"Smart Albums" like Aperture has
There are a few features in Aperture that I use extensively in my workflow and I don't see them on Luminar 3. The most important is Aperture's "smart albums" where you can configure an album to show only photos that meet a certain criteria (stars, tags etc).
I use these in conjunction with the star ratings applied to photos (which Luminar has).
I start with a quick review of downloaded photos, marking any photos I want to retain and Post Process with 1 Star. these photos automatically appear in the smart album I created called "1 star - process"
Next, I delve into the 1 star folder and do any processing and then mark photos that are finished with 4 stars. These photos then move to the smart album I created called "4 stars - to publish"
Finally, when I publish/sent/print any 4 star photos I mark them with 5 stars and they move to the smart album called "5 stars-complete"
I essentially have an organized view of a project in 3 smart folders that automatically update based on the status of the photos (needs to be processed/needs to be published/finished).
This smart album function is central to my DAM workflow and it would be very, very, very helpful to have it in Luminar. So please keep that in mind when looking at new features and your roadmap.
FWIW, I do think you've done a superior job (for the limited work I've done with Luminar Libraries so far) vs Aperture on not having the hassle of importing photos into a library and then having them unavailable because the photo or folder gets moved...this was by far the most frustrating issue with Aperture - their whole library structure seemed designed for failure. Something it would appear you've addressed with your file logic.
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Thanks, Robert. Where is this "wall" that you refer to?
I was going thru the manual and in Chapter 12, found this:
"Chapter 12: Filtering Images
The Showing drop-down menu located to the left of Shortcuts allows you to filter your images by favorite, ratings, color and even edited. With hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of pictures, finding the best ones can be tricky. For instance, selecting show 4 Stars or More, lets you view only some of your best photos."
however, I have yet to find this "Showing" dropdown menu they refer to.
Here's what my Library tab displays...certainly no "Showing" drop down that I can see....
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I second this suggestion. Both the "Showing" filtering and the static albums are much too rudimentary to support organisation of larger libraries.
Automatic albums should be dynamic and automatically contain all images currently in the library that currently fits the criteria. The current method (manually add photos to a album) is very tedious with a large library. It also only adds your current photos. Every time new photos are added to the library, you need to go through them and add them to your albums
The criteria could be just about anything from metadata as well as star / colour or other labels added in Luminar and you should be able to combine multiple criteria into a smart album.
In current version "shortcuts" are similar but it only works for dates. There is a shortcut that displays all images of a certain year, month or day. Smart albums should work like this but be highly configurable so they help you to find "all good photos taken 2017 with a medium telephoto lens for client x" or other very specific need each photographer has.
Example of criteria for smart albums:
- a date-span, time of day
- photos taken with a certain camera, lens, focal length, aperture, exposure time, ISO
- photos from certain geography
- rating, flag, colour, keyword, edited, included in other album
- filetype
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HI Angela, must say I support @Ake on this. Not having smart albums will deprive the Library of a very important function and one that is pretty basic to a dam. I thought it was already on the road map but perhaps I am thinking about search, which provides all the tools that would be used by a smart album (or should do).
Have a great day.
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