Photos shot on this date?
Spring may have arrived in London last week, blossom is on the trees, the air is cleaner and there are no crowds. It would be great to go out and take some pictures. But not with the Coronavirus outbreak.
For the last year I’ve been posting new photos to my Instagram page. It’s no big deal, sometimes it’s nice to get feedback, and it’s a habit that I quite like – hell, now we all need some social interaction!
But without new pictures, what to do? One idea was to look back a year in Lightroom, which is easy enough since I store my photos in folders for each day. But if I didn’t shoot anything on this day last year, have I really got the patience to look back year after year?
Sadly Lightroom doesn’t make it easy. One can certainly do it using the Library Filter to filter by date, but I’ve got photos going back 30+ years and finding all the March 20s means a lot of clicking. There’s a similar problem with smart collections – you have to type in each date.
And that’s what led me to this idea – a script that creates a smart collection for the same date for previous years. So it creates a smart collection as below. Run it tomorrow and it’ll find everything from March 21.
Installation instructions are in the start of the file. The script goes back 25 years but you can change that if you wish, and I suspect it might be useful for lots of other purposes – birthdays, anniversaries. But you’ll have to hack it for yourself!
Nice Work John!
Roelof
Hi John,
You’re a hero in these times.
Thanks for the great script.
I am not a programmer or hacker.
Can I change the script to create smart collections of the last 25+ years and months for the months (january, february … december) or weeks (1-53)? I think so, but what do I have to change? THANK YOU
Dark times indeed, Wolfgang. Maybe it’s safer to to stay home with Lightroom!
Glad you find the script interesting. If you’re not a programmer or hacker, you’ll find it difficult. But after posting this script, I had too much time on my own, thinking about how to develop the idea. So I am going to add it to my Search and Replace plugin, and it will allow months or specific from/to like 24 December to 2 January. I’ve got most of it working already.
Thanks for the answer.
Great idea to integrate this into the Search and Replace plugin – it makes the plugin even better. I use it very often.It would be nice if your plugin could also create Smart Collections. I am looking forward to this version. Stay healthy and thank you.