Backup filtered Lightroom views
How do i backup photos filtered in Lightroom. In an older [post id=213]article[/post] i already gave tipps on how to backup your photos/videos and cataloque to a NAS or an external USB harddisk
Lightroom is probalby known to you as a powerful and yet easy to handle tool to organize your photos and videos. You can filter photos by different criteria, either by color marking or even more flexible by keywords added to the photod.
Basicallay i mark my photos with the stars, the more stars the better a photo (in my opinion) is. I begin with 3 and more stars for photos i might develop or even publich on my website
At the same time, as you can see in the screenshot, i mark those images, i already published on my website or on Google+ with a violett color mark. This color marking bases on the eBook The photographers workflow, which helped me to keep the metadata more consistently.
Now according to your system you can filter for all photos with 3 or more stars or you create a smart collection, which does the filtering for the photos with 3 or more starts and a color marking violett, meaning all published photos.
The first and easiest option is to export the collection into another cataloque.
Just choose the destination folder e.g. on a NAS or external harddisk and Lightroom will copy all RAW files and corresponding XMP Files to the new location. If the collection contains for example panorama shots, and the panorama project files are recognized side car files, Lightroomwill copy them, too.
Lightroom will kepp the folder hierarchy und writes a catalog file, which contains all keywords and more important the development protcol for the picked images.
Even though the catalog export keeps the folder hierarchy including photos and xmp side car files, the whole folder hierarchy must be handled as a unit belonging to the newly generated catalog. Missing one or more photos reimport them from catalog and noit just copy them to original Lightoom folder hierarchy.
The second possible option is the use of the Lightroom Plugin LR/Transporter. This plugin can export metadata and of course filenames.
With the settings in the screenshot we can generate a list of the filenames in the selection.
The token {fileNameNoExtension} with the addition of the “.*” sign assures that corresponding xmp side car files are also handled.
Such a generated file could be a source input file for a copy program to backup the selected images and all the side car files to it. But i did not test this one, because you loose at least the development protocol for those images, because this is saved in the SQL database.
If i would have to do such a task i clearly prefer the catalog method because al files are copied with only one exception, files which are not recognized as side car files are not copied. On the other hand you get all keywords and the development protocol.
What do you do, just keeping a backup or did you have a job for backing up filtered views from within Lightroom. Just leace me your comments/suggestions and any question. If you liked the article i’ll be happy about a +1 or Like share.
ciao tuxoche
