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3 thoughts on “Photo Taco – Lightroom Collections”

  1. I’d be interested in setting up my photo library in the way you’ve described but I saw a webinar once that warned against using collections because unlike keywords and star ratings, information about collections doesn’t get written to XMP sidecars and therefore couldn’t be read by other programs you may use in future. Is this something you guys have heard of or think I should be concerned about?

    Thanks for another great episode Jeff.

    1. @Kate,

      Yes, I believe you are correct that the data about what collections photos are in would not end up in any XMP sidecar files – at least not how they work today. However, even though XMP is an international standard (ISO 16684-1:2012), it was created by Adobe and still may not end up being remotely useful in transitioning away from Lightroom to another program. You have a decent chance that any new player in the field of digital asset management would want to include the capability of reading and using XMP files, but they don’t have to. To me, XMP or not, you would have a lot to consider before making a fairly large leap to another program. This is part of the reason the death of the Apple Aperture product was so hard-hitting. Photographers had invested a lot of time and energy into managing their photo library using Aperture, and even though Adobe has created tools to try and pull as much over as possible it is far from a seamless transition.

      To me, I am committed to leveraging all of the capabilities of Lightroom right now. Since I think collections are the best way to organizer your photos in Lightroom, I am going to use them as much as possible even though that information may never be extracted from Lightroom into another program. If the day comes where another program is so good I become convinced to switch, I will deal with that problem when it happens.

  2. Luckily file system directories, collections, and keywords are not mutually exclusive. So if you found yourself needing to migrate you could use keywords that match the collection names so that the new program can use its collection concept to identify them.

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