Terry did an awesome thing - he created a new, updated version of his video on how to move your photos to a new hard drive, and it's awesome (as you would expect from Terry).

I received a question from someone wanting to know how to rename their virtual copies the other day, and thought it would make for a useful post to share with you all. The short answer is that you can’t rename your virtual copies because a virtual copy only exists in the catalog as an additional set of processing instructions. Since there is only the one source photo on your drive, there are no copies to rename. Let’s dive into a longer answer. One of the most useful aspects of a virtual copy is that it doesn’t require making an actual copy of your source photo if you want to process it in an alternative way. This can free you up to create any number of versions of a given photo. Sure, they do require the creation of previews in the preview cache and they do add to the size of the catalog, but those are smaller prices to pay than duplicating the actual source photo multiple times. Some common reasons I’ve seen for creating virtual copies are to have a photo cropped to multiple different aspect ratios, to try out different processing techniques, to create different color and B&W versions, and so on. I’ve written more on virtual copies if you want to dive deeper. Each time a virtual copy is created Lightroom automatically populates the Copy Name field with Copy 1, Copy 2, Copy 3, etc., as a way to give each virtual copy a unique name. The Copy Name field and the auto-filled names are often invisible to a lot of people using Lightroom. If you expand the Metadata panel and select a virtual copy, you will see what I mean. Those auto-generated names aren’t particularly useful, and although we can’t customize what Lightroom inserts in that field, we have full editorial control to insert a more human-friendly name in there if it suits our purposes. Just click in the field and type away. Likewise, you can use that field to provide an alternative or supplemental name to the source photo, which is left empty by default. For example, if you create a single virtual copy to make a B&W version, and fill Copy Name with “BW” then it might also be useful to enter “Color” for the original (or master in Lightroom terms). You can make that a bit more useful by customizing the Info Overlay and Grid View Style to display the Copy Name field so that you can see it more easily. I’ve written previously on customizing the Info Overlay, and customizing Grid View Styles is very similar. You can further leverage the contents of the Copy Name field by including it in a Filename Template that you can apply to your exported copies. During export your virtual copies will become real copies that exist on your drive, and at that moment they each need to have a unique file name. Why not take advantage of the name you already used? Here’s how to incorporate Copy Name into a Filename Template by appending it to the existing source photo’s filename: In the Library module, go to Library > Rename Photo, to open the Rename dialog box. Click the File Naming drop-down menu and choose Edit from the bottom of the list. Delete any existing tokens in the editing window. In the Image Name section, click the Insert button next to Filename to include the source photo’s filename. (Optional) Click into the editing window and type your favorite separator, such as a hyphen. Note, that if you include a separator and leave the Copy Name field empty for the source photo, you end up with a filename that ends in the separator only. In other words, if Copy Name is empty, there is nothing to separate from the leading filename. Still within the Image Name section, click the drop-down for the second set of tokens and choose Copy Name to add it to the template. (Optional) Incorporate any other tokens you find useful. Click the Preset drop-down menu and choose Save Current Settings as New Preset, and give it a meaningful name. Cancel out of the Rename dialog box without renaming. Any Filename Templates you create are available for use on import, within the Library module, and on export. The next time you export a batch of photos with usefully-named virtual copies, you can put this Filename Template to work, and in a way, rename your virtual copies. Hope that helps!

Catalog related questions are the bread and butter of the Lightroom Help Desk, and one of the more common questions pertains to people not opening the correct catalog or not knowing where their catalog is located. A really simple way to ensure you always open the right catalog every time you open Lightroom Classic is to create an Alias (PC: Shortcut) to your actual catalog file, and put that on your desktop. Here’s how on a Mac: If you are not sure where your catalog is located on your drive, open Lightroom, and go to Lightroom > Catalog Settings > General (PC: Edit > Catalog Settings > General), and click the Show button to open your file browser to that location. Navigate inside of the selected folder, and look for the file with the .lrcat extension (you may need to change the view of your file browser to display file extensions). Control-click/right-click the catalog file and choose Make Alias. Drag the alias (not the actual catalog file) to your desktop. Here’s the steps for Windows: If you are not sure where your catalog is located on your drive, open Lightroom, and go to Edit > Catalog Settings > General, and click the Show button to open your file browser to that location. Navigate inside of the selected folder, and look for the file with the .lrcat extension (you may need to change the view of your file browser to display file extensions). Right-click the catalog file and choose Send to Desktop > Now all you need to do is double-click that alias/shortcut and Lightroom Classic will open that catalog file specifically every time. One thing to note is if you have an older version of Lightroom installed, then in some cases I’ve seen that older version retained as the default program associated with .lrcat files. In those cases, trying to open a current Classic catalog in an older version of Lightroom presents an error (because you can’t open a new catalog in an old version). To avoid this from happening, uninstall any older versions of Lightroom you are no longer using. If you need to keep an old version of Lightroom for some reason, then just make sure the current version is the one that is registered on your operating system as the default program for .lrcat files. Bonus tip, if you use a Wacom tablet you can even register one of the Express Keys to launch that specific catalog file and skip the alias/shortcut trick. One last step to take is to go to Lightroom > Preferences > General (PC: Edit > Preferences > General) and configure that specific catalog to be the Default catalog. This way if you should launch Lightroom itself, it will open that catalog specifically, and not any other. What About Multiple Catalogs? If you are one of those rare (and amazing!) people who needs to use multiple catalogs, then you can create multiple aliases/shortcuts (one for each catalog) and keep those on your desktop (or in a special folder on your desktop to keep things tidy). Make sure you name them in such a way as to help you know which catalog you are opening when double-clicking. Once that is done, on the Preferences > General tab, instead of choosing a specific catalog as the default you can choose Prompt me when starting Lightroom to be presented with a list of catalogs to choose from each time you launch Lightroom instead of using one of the aliases/shortcuts. In other words, if you use an alias/shortcut to open a specific catalog you won’t be prompted with a list, you’d only see that when launching Lightroom from your Dock/Taskbar/Start Menu. Make sense? Hope so. 🙂

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