Lightroom Collections Question

[Gold]

When processing in Lightroom (Classic), I frequently have the same photo in multiple collections, for example a 'trip/outing' name, a collection by month for each of my kids, and a location for the project that it is part of. When editing I will typically select one of the collections and work through the edits. However when an edit creates a duplicate 'edit' version of the photo (usually the AI Denoise function or 'edit in photoshop'). The edited version will automatically be added to the collection I am working in but not the other collections the original file was part of.

Is there any way to automatically set an edited image to be part of all the same collections as the original?

Thanks!


(Also I realize I could manage much of this through tags but I'm many years and tens of thousands of photos into this system)

 

[Craikeybaby]

I'm not sure on that one. I tend to edit in the main catalog, then move the edited images to a collection afterwards.

 

[Harlequin565]

I'm guessing you're using manual collections and not smart collections?

My suggestion would be to switch to smart collections which would then automatically pick up qualifying images. It sounds like perhaps you may have a lot of collections though so this might not be feasible.

The way I'd do it would be to pick collection a, select all the images, add a keyword of "collection-a" (to all of them in one go), then create a smart collection looking for the keyword of collection-a. This should take only a couple of minutes per collection once you get into the swing of it. Repeat for each collection. Then when you create a virtual copy, the keywords should all be copied over and the image will appear in whatever collections you've designated. The trick is to use unique identifiers for each collection (with no spaces - as I've learned to my detriment)

Manual collections get very messy very quickly which is why I stopped using them a long time ago. Having smart collections that pick images based on keywords is much more flexible and makes managing a lot of collections much easier because all you have to do is change the keywords to move them about.

 

[sk66]

In addition to what Ian wrote; when a file is duplicated in LR the new file retains the original file's keywords... i.e. it will be added to the smart collections automatically.