Limit smart collection to n photos

[Poison Pants]

Is there any native method or plugin to let me limit a smart collection to a certain number of photos, taking into account my sort order? As in,

* the 100 most recent 4-star photos

Thanks!

[dj_paige]

No such thing.

[Rob_Cullen]

One option- You can define your Smart Collection to only show photos 'after' a specified Date (eg. after 2020/01/01)

or-

[Conrad C]

That Date field in Smart Collection can also filter for images created/edited in the last x days/weeks/months/years, if that helps.

[johnrellis]

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Another thing that might help: In View > View Options, set Index Number to be displayed in the Compact and/or Expanded Cell Extras.  Also set the option Preferences > Interface > Filmstrip > Show Index Number.  This sets the "index number" for the thumbnails currently displayed in grid view and the filmstrip, so you can quickly find the 100th:

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[Poison Pants]

Thanks for your thoughts, everyone. The goal is an automated way to have n photos in a Smart Collection for an Export Service, so that I don't have to manually select them. (I'm pretty adept at the software, so I'm aware of the various sorting and selecting and manual collection options.)

Out of curiosity, could a plug-in do this, if it were so coded? I used to do programming -- might be worth dusting off my skills.

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

"could a plug-in do this, if it were so coded?"

A plugin could let you choose a smart collection and then create a regular collection of the first n photos (as displayed in grid view under the current sort order). 

But beware the learning curve on the LR plugin SDK is pretty steep -- you have to learn a non-traditional language (Lua), the SDK APIs, and the limited debugging tools (print statements won't cut it). Programmers who try to just dive in by copying-and-pasting from the limited examples out there generally find they would have saved time but investing 6 hours or so reading up on the language and the SDK first.

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