Seven (almost) random Lightroom 4 quick tips
As you play with Lightroom 4, there are lots of small features you may have overlooked. Here’s a brief run through of some of my favourite tweaks:
1. Try dragging any folder into the Collections panel. Lightroom 4 creates a new dumb Collection, and any stacks that were in the folder are repeated in the Collection.
2. Ever want to duplicate a Collection or a Smart Collection? It’s now very much simpler – hold down the Alt or Option key, and drag it to another position in the Collections panel. You can shift select multiple items too, and even copy entire Collection Sets using this method. Copying Sets is a bit fiddly though, so I may do a short video showing how to do it.
Use the mouse wheel to scroll through images on the map
3. On Windows, you can now move more than one folder at a time by dragging and dropping. As an Adobe engineer put it, this was an old bug that had been deferred one time too many.
4. In the top panel (F5) you can now right click the module names and hide those you don’t want – a silly idea in my view but someone’s bound to like it!
5. In Books, to globally change a book’s font, switch to grid view and choose Edit > Select All Text Cells. You can then change the font in the Type panel.
6 Emailing directly from Lightroom was much requested and has now been implemented, though to use a cricketing term it’s a bit “agricultural”. A dialog box appears and you can type a message and type email addresses, but you can’t choose email addresses directly from your computer’s address book – it’s not integrated. Theoretically you might start building up an email address list in Lightroom, or even export data from your email software and hack the Lua text file Lightroom uses to store its list. But you don’t need to do any of this – just hit Send and don’t enter any email addresses. Depending on your email program, Lightroom then opens the email in your email program and you can then use its address book.
7. When you click a flag on Map, Lightroom displays a popup with the first image at that location. Clicking the forward and backward arrows is the obvious way to move through the pictures tagged at that GPS location, but there’s an easier way. Move the cursor over the popup’s thumbnail – you can now use the mouse’s scroll wheel or similar wheel on a tablet to scroll through the images.
The only problem I’ve found by just hitting the send button w/o entering an email address is, if you are sending alongs photos they don’t line up in a nice vertical column. They are scattered all over the page… but if I manually enter an email address they send in an orderly fashion. I guess I’ll just have to start building up an email address book in LR manually as I go. Arrrghhh!
Mark
LR’s email is a pretty primitive feature. I rarely use it for more than one photo.
[…] Seven (almost) random Lightroom 4 quick tips – Lightroom Solutions – John BeardsworthThere are a few hidden gems in Lightroom 4 that are really cool, but that nobody knows about. I particularly like how much easier it is for photographers to create and duplicate collections. […]
Hey John,
Great article! I’ve still been using a plugin solution to duplicate collections and sets (thanks!) but was excited to read in this article that it is now available natively in LR4. I’ve tried using the alt-drag method to duplicate collections sets with no success, and a Google search for how to do it turns up nothing. Any tips would be much appreciated!
Cheers, Sean
It’s possible, Sean, but it’s not as straightforward as it should be. You have to expand the set, then Shift click, hold down the Alt/Option key, and drag. I prefer to drag into a temporary set, because the copying isn’t recursive – the set and its children are all copied to the same level. The temporary set just keeps them all together, so you can then drag the children to the parent.
Oh that is no intuitive. I think I’ll stick with the plugin then… Thanks!
Is there anyway to allow Lightroom to have the ability to add more colors/modify colors for cataloging images. Five colors isn’t enough for how I would like to catalog my images. I would like to have at least 10-15 colors for dividing images into catalogs or create sub-catalogs under those catalogs.
No, sadly. Another similar request is to assign two colours – that would hugely increase the number of categorizations.
You can use a combination of stars and colors to expand the possibilities.
I myself prefer collections and smart collections.
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Tried your suggestion for mail {But you don’t need to do any of this – just hit Send and don’t enter any email addresses. Depending on your email program, Lightroom then opens the email in your email program and you can then use its address book.} but couldn’t get that response from my system. I use Win 7, 64-bit, LR 4beta, and gmail which I access through firefox.
Wish it would work as you say, but perhaps gmail is not one which works this way?
Yes, it’ll depend very much on the email client. I’m on Win 7/64 but use Outlook and it works exactly as I suggest.
If it doesn’t work, and if you’re a bit geeky, do take a look at the file format of Lightroom’s address book. It’s not to difficult to write it from a list of email address and names.
How do I add Outlook as a client. I see very clearly how to add gmail and others but not how to add outlook. Any help would be appreciated.
Paul, you don’t really need to add it. Assuming that you use Outlook on your computer (not Hotmail rebranded as Outlook), it should be picked up as being your computer’s default email program. I generally just click send without completing the subject or addresses – the message opens in Outlook.