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billyk57712340
Participant
December 24, 2023
Question

Create album containing both already-in-cloud and newly added images

  • December 24, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 265 views

I'm creating a special-topic album (happens to be photos taken from airplanes). This includes a bunch of photos I'm newly adding, and also photos scattered among many existing albums. I duplicated these into one folder on my Mac. I can import the new ones easily, of course, but how do I include the ones in existing albums? Please don't tell me it can only be done one by one, since there are many dozens of these in dozens of albums. Finding and making new versions of them would be too much (and easy to make a mistake).

Any solutions to suggest?

Thanks, BK (Lightroom CC v7.0 for Mac desktop)

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1 reply

Rob_Cullen
Community Expert
Rob_CullenCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 25, 2023

"Albums" are simply virtual lists of photos (like iTunes Playlists) that you create manually from the photos that already have been imported to your Lightroom library (catalog).

You can place the same photo (existing in a Catalog) in any number of 'Albums'.

Either- view [All Photos] and drag wanted photos to the new Album, or drag photos from one album to another (which will 'copy/add' the photo to the other album).

Your Lightroom app works with photos imported to the Lightroom Cloud. You do not (and cannot) copy files in your local folder system and expect them to be added or imported to the catalog.

 

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.1.1, Photoshop 27.3.1, ACR 18.1.1, Lightroom 9.0, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.2 .
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billyk57712340Author
Participant
December 26, 2023

Thanks, Rob. Appreciate the answer.

I suspected that was the case, but it doesn't give me an easy solution (100s of photos scattered across multiple albums would have to be found and dragged one by one). I think the best I can do will be to copy the photos into new folders on my Mac, renaming them trivially each time (writing a shell script to prepend "a_" in front of each name).

But then the question comes: If I upload a renamed photo that is already in my LR library, how does Lightroom decide that this is or isn't a "new" photo? If the Exif and other internal ID information has not changed, just the filename, is that enough? Or will Lightroom "realize" that this is in fact an existing photo?

I suppose it will be easy enough to test this.

Thanks for any suggestions.

BK

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billyk57712340Author
Participant
December 27, 2023

Reimporting is a very bad idea and totally unnecessary. Lightroom auto-tags images, so you should be able to search for them by searching for 'airplane'. Then select them all and add them to that album. You can do that in bulk, no need to do it one by one.

 


Once again, I appreciate the responses and am not trying to be argumentative. However:

Lightroom search does find lots and lots of "airplane" photos, including many of the ones I am looking for (not airplanes themselves, but shots from windows). Many or most of the search results are unsuitable for my present purpose, since that is dominated by photos of airplanes themselves, while omitting some of the window views I want.

Unfortunately I already made a selection by scanning through many travel albums I have only on a local disk, making a broad selection of photos I now want to work on and weed down in Lightroom. That was very likely a mistake, but I need to be conservative about what I upload to keep within my 1Tb storage limit. I typically upload a photo album only when I decide it is worth working on, and many of the albums with window-shots hadn't been uploaded.

So even though it is wasteful and possibly confusing, I think the rename/reimport is my best path forward at this point.

Thanks a lot for your advice.

 

 

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