Navigating Lightroom Folders and Collections

I don’t really like Lightroom folders and collections, or at least the way they (don’t) work together in Lightroom Classic CC.

Quite often, you can be browsing photos in a collection and wish you could quickly see the rest of the pictures in the same folder. Or you might be looking at pictures in a folder and wondering which collections you’ve added them to.

Well, they’re easily overlooked, but there are options on the context menu which can help you out, and here’s how they work.

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01  Browsing a smart collection

I’ve set up a smart collection which gathers together all the photos in my library that I’ve given a five-star rating. That’s fine – it’s a good way to check out my favourite shots. But what if I want to trace this one back to the folders it’s stored in?

02 Go to Folder in Library

That’s easy. If I right-click on the image, I get this shortcut menu, and near the top is the option ‘Go to Folder in Library’.

03 Go to Collection

That’s fine. I can now see all the other photos from that shoot, and the original image my 5-star shot is stacked with.

But what if I want to do it the other way round? What if I’m starting from this folder view and I want to see which collections a particular photo’s been added to?

That’s easy too. If I right-click a picture in folder view, the shortcut menu has another option – ‘Go to Collection’. This displays a sub-menu listing all the collections a photo has been added to. I can see this one’s been added to a collection called ‘Las Vegas’, and if I select that from the menu, I’ll go straight to that collection.

Easy!

See also

Aperture users: 3 ways Lightroom could drive you mad!

More Lightroom tutorials