Lightroom: Finding Which Collection does this Photo Belongs To?

category: Lightroom • 1 min read

Lightroom’s strength is supposed to be its Digital Asset Management, meaning organizing and finding photos. The 2 basic ways of organizing the photos in Lightroom:

  1. Collections: either static or smart collections
  2. Keywords

Occasionally, I have a photo and need to know which collection it belongs to:

  1. Select the photo
  2. Right click on the photo for the pop-up menu
  3. Select Go to Collection

It will show all the static collections that the photo belongs to. The collection with a check-mark is the current collection that you are in.

This photo belongs to 4 collections:

  • Quick Collection
  • charlie-prints
  • charlie-selects
  • cats dogs of Canada’s poorest postal code

Lightroom's strength is supposed to be its Digital Asset Management, meaning organizing and finding photos

Lightroom: displaying the collections that the photo belongs to

I have not found any way of identifying if the photo belongs to any smart collection.

  • The smart collections are executed at run-time. This means that the smart collection only exists when you click on that smart collection. In fact, the smart collection is an SQL1 statement that is executed when you click on the smart collection.

  1. SQL: Structure Query Language. It’s the language used to ask questions from the database, in Lightroom’s case, the database is SQLite from Oracle. ↩

Lightroom LR_Info