently deleted them when I was working on something). Thankfully, they were in the recycle bin. But it made me realize another aspect of locking that is needed, along with the ability to protect from inadvertent changes to existing images, we need:

* Protection from inadvertent deletion, especially of locked images.

I realize that Lightroom can't stop you from doing whatever you want to files in the OS, when Lightroom isn't running..., but it should be able to detect "missing" files (fairly promptly) - and there should be a distinction between missing, and offline:

* Missing: drive is online, but photos are gone.
* Offline: Drive is not mounted, that's why photos not present.

This help would be appreciated by all fallible humans, but would have even more value to users who don't understand that Lightroom doesn't suck images into itself when importing. I've helped more than one user recover, who deleted all their image files after importing, thinking that Lightroom had them already...

Rob

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

I haven't read back through the whole thread today, so apologies if this has already been posted, but to avoid accidentally deleting images, you may be interested in the PhotoSafe plug-in http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-good...

[areohbee]

I am familiar with PhotoSafe - it protects from catalog removal, but not disk deletion. Worthwhile to be sure, and I use it, but hopefully Adobe will take it all the way, since a photo in the catalog but not on disk is a photo you can't edit or export - which is about as much fun as a dead puppy... Likewise, for corrupted files: having them on the disk isn't much fun if they can't be read...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I think it would also be nice to see a feature where after export there was a little flag or something of the sort to show you have now exported the image. I work on series of photos over time which I export to lots of different locations and it is often a bit of a job to remember what i exported when and where. To have a feature where you could quickly glance to see the last date and location if you have previously exported the image before would be very useful

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Locking (from editing, not just deletion, and at the virtual copy level) would definitely be a good idea that would complement the feature under discussion nicely.

With LR's batch processing abilities, it';s all too easy to accidentally make adjustments to images where you want to preserve the current edits.

It would also be useful to be able to search for 'finished' photos -- and I've already used up all my colour labels for other things

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I think most of the groundwork for this is already in Lightroom. There are virtual copies, softproof copies... all's missing is a final copy.

A final copy could be locked for editing similar to the way softproof copies work. If you want to make a change, you get prompted.

There is already the ability to filter by virtual copies, so similarly you could filter by final copies.

Can we hope for this in Lightroom 5 Final, pretty please?

[jfaxelrad]

Feature Request: Ability to "Lock" Final Versions of Images
I know this is not new (people have been asking for years), but LR5 is so feature-rich that the lack of locking capability is now my biggest frustration.
Lightroom is now like a vast library in which the mis-shelving of a book effectively means that it will never be found, so it's as good as gone forever. There are so many ways to "lose" an image in LR. I can accidentally change its flag status, or its color/star rating. I can accidentally remove it from a collection. I can accidentally delete a snapshot or virtual copy. In the most extreme case, I can even accidentally remove it from the catalog. Admittedly, some of these things are hard to do, but they still can be done (for example, you think you're removing a reject image from the catalog, but you've accidentally selected an image you want to keep). It's even more worrisome for the many things that can be done with a single keystroke or mouse click (such as changing the star rating). And to reiterate a key point, no amount of backing-up my catalog and image files to multiple external drives will save me if a carefully selected and edited "pick" accidentally gets identified as a "reject." Once the erroneous attribute is set, I'll never see that image again. It's as good as gone.
Please, Adobe, help save us from our own inadvertent keystrokes/mouse clicks.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It's funny to see that this feature has been requested over three years ago, and it seems to have a lot of votes in its favour.

Is it gonna be under consideration for another three? Just wondering...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

+1 for locking an image to prevent accidental deletion. This thread is pretty old, has Adobe had a response to it?

[areohbee]

This plugin may help you work around:

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-good...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thanks, I just downloaded it and am installing it now. I appreciate the pointer.

[areohbee]

You're welcome - but it was just a re-iteration of the first response in this thread.

[DuncanJH]

A simple toggle "lock" to prevent any edits or deletion plus the ability to "unlock" would be a good start.