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Author Topic: LR: Lock Image States  (Read 3001 times)

John Caldwell

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LR: Lock Image States
« on: May 16, 2018, 08:36:31 am »

This is a topic that has come up in Eric Brody's recent thread that I have rudely highjacked. The issue concerns unintended edits were made on multiple catalog images, but not discovered until much later. I believe an overdue safety feature is the ability to Locking Image States. I've been wanting to bring this up for a long time, so I'm grateful for Eric's thread.

Seriously, why can we not Lock Image States in Lightroom? If a catalog spans multiple years, or genres of images, is it not logical that one might choose to Lock images, perhaps locking thousands of images at a time, rendering them impervious to unintended edits? The more LR offers keystroke shortcuts to do complicated things, as most of us now enjoy, the greater the chance that a few keystrokes could exert united edits on huge numbers of files. I have no knowledge of coding, but I'm tempted to think this should not be burdensome programming to write.

Again, I'm surprised that more people have not insisted on our ability to Lock image states. It goes without saying that one needs also to Unlock, on an as-required basis.

John Caldwell
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Chris Kern

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #1 on: May 16, 2018, 12:19:00 pm »

I believe an overdue safety feature is the ability to Locking Image States.

Well, they don't provide the precise functionality you're requesting, but Lightroom snapshots allow you to preserve specific edit states indefinitely and return to them regardless of whatever subsequent edits you may make—intentionally or otherwise.

John Caldwell

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #2 on: May 16, 2018, 12:25:18 pm »

Chris, one could as easily produce unintended edits in virtual copies, could they not?
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Chris Kern

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #3 on: May 16, 2018, 12:37:17 pm »

Chris, one could as easily produce unintended edits in virtual copies, could they not?

Yes.  That's why I tend to use virtual copies primarily as starting points for additional edits and snapshots as a way of preserving final (i.e. permanent) edited states.

John Caldwell

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #4 on: May 16, 2018, 12:43:23 pm »

Fair enough. How would you rank your interest in being able to lock states of images/virtual copies? I ask genuinely, as I've long been surprised this was not felt a priority. When one thinks of the amount of work that could be undone, and discovered too late, it's pretty daunting.
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Chris Kern

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #5 on: May 16, 2018, 01:05:22 pm »

How would you rank your interest in being able to lock states of images/virtual copies?

I'm not certain whether I would use such a capability—until you raised the issue, I'd frankly never thought of it—but I certainly wouldn't be opposed to Adobe implementing it.

It occurs to me that another workaround for implementing approximately the functionality you want would be to select a group of images you wanted to "lock" and export them as a catalog.  Then if you subsequently altered any of them inadvertently, you could reimport the saved catalog and return them to their previously "locked" state.  This would have the virtue of making it possible to preserve both Develop Module edits and Library Module attributes such as keywords and metadata.  But it would create some additional management overhead to manage the various catalogs as well as some additional demands for mass storage.

John Caldwell

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #6 on: May 16, 2018, 01:14:14 pm »

Yes, Exporting as a Catalog each time you wanted to Lock content would, clerically speaking, work. It would Freeze-In-Time current edits.

Regarding having never thought of the benefit of Locking, I'll bet you can finishing my sentence for me: It was when I had grabbed thousands of images from several years prior and had, evidently, brushed the 0 key on the numeric keypad. Months later, many Catalog backups later, I found that I had erased all Star ratings. But I had Deliberately done other stuff to those same images in the interim as well, so reverting to an old Catalog or backup traded one problem for another.

John Beardsworth got me through that, but there was a lot to it. Having been down that road, I got to thinking of just how much damage really could be done, giving the ease of selecting multiple files, and employing keystroke shortcuts - intended or not. So this is how I get to the vigorously help belief that we should be able to lock down portions of a catalog.

Thanks for your interest,

John Caldwell
« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 01:18:01 pm by John Caldwell »
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Chris Kern

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #7 on: May 16, 2018, 01:34:33 pm »

I had grabbed thousands of images from several years prior and had, evidently, brushed the 0 key on the numeric keypad. Months later, many Catalog backups later, I found that I had erased all Star ratings.

I know I'm in a distinct minority, but I detest keyboard shortcuts.  I don't know how many times I've fat-fingered the keyboard and either changed some image attribute or put LR into an irritating unintended state.  I wish there was a facility for locking them out!

Peter McLennan

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #8 on: May 16, 2018, 04:48:40 pm »

It seems like a good idea to me. An inadvertent keystroke has hosed me on more than one occasion. If it goes undetected at the time, the results can be disastrous.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

I say propose it to Adobe and see what they say.
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John Caldwell

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #9 on: May 16, 2018, 05:47:46 pm »

I say propose it to Adobe and see what they say.

Thanks, Peter. What's the best way to make such a proposal to Adobe, if you know? Do you suspect this has come up before and been vetoed for some reason?

Once you've been burned that the fact that a few thousand images could be burned by a couple unintended key strokes, you start to see this as a pretty obvious requirement, in my view.

John-
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RikkFlohr

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #10 on: May 17, 2018, 12:31:26 pm »

Feature Requests including Behavior Changes should be posted here: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/categories/photoshop_family_photoshop_lightroom

There may exist previous feature requests that you can add your voice and Me Too vote to.  This one comes to mind: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/mark_a_photo_as_the_final_version
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Hoggy

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #11 on: May 26, 2018, 06:53:05 am »

I would certainly vote for such a feature...  If you find any of the likely multiple requests to vote on, it would be great if you could post them here.  Then I'd vote on them too.

Lke Chris, I tend to detest keyboard shortcuts, too..  Except maybe for some of them.  It would be nice if LR would gain the functionality within C1, for changing and turning off various shortcuts as one wishes.  Outside of a select few, I can never remember many of them, anyways.  :)

As far as locking image states, that's one thing I use snapshots for.  If you make a snapshot on a virtual copy, it will go into the main images' xmp.  If you periodically, or religiously (like me), make sure to do 'save metadata to file' - it will write it out to either sidecar xmp file for non-native-DNG raws, or into the file for the other formats.  (And, yes, snapshots DO go into the xmp data that gets saved out.)  Obviously this will only help to protect image states, not other metadata changes....  Just make note that if you do anything to virtual copies, neither the main image nor the VC will show the badge for 'changed'.

There is also JF's Photosafe plugin, for protection against accidentally deleting/removing images.  But I just checked to make sure, and it doesn't protect against anything else.
« Last Edit: May 26, 2018, 07:00:00 am by Hoggy »
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Thomas Achermann

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #12 on: May 26, 2018, 12:57:28 pm »

There may exist previous feature requests that you can add your voice and Me Too vote to.  This one comes to mind: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/mark_a_photo_as_the_final_version

Rick, that feature request post dates from 7 years ago and 293 people have added their vote in this timespan. In my opinion, if Adobe would have wanted to add such a capability to LR, they would have done so many years ago. Sadly there is not much evolution happening anymore in LR.
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fdisilvestro

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #13 on: May 26, 2018, 05:44:21 pm »

I would be happy if LR showed the date of the history step (which is info available in the database) and add an option like "mark as final" to the contextual menu in history steps

Another option besides creating a snapshot, would be to export the final images as DNG, which will be even better for archiving purposes than just locking the edits.

Hoggy

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #14 on: May 26, 2018, 08:26:24 pm »

I found what I think is a better suited one, for me at least:  https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/locking_photos_please_protect_me_from_myself

I would want it to lock ALL changes, though..  i.e. Including keywords, captions, etc.  Not just image states, as I got that covered here with snapshots.
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John Caldwell

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Re: LR: Lock Image States
« Reply #15 on: May 28, 2018, 12:55:24 pm »

I found what I think is a better suited one, for me at least:  https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/locking_photos_please_protect_me_from_myself

I would want it to lock ALL changes, though..  i.e. Including keywords, captions, etc.  Not just image states, as I got that covered here with snapshots.

Right. The idea is too be able to lock every single metadata edit to a given image, or groups of images, and undo any of those edits only when you knowingly approve such an act.
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