CanonShot Loc: Lancaster County, PA

On Sunday, I got some enlightening answers about LR3 since I am a complete newbie with the program, but I did not want to continue to morph from the original Orton Effect topic I set up in Photo Analysis section. So, here goes. If you can offer practical experience advice with LR3, please jump in.

Q#1 - If I work on an image in LR3, how do I save it? If I save it, will it make the same changes to the original I have in a hard drive folder?

Q#2 - Can I delete a tag/tags in LR3 should I decide later that I want to rename all photos of a certain kind? For instance, I have eagle pix from different locations. Let's say I want to drop location tags in favor of their activities, fishing...eating... scrapping...soaring. How can I do it?

Q#3 - If I delete a pic out of LR3, am I also deleting it out of the original hard drive folder? Is the reverse true... if I delete an original from a hard drive folder, have I deleted the LR3 version of it? A related question to #1.

Frank T Loc: New York, NY

Q#1 - Lightroom 3 saves the changes automatically but if you wanted to return to the original you can simply press the reset button on the right side of the screen. Alternately if you wanted to save the image as a JPEG or to a different location, go to the Library module and click on Export. This will bring up a dialogue box that will allow you to chose the particulars of the export.

Q2 - Not real sure so I won't answer it.

Q3 - You can remove a photo from Lightroom without deleting it from the hard drive. Simply highlight the photo and press delete - A dialogue box will come up giving you choices as to whether you want it deleted from the hard drive or just remove it from Lightroom. If however, you delete the file from the hard drive, the thumbnail will still show in Lightroom, but if you try to open it you will get a message that the file cannot be found. Lightroom, is basically a list of instructions on how to treat the file, not the file itself.

CanonShot Loc: Lancaster County, PA

Thank you, Frank T. You have provided the first LR3 smile to my day.

Iduno Loc: Near Tampa Florida

You can delete tags in LR. Select the photo and in the panel on the right you will see the tags. Delete, add, change. Whatever you want to do.

Do keep in mind that tagging a photo is different than renaming a photo. An image only has one file name. But, you can have many tags (and probably should).

I've found it important to make all my file changes from within lightroom, not outside wth another program.

CanonShot Loc: Lancaster County, PA

That's valuable info and great tips concerning tags and in-LR3 file changes. Thank you, Iduno. Maybe uDOno.

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

LR is different than the way other programs work in that the original is never touched...ever.

What you are doing when you change things is changing an "information file" about how to DISPLAY your original.

When you want a "copy" to email or to print, you have to export to some format at some specific resolution...

Tagging is the same...the file is NOT renamed...just tagged.


LR is amazing for sorting your photos according to their metadata (example, you can hit a button and find all shots that you took in a certain month with a certain lens at a certain shutter speed.

normanhall Loc: Leslie Missouri

in question number 2 are you referring to the keywords you have added to it? If this is what you mean, just highlight the image and on the right side of your screen there will be a box with all the keywords for that image listed. Just highlight the word in the box an hit backspace and it will clear those keywords from that particular image.