And I reviewed this PDF before installing Lr. On Page 98 in a section titled Select photos in the Grid view and the Filmstrip, it even discusses how selections work. It tells you how it violates standard conventions without first highlighting that it does so.
Here's just
some of how Victoria explains what I think we're talking about (and her ebook at $32 is worth every penny):
SELECTIONS
When you select multiple photos in Lightroom’s Grid view or in the Filmstrip, you’ll notice that the cell border displays in three different shades of gray.
Because Lightroom allows you to synchronize settings across multiple photos, there needs to be a way of choosing the source of the settings as well as the target photos, so Lightroom has three different levels of selection (or two levels of selection plus a deselected state, depending on how you look at it). (Figure 6.10)• Active—The lightest shade of gray is the active photo. That’s the single photo that would be shown in Loupe view or Develop module.
• Selected—The mid gray is also selected, but it isn’t the active photo.
• Not Selected—The darkest shade of gray isn’t selected.
Anything you do in Grid view on the primary monitor, such as adding star ratings or keywords, applies to all the selected photos, whereas other views only affect the active or most-selected photo.
When applying settings, or especially when deleting photos, double check how many photos are selected, otherwise you could accidentally apply a command to all of them.
If you’re synchronizing settings across multiple photos, Lightroom takes the settings from the active photo and applies it to the other selected photos.
To select a single photo, you simply click on it. To select non- contiguous photos—ones that aren’t grouped together—click the rst photo and then hold down the Ctrl key (Windows) / Cmd key (Mac) while clicking on the other photos. To select sequential photos, click on the rst photo, but this time hold down the Shift key while you click on the last photo, and the photos in between will also be selected.
There’s also a trick to deselecting photos. Clicking on the thumbnail itself retains your current selection and makes that the active photo, leaving the others selected too. But if you click on the cell border surrounding the thumbnail, the other photos are deselected, leaving just that single photo selected.
The thumbnails give you a good overview, but they’re a little too small to see the detail in your photos, so Lightroom offers three further view modes—Loupe, Compare and Survey—each with different strengths.