attributes and collections and whatnot ...

[Jeremy Payne]

I have been been giving LR3 beta a serious spin, and I noticed something that I'm not sure is a bug or a feature that I just missed in 2.x and before ... I am away from home and don't have access to my old LR 2.X library so I can't check to see if this behaves the same in LR 3 and 2.

In the past, I hardly used 'collections', but I started to play with them in the beta.  I had always found filtering on-the-fly to serve my purpose in the past ... but my work is getting more complicated and I'm starting to have more commercial and non-profit clients, so I thought I would start using collections to keep it all straight.

So ... to my question ...

If I create a collection put a few thousand RAW images in ... and then while in the collection 'view' I give them attributes like 'flags', 'stars' and 'colors' ... are those supposed to be attributes within the collection only, or do they carry back into the main library?

I ask because it seems that colors and stars do "cross the line" and come back into the main catalog library, but flag status does not.

Is that a feature or a bug?  Is that how it works in LR 2.X?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Tom Montgomery]

I don't know whether it's a feature or a bug, but a quick test shows that LR 2.5 behaves in the same way.

[john beardsworth]

Just remember this mantra - flags are local, rating and colours are global. This is what you found - that a flag set in a (NB dumb) collection will not be shown in another (dumb) collection or if you find the images through a folder. This is to allow you to use the flag in multiple contexts. For example, you might a group of images that you want to show to a client and also shortlist for a book. So they can go into the client collection and get flags relating to the client's choices, and also into a book shortlist collection. ie flags are local.

John

PS It's always been this way

[Jeremy Payne]

Just remember this mantra - flags are local, rating and colours are global. This is what you found - that a flag set in a (NB dumb) collection will not be shown in another (dumb) collection or if you find the images through a folder. This is to allow you to use the flag in multiple contexts. For example, you might a group of images that you want to show to a client and also shortlist for a book. So they can go into the client collection and get flags relating to the client's choices, and also into a book shortlist collection. ie flags are local.

John

PS It's always been this way

Cool - thank you for that ... did not know that ...

Another question ... somewhat related ...

Why can't you give something two (or more) colors/labels?  At the end of the day, I use keywords for things like that but I'd like to have colors be non-exclusive.

[john beardsworth]

It's just the way it is - people get confused enough by flags, you know.... Also remember that labels can be written into the image metadata and can be read in other programs (eg Bridge) so they need to be consistent.

John