Caption and Local Backup Issues with Lightroom CC

[markwclark]

I have recently updated my Adobe packages and now use (or try to use) Lightroom CC with Photoshop CC - at £20 per month - for life - no less!"

I am avoiding Lightroom Classic at the moment - although I've got it - as I get confused as hell with the syncing, which is not the subject of this discussion! But just as a by the way the question you get about 'syncing this catalogue instead' when you set off Classic to start syncing frightens the life out of me so much that I just quit the program -  scared as hell that I am about to wipe out my carefully structured cloud albums!

Before going on I must say I really like the Lightroom CC product a lot.  It's very powerful - pretty user friendly - and accessible - but it does have a few issues for me. Many of which will be no doubt down to my ignorance and lack of product knowledge. Not sure whether they are big or small issues yet either - its all a bit early to tell. I am used to using Photoshop Elements (an old version 6) and Photoshop Premiere Elements a newish 2019 version.  All of my 13000+ photos which go back to 1969 are organised and captioned and I mainly use caption text searching if ever I needed to find a photo in PSE 6.

Captions

Question 1 - captions search. I cannot a find a way of doing text searching in Lightroom CC. Is there one? Is there likely to be one? I am not sure about relying on face recognition. Say I take a picture of Baby James on his birth date - will facial recognition work for his wedding day! I suspect not. My old fashioned text searching for 'Baby James' or 'James' might work out to be more reliable. Alright it will bring up lots of James's but I tend to find I can get the picture I want quite quickly - especially when I refine the search by time period.

Question 2 - caption capture. When I added a caption to a photo in PSE6 it also put this information into the same photo in the My Pictures library - under 'details'. When I put in a caption in Lightroom CC it does not do this. So if I ever fall out with Adobe or they go bust I will lose all the captions I make going forward. I have tried a workaround by using Bridge - adding a caption as a description. This appears to work most of the time - it puts the caption into the Pictures Library - under details - as well as into Lightroom CC as a caption - usually! But every now and then it doesn't work - so I am not totally convinced by my workaround. Anyone any experience of this?  Anyone got a better idea? Maybe it's me doing something stupid when there is a more obvious and elegant way of captioning to photos in Lightroom and getting the caption information showing in 'details' in the photo in the Pictures Library.

Question 3 - caption displayed/presented. Sometimes you want to see the photo with it's caption underneath or above - whatever. Again there seems to be no way of doing this in Lightroom CC. Incidentally, I tried exporting using 'save to' and no caption information is exported at all as far as I could tell. Also sometimes after copying a caption to paste as the basis of captions for other photos Lightroom will occasionally throw a 'wobbly' and only allow a few uses of cut and paste. Weird! PSE 6 was no problem in this regard.

Local backup of Lightroom photos.

My photos in Lightroom are organised into albums by year and quarter and vacations/major events thus:-

1985Q1

1985Q2

1985Q3

1985Q4

1985VFrance

1985JansWedding

1985 CompetitionShots

When I go to my local folder of Lightroom backups this structure is completely ignored and the folders are organised into years starting 0000 to 2019. The 0000 seems to contain a lot of pictures from the earlier years but I am not convinced they are all there. Also the dates for the later years and the photos in them don't match. This is not surprising as a lot of my photos pre-date digital photography and they are scanned in slides and prints - and it is probably the scanned in date being used. All well and good but I don't have much confidence in the completeness of the back up and none in its accessibility. Finding a particular photo will be a nightmare. Lets hope I never need to!

Question 4. Is there any way I can put some structure into this that will make it more user friendly? This must be a common problem. I can't be the only Adobe user in the world whose photo library was originally based on slides and prints. (Maybe I am looking at this wrong - maybe I should not see it as a backup but more of a way of storing the odd or current recent photos locally to work on when I am not on the internet for some reason.)

Finally if anyone can point to a really good explanation of when to use Lightroom CC, when to use Lightroom Classic and when to use Bridge - and how the syncing works between them all I  would be grateful. (I mean I get how all the syncing works between mobile devices, the web and different PC's etc.) It's how all the different catalogues/libraries and collections work in different programs that defeats and worries me. I haven't found the on line manual all that good in this regard. A good video tutorial on this subject would be very helpful. Maybe there is one and I just haven't found it.

Thanks for any feedback.

Mark

[JP Hess]

The only comment I'm going to make regarding all of your questions is that there is no need to be scared of Lightroom Classic. The only images that get synchronized with Lightroom CC are images that you choose to put in a collection and that you choose to share that collection with Lightroom CC. Otherwise, all images in Lightroom Classic remain in their folders, on your computer, not shared, completely private. That is, unless you make what I consider to be the mistake of migrating your Lightroom Classic catalog. In that case, all images get migrated to the cloud. I'm not a proponent of doing that.

[Theresa J]

I will add to Jim’s comment by saying, when you sync a Lightroom Classic catalog, all images in the cloud (by way of Lightroom) will download to your computer. Nothing will automatically upload, but images will automatically download.

Lightroom does not have the search capabilities of Lightroom Classic. It relies on web based artificial intelligence to find images.

Lightroom stores everything in the cloud and does not have a folder structure. Organization is done by creating albums. The files on your local drive are only a mirrored sync of the cloud. They are NOT the master files. Do not think of them as a backup. They are there so that you can work when you don’t have internet.

Use Lightroom if you want all of your work in the cloud and automatically synced everywhere.

Use Lightroom Classic if you want your images stored on local hard drives. Use Classic if you don’t want to incur extra cloud storage fees. Use Classic if you need features like printing and import presets (plus many more, see link).

Do not use Lightroom and Lightroom Classic together on the same computer.

Use Bridge for images that you don’t want included in your Lightroom catalog.

Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic | Adobe

[markwclark]

Tx for this. I like the idea of keeping Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic on the different computers and may end up doing this - at the moment I am going to concentrate on the CC version though. I'm more and more impressed with it the more I use it. And thanks for the advice on when to use the different products.

[Jim Wilde]

markwclark  wrote

Captions

Question 1 - captions search. I cannot a find a way of doing text searching in Lightroom CC. Is there one? Is there likely to be one? I am not sure about relying on face recognition. Say I take a picture of Baby James on his birth date - will facial recognition work for his wedding day! I suspect not. My old fashioned text searching for 'Baby James' or 'James' might work out to be more reliable. Alright it will bring up lots of James's but I tend to find I can get the picture I want quite quickly - especially when I refine the search by time period.

Question 2 - caption capture. When I added a caption to a photo in PSE6 it also put this information into the same photo in the My Pictures library - under 'details'. When I put in a caption in Lightroom CC it does not do this. So if I ever fall out with Adobe or they go bust I will lose all the captions I make going forward. I have tried a workaround by using Bridge - adding a caption as a description. This appears to work most of the time - it puts the caption into the Pictures Library - under details - as well as into Lightroom CC as a caption - usually! But every now and then it doesn't work - so I am not totally convinced by my workaround. Anyone any experience of this?  Anyone got a better idea? Maybe it's me doing something stupid when there is a more obvious and elegant way of captioning to photos in Lightroom and getting the caption information showing in 'details' in the photo in the Pictures Library.

Question 3 - caption displayed/presented. Sometimes you want to see the photo with it's caption underneath or above - whatever. Again there seems to be no way of doing this in Lightroom CC. Incidentally, I tried exporting using 'save to' and no caption information is exported at all as far as I could tell. Also sometimes after copying a caption to paste as the basis of captions for other photos Lightroom will occasionally throw a 'wobbly' and only allow a few uses of cut and paste. Weird! PSE 6 was no problem in this regard.

Question 1: there is not a specific "caption field only" search, though the caption is one of the several elements that would be searched when doing a free-form search in the Search Bar. Although I do use the title and caption fields, I also use keywords which have the benefit of a more targeted search/filter option. So "James" might appear in a caption, but would definitely appear as a keyword, and it's the keyword filter that I'd turn to first when looking for pictures of "James".

BTW, face recognition can be astonishingly good at recognising faces in images spread over years and decades....sure, a single picture of Baby James and a single picture of him on his wedding day 25 years later might not be matched, but is that a typical scenario? Wouldn't there also be many images of James throughout his life, and in that scenario you'll find facial recognition works very well when new images are imported.

Question 2: I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve here. Lightroom (both "cloudy" and Classic) are non-destructive editors, so any changes you make to an image, e.g. adding a caption, are not written to the image but are instead stored in the catalog. Those changes are typically only incorporated into an image during the export (Save To) process, but the original remans unchanged. So what are you trying to achieve by looking at the images in the My Pictures library? If you can tell us that we'll probably be able to suggest something.

Question 3: No, the desktop version of Lightroom doesn't have the option to display captions above or below the image, though it is available when you have the Info panel available. But even that isn't great, as you can't see the complete caption if it extends beyond the narrow field of view that the Info panel provides. A far better option is to browse the images using the Lightroom Web app in your browser, as the caption is displayed below the images when using the loupe view. Also, when using the Info panel in the Web app the caption field is displayed multi-line, so the complete caption is always visible. In fact, I'll typically do any caption entering using the Web app instead of the Desktop app.

[markwclark]

Tx for your response which was very useful.

With regard to ‘My Pictures Library’ and captions I will try to explain it better

I originally used my now very old version of Photoshop Elements 6 (PSE6) to catalogue and caption all the photos I wanted to hang onto since 1969. I scanned in about 3000 slides and hundreds of prints in the process of doing this. I can't remember the details exactly but I lost the Photoshop 'tly' back up when I inadvertently re-formatted a hard drive. I then had a situation where my PSE 6 catalogue became corrupt and I had no Photoshop back-up to use to recover the situation. (Isn’t it is always thus!)

I knew I had both copies and backups of all the actual images in my 'My Pictures' library so I could recover all the images. But my heart sunk at the prospect of having to re-caption everything. However, when I imported all my original images from my 'My Pictures' library into my PSE 6 organiser I found to my delight that all my captions were still intact!

I investigated further and found that my PSE6 generated captions had ended up in the 'details' area of the image in my 'My Pictures' library. (I'm sure you know this but just be sure you understand me - go to a picture in 'My Pictures' hit 'properties' and then  'details' and that's where you'll find the caption data in the case of an image that was captioned in PSE 6.)  This is not the case with captions originated in Lightroom, even when you export the image. ( I haven’t checked if this is the case when the captioning is done in the web-browser, but I suspect it will be the same.)

What I like about this - i.e. having the caption copied into the 'details' of the original image - is that if ever I fall out with Adobe or they go bust or something  - I can recover my images and their associated captions from my 'My Pictures' library if ever I have to!

I guess it's to do with the fact that in PSE 6 it is the edited image that is saved back into my 'My Pictures' library, whereas in Lightroom the original image is unaltered. Also it may have something to do with the way I had decided 'My Preferences' under 'Edit' in PSE6. I had ticked the following boxes (either that or they were the defaults).

'Use last modified date if EXIF date is not found'

'Import EXIF caption'

I have just tried an experiment. If I caption a photo directly into the 'details' tab then import it into Lightroom then the ‘details’ become the caption. This is not a particularly user friendly way of doing something when you have just bought an advanced product. But I guess it's a workaround of sorts. 

Thanks for the tip about Loupe view and captioning on the web browser.

The more I use and learn about Lightroom CC the more I like it. It's a really good product! 

Mind you at £20 per month for life (if you want access to it) it is not cheap so it had better be good! (Hmmmm! If I live another 20 years and keep it going it will have cost me £4800! Assuming they don’t put the price up!)

Captioning does seem to be weak area though and I hope they do go onto improve this. Especially, when I am spending £4800 with them.

Finally, thanks again for your helpful response.

Cheers

Mark

[markwclark]

Jim I have just used 'save to' in Lightroom and it did export the caption in that it was visible in 'details'. So I was wrong about that - could swear it's not what happened before but I must have it wrong. Still it's a bit cumbersome though having to save each picture you caption to get the caption data backed up outside Lightroom Does have the benefit of backing up the final edited image though. Is there a better way?

Cheers

Mark

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

I agree that exporting each image just to backup caption data is cumbersome, which is why I wouldn't dream of wasting my time that way. Currently, because I use both Classic and the cloudy Lightroom, all that data (which is a lot more than just caption data...keywords, titles, location data, edits) is stored and backed up in the respective catalogs, so there is no need to use exporting as "backup tool" until there is a need to do so. So, if ever I decide to cancel my subscription I would have various options that I can use only when and if I make that decision:

1. I could use the free Adobe Downloader app, which is specifically intended for the very purpose of removing the user's data from that cloud when the subscription is terminated. The user has 12 months after the termination to download the images, which would include all the associated metadata (either in XMP sidecar files in the case of proprietary raw files, or embedded in the XMP section of the header of all other file types).

2. I could run a one-time export (Save to) of all the images in the cloud using the "Original + Settings" option.

3. I could create a new Classic catalog, sync it to the cloud, and all the images in the cloud would be downloaded into that new catalog, complete of course with the metadata. Even after cancelling the subscription I could continue to run Classic in the "reduced functionality" mode (no Develop or Map module), which would give me continuing access to the images as well as the ability to import and organise more.

So basically I do not worry about, or take any specific actions to prepare for, what I might do sometime in the future. Time to worry about that when and if I ever make the decision.

[markwclark]

You’re right Jim. I am being paranoid. I will wait until the need arises and then do a big ‘save to’ to get all my processed images with associated back up. 

Cheers Mark

Mark Clark07963 115897Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

[markwclark]

I am being paranoid. I will do a big 'save to' when I need to!