Is it possible to get more info in the history panel?

[bernie west]

Is there a way to get the date/time of an adjustment shown in the history panel of lightroom?  I often revisit old images while I'm surfing through my catalogue and slap a few extra tweek ons on an image here or there.  More just to test some new ideas/creativity.  If the fiddling doesn't come to anything, I put the image back to the history state before I fiddled.  The problem is that if I do a significant number of adjustments, it's hard to tell in the history panel where the old changes stopped and the new began.  Any ideas on how to deal with this?  I know I can make a snapshot before I start, but I'd like to avoid that as I do this to a lot of images and sometimes it's only a couple of adjustments before I realise it's a time to return to the previous adjustments.  Hmmm, is that what the "Previous" button is for?  I never managed to work out exactly what that does...

[john beardsworth]

No, it's not possible, though I agree that I'd like to see when an adjustment was made (maybe via a tooltip).

Previous copies the previous photo's adjustments to the current one.

[Lustrous]

Snapshots are the answer here-  You can create as many snapshots for the one image as you want. Not only the start!
At every stage of your edit/development experiments- press CTRL+N and [Enter]
You can scroll through ALL your snapshots by running the cursor over the snapshot list and preview them in the Navigator panel. (You need to check "Show Photos in Navigator in Mouse Over" in the Preferences > Interface Tab.)
Return to any one of the snapshots and its' stage of development, by a click of the mouse.
Keep any snapshot as another separate Virtual Copy [CTRL+'] (but it will not have any history!)

"Previous"- When you have applied development adjustments to one image, select the next image in the filmstrip, click [Previous] and your edits are also applied to this image. Try it out- In Develop mode, one image selected, Press [V]- you get a mono image- select next image, press [Previous], it also goes mono.

[bernie west]

You must have missed the bit where I said "I know I can make snapshots, but I'd like to avoid that..." 

[Lustrous]

Thanks for the feedback.
When you said- "before I start", I assumed you were not aware you can make multiple snapshots of one image.
I am now enlightened.

So the correct answer to your original post is NO!

[fdisilvestro]

As far as I know, LR does not currently provide that information via the user interface. In any case, that information is stored in the catalog, so it might be possible for Adobe to include it in future versions or for somebody to develop a plugin (I do not know if there is already a plugin that does that).

The following image shows the edit history as it is displayed in LR for a particular image:



Querying the LR catalog (it is just a SQLite Database), I could get the date and time of each edit:



Regards

[bernie west]

Ahhhh, a challenge for my inner programming geek!   

[john beardsworth]

The SQLlite database is locked while you're in Lightroom, so you can't access the data directly. One guy did do plugins that accessed the data but IIRC he did it by copying the database file and querying the copy.

[fdisilvestro]

The SQLlite database is locked while you're in Lightroom, so you can't access the data directly. One guy did do plugins that accessed the data but IIRC he did it by copying the database file and querying the copy.

True, but the anyfilter plugin by John Rellis seems to be able to query the live database. It should be easy (for him) to extend the anyfilter plugin to query the edit history.

[bernie west]

It will be locked to everything outside of Lightroom.  Lightroom itself will be able to access it.  I'd assume plugins would access these things via one of the Lightroom processes.

I'm guessing Adobe will have some how-to guides scattered around the net?  I might actually give this a go some day.

[john beardsworth]

True, but the anyfilter plugin by John Ellis seems to be able to query the live database. It should be easy (for him) to extend the anyfilter plugin to query the edit history.

Any plugin can query data in the live catalogue - mine do, and so does Ellis's - but not by directly querying the live database itself. They use Adobe's SDK which makes available more information than you can query via Smart Collections or the Library Filter, but not history steps. You have to use an external SQL tool to read the database.

It will be locked to everything outside of Lightroom.  Lightroom itself will be able to access it.  I'd assume plugins would access these things via one of the Lightroom processes.

I'm guessing Adobe will have some how-to guides scattered around the net?

As above, that assumption's wrong. You have to use an external tool - plugins cannot access this extra information via a Lightroom process.

[fdisilvestro]

Thanks for the clarification. I see, the plugins have access to the API, but it is not possible to execute SQL statements. Your suggestion to have it as a tooltip would be really good, let's hope Adobe implements something like that in the future.

[Robert Boire]

Is there a way to get the date/time of an adjustment shown in the history panel of lightroom?  I often revisit old images while I'm surfing ...

I share your frustration. Its a pet peeve for me as well.   I had no idea that the information was actually available in the database..which means implicitly that Adobe could provide it in the history panel.

The problem I find with snapshots is that you have no idea - unless I am missing something - where in the history panel the snapshot was made. So if you have edits after a snapshot or several snapshots its easy to get lost.  It seems to me it would be easy to create an entry in the history panel that effectively says ` Created snapshot `time stamp`  now' . That would tell you that everthing below is included in the particular snapshot.

Here is something I do sometimes if I want to test a series of tweaks... create a vitual copy.  The history in the virtual copy will include the time stamp of when its created (again it would be nice if the history of the source image also indicated that the virtual copy was made). Then you can be sure that all changes made to the virtual copy happen after that date.  You can also extend this by creating a virtual copy of the virtual copy etc. Its not ideal since it gets awkard if you have several virtual copies...but it helps.


Robert

[bernie west]

That's a good tip about the virtual copies.  I might try that and see how that works out.

[fdisilvestro]

I share your frustration. Its a pet peeve for me as well.   I had no idea that the information was actually available in the database..which means implicitly that Adobe could provide it in the history panel.

Adobe actually provides the date time information but only for the following actions: Import, Export, Create Virtual Copy and Snapshot (when you reapply a snapshot)

The problem I find with snapshots is that you have no idea - unless I am missing something - where in the history panel the snapshot was made. So if you have edits after a snapshot or several snapshots its easy to get lost.  It seems to me it would be easy to create an entry in the history panel that effectively says ` Created snapshot `time stamp`  now' . That would tell you that everthing below is included in the particular snapshot.

There is a (convoluted and not robust) way to include the info about the snapshot in the history. You need to have at least 2 snapshots (the first time you can create 2 snapshots at the same time)

1) Create a snapshot and put a name that identifies it as a baseline (required only the first time)
2) Create a snapshot and save it with the default Date Time
3) Go to the Snapshots panel and apply the "baseline" snapshot
4) Repeat the previous step with the last snapshot

The history will show now both snapshots applied, baseline and the one with the date time