Did you know that Lightroom has a feature that will take all of your flagged images (the ones that have the pick flag), and demote them to unflagged while also demoting all images that are unflagged to rejected? All you have to do is choose Library > Refine photos. I’m curious to hear if any of you have ever used this feature and what were the circumstances?
You’ve probably noticed that when you apply the Reject Flag to a photo, the rejected thumbnail is dimmed in the Grid view. But did you ever notice that when you Pick photos (add a flag), Lightroom displays a highlight around their thumbnails to help identify them? Well, now you know. : )
The Refine Photos command – Command + Option + R (Mac) | Control + Alt + R (Win), will demote Unflagged images to Rejects and Flagged images to Unflagged. Images that already had the Reject flag applied remain as “Rejects”. Note: the Refine Photos command applies to ALL of the images in a folder/collection, not only the selected images.
I find this to be an excellent way to demote the status of an entire shoot when I have been a bit too generous with my first pass of flags…
Command + Option (Mac) / Control + Alt (Win) + K will enable the painting tool in the Library module. For those of you not familiar with the Painting tool, it allows you to pick an attribute (such as keywords, labels, ratings, target collection etc.) and apply to images by clicking on the image thumbnail in the Grid view. Option (Mac) / Alt (Win) -click with the Painter tool will remove the information. When finished, tapping the Escape key will put the tool away.
I thought that you had to click on each image with the Painter tool in order to apply its “attribute”. However, you can also drag across multiple thumbnails with the Painter Tool in Lightroom to spray them all at once.
I just learned a new shortcut with regards to flagging images: tapping the tilda key will pick/remove the flag attribute from an image. This is really handy as you only have to tap one key to pick/remove a flag (as opposed to the shortcuts that I have been using – tapping “P” for pick and “U” for removing or unflagging an image). It’s not a new shortcut, it was just new to me.
I apologize for having several posts that cover shortcuts for flagging. However, instead of re-posting them here, you can quickly view all posts on “flags” (to find shortcuts on assigning flags, auto-advancing, deleting rejected files etc.) by using the “search julieanne’s blog” option in the upper right corner!
Lightroom has several different ways to tag images including flags, star ratings and color labels. Both the star ratings and color labels are global settings. If for example, you apply a star rating to an image in a folder, that star will travel with the image if you add the image to a Collection or Publish Services. The Flag tag (or attribute), on the other hand is specific to the folder/collection/publish services in which it is assigned. This “localized flagging” feature was designed so that you could flag images within a folder/collection/publish services independently of the other image’s other locations and so that you could then use that flag to further filter the images – to play for example, only a subcollection of images in a slideshow at any given time. The feature can, however cause unexpected results if you didn’t know that was the way that flags were designed to work.
Use the following shortcuts when working with Flags:
• “X” applies reject
• ”U” unflags
• ”P” or “~” flags
• Command (Mac) / Control (Win) + up/down arrow increases/decreases flag status.
