Phosphors

We’ve added some documentation on some key organizational topics to Lightroom Community Help.

• Over at Lightroom Forums, Sonny from Minneapolis asked, What does the Update Folder Location command do? Now you can get the answer in the topic Add new or existing folders.

• Another Lightroom 2 feature that slipped past us until now: The Add Parent Folder command. This command, which lets you add a higher level folder to the Folders panel, can be incredibly helpful if, for example, you accidentally import photos into a folder at the wrong level, or if you want to move more than one folder at a time (just grab and drag the parent folder).

• A couple of additions on the subject of catalogs. Moving or copying catalogs is simple enough if you know what to drag. And combining or merging catalogs—such as adding photos in a catalog on a laptop computer to a catalog on a desktop computer—is a common task that’s covered in Help, but frankly, not very well. Now, however, the topic Create a catalog from existing photos more explicitly describes how to use the Export As Catalog and Import From Catalog commands to perform this important task.

We just pushed an update to Lightroom Community Help, once again making more than a dozen corrections and clarifications based mostly on the comments you’ve made on the site.

Highlights include:

• The recommended workflow for importing from a scanner. Many of you are searching for information on the best way to do this. Unfortunately, there is no automated solution. Lightroom engineers recommend that you simply scan your photos to TIFF or DNG, if your scanner software supports it, and then import those files into Lightroom.

• How to import from iPhoto. There have been discussions on how to do this in comments on the site, so Lightroom Community Help moderator Gene McCullagh generously blogged about how to do it in the article Moving your images from iPhoto to Lightroom, and we’ve linked to it from the Help topic Import photos from Photoshop Elements (Windows). By the way, Lightroom does not import Photoshop Elements 7 catalogs. This is because PSE7 shipped after Lightroom 2. It just happens that way when applications have different release cycles.

• Time Machine. Indeed, Adobe still recommends you don’t run Time Machine backup or restore operations while Lightroom is in use. We’ve documented this on the Change catalog settings page, which covers catalog backup options.

• Lens corrections vs. postcrop vignettes. There’s been a lot of online chatter about this recently, including at this Lightroom Killer Tips page, so we’ve documented the fact that lens correction adjustments affect exposure values in a photo, while postcrop vignette adjustments add black or white values to a photo.

• Finally, we’ve answered the perennial question: How do I rearrange slides in a slideshow? The new page Rearrange slide order tells you how. Bonus: you can find out how to Rearrange web gallery photo order, too.

Remember, you can download a PDF of the current Lightroom web Help on every page of the site. Just click the PDF icon in the upper left corner of the page. And watch for more updates later in March.