Finding A Photo in Lightroom
I’m a big user of Collections in Lightroom. But every once in a while, I’m in a collection and I need to get back to the original folder that a photo came from. If the collection just has photos from one folder, than it’s usually not so hard for me to find it. But sometimes I have collections with photos from multiple folders and I forget where their original “home” is. Well, Lightroom has a way to find it. Just right-click on your photo (btw… if you don’t have a right click mouse, it’s time to join the year 1998 and get one 😉 ). Anyway… just right-click on your photo and choose Go To Folder In Library. Lightroom will automatically bring you out of the collection, and in to that original source folder in the Library module.
Great tip Matt – works on multiple files as well. I work almost exclusively in collection and have two sub collections for each job – one is the Selects with my adjusted RAWS, and the other is a Final Edits collection with the Photoshopped files – you tip makes it easy to keep my drive a bit tidier and go through all those old jobs and delete the RAWS. Highlight all images in my selects collection, right click – show folder – then hit delete as all my images are already selected. Excellent. Save me ages over the way I used to do it.
Nice, that’s a good one! I’m always having an issue with this because if you use Nik HDR Efex out of Lightroom, the merged image can’t be seen from the collection… so I find myself digging around to find where the original file is located. Thanks Matt!
Great tip Matt… thanks for all the great tips and hard work!!!
That’s a real time-saver, thanks Matt! I just discovered that if I then want to go back to my previous collection or where I had just been, a Command-z (Control-z on PC) takes me right back. What a deal, that’s great!
Hey Matt,
Great tip as always! I think you talked about this one too at one point, but I just stumbled upon it yesterday. I was looking through some old photo and got the file can’t be found message. So, I connected my external disk drive, then right-clicked (Yes, I do have a right click mouse :-)) and LR had a go to original folder in the menu so I click on it and Bam I had the original fold and LR automatically found the files! Awesome!
Dennis
Hmm… not wanting to revert back 16 years I will continue to two finger tap on my trackpad and select Go To Folder in library….. 🙂
Great Tip, but I don’t have mousebuttons on my trackpad… luckily ctrl+click does the job too. First thing tomorrow I’ll buy a 1998 mouse though.
Thanks for all the great articles and wonderful website – best Lightroom site ever!
It’s “then” not “than” though.
I like that tip, Matt. It’s especially good for people who have photos scattered all over their hard drives. I used to be that way. However, since earlier this year, I corrected that problem. I’ve moved all my digital photos since 2001 to one single location on my hard drive. So, far I have not seen any downsides to that. As part of the move, I also added the date to the front of the original file name. Lightroom makes it so easy to handle all photos!
I did that and…well…Lightroom simply said, “No! I’m not going to show you the folder.” I jerked my head back a bit, blinked, tried again…same message, but this time with two exclamation marks after “No.” Hmm, I thought to myself. “Ah, I’ve got it!” I simply typed out the sentence, “One word: Photoshop,” and that did it. Lightroom cooperated. (Great tip, Matt!)