Lightroom 4: Adobe Broke the Collections

In the good old day of Feb-2012, aka Lightroom 1, Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3, you could flag or rate a photo without worrying. With LR4, a photo can only belong to one collection! In LR1, LR2 or LR3, a photo can belong to many “regular” collections, with just drag and drop. Then you could decide on ratings or flags. For example, one photo can go in a customer collection and be rated as a 5 star, the best for that customer. I like that photo and want to add it also to my portfolio collection. In my portfolio collection, it should be only a 3 stars. I have much better photos than that, but that photo should be in the portfolio collection and if I find a better idea of what to do with it, it could even go up to 4 or 5 stars. Can't do that now anymore in Lightroom 4.

In Lightroom 1, Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3, all the flags, pick…, and the ratings were local to the collection. Now in Lightroom 4, all the flags and the ratings are global to the whole catalog.

So what to do now? Since I have not found a way of changing the collection options, I must delete all of my collections. What about all the work already done over the years?

  1. Create a collection with the same name, just add a -zz after the name: Just make sure that the Make new virtual copies is enabled. Do it for every collection that you have, except for the smart collections.
  2. After creating the collection, now drag and drop the photo from the old collection to the new collection.
  3. After adding all the photos to the new collections as virtual copies, now delete all the old collections.
  4. Right-Click on the collection > Rename and remove the -zz.

Since Lightroom 1 started shipping in January 2007, flags and ratings have always been local. Why did Adobe make such a major design change? Who knows? But also it's buried in the release note. Adobe should have been announced as a major change and here are the steps and consequences. Many people will get “screwed.”

What's wrong with using virtual copies?

  • In the “good old days” of LR1, LR2 or LR3, a virtual copy was used to create a different processing, a variation of a photo. A virtual copy for a web sizing, another virtual copy for printing, another one for the same photo in back and white and another one for a fake HDR version of that photo.
  • Now, in LR4, if I have to create all the collections with virtual copies, the changes done to a photo from the All Photographs collection will not show up in any of the collections. I make a change to the crop, I will have to do the same crop change in all the other collections. What if I forget to propagate the change to another collection? What a nightmare!

So for now, in Lightroom 4, photos can only belong to one single collection. The management part of the DAM (Digital Asset Management) has disappeared.