Lightroom Collections: the Big Drawback

Before discussing the nuts and bolts of using Lightroom 2 to catalog our photo library, I do want to mention one cautionary note about "collections."

While the ability to create collections or smart collections or "nested groupings" (a concept developed by Peter Krough in his superb DAM Book) is one of the most valuable features of Lightroom, sadly they cannot be shared between and among multiple users, not yet at any rate.

The important thing is that, as I understand it, catalogs can be shared among different users, and that's something we'll look into more closely in future postings.

Smart Collections won't help reindexing

If you have a large photo library and are sharing it from a central server/hard drive among other creative team members (and why else would you be here, right?) then you already know what a hassle it is to continually and constantly have to reindex your images.

In our case we have a fairly simple folder hierarchy of (right now) 61 folders of images, each containing between 1-3k image files. But new metadata is added frequently to images and so not a week goes by when at least several folders have to be reindexed in order for each machine to be able to effectively and accurately search the entire library. But reindexing is time-consuming and is affected by the variety of workflows within the department. So, naturally this results is a fairly long process for some team members.

As a consequence, I'm always on the lookout for some workaround that might expedite the reindexing process and thought I had struck pay dirt with Smart Collections (SC).

Here's what happened:

Last week, for no particular reason, the question popped into my head that since SCs seemed smart enough to update itself automatically when an image with specific search criteria was added to the library, did it do this on its own without any further attention from my part? The short answer, for you spoiler fans, is no.

Anyway, my first thought (prayer really) when working with a SC the other day was, "Hey, maybe I can use this as a workaround for continually reindexing!" I ran a quick test by creating a new smart collection, then added an image to the library with the same search criteria and went back to the SC to see if it updated automatically.

No such luck.

I had to go in and reindex the folder where the test image resided and then sure it popped up just fine in the SC.

Two other rather unpleasant side notes: (1) They don't like lots of photos -- my SCs take several minutes to load each and every time I launch it. And (2) when going from one to another (with large number of files in each) and back again the SC selected always takes a long time to load, leading me to believe that the SCs are not indexed of course and wondering how/where Bridge stores these beasts.

Ciao for now