Is there a way to copy particular rules of a smart collection in Lightroom?

Question

I'm using smart collections in Adobe Lightroom CC 2019, and I'm wondering if there is a way to copy some rules of one smart collection to another. It would be tedious to do so manually, as I would have to add 4 rules for 5 smart collections. Is there any way to do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can't directly export particular rules from one smart collection and apply them to other. But you can do a bit of hand work and accomplish it.

Here is what the file exported from the smart collection looks like:

s = {
    id = "598429D7-9AC3-46EB-84DF-438BE32EFFC4",
    internalName = "all",
    title = "all",
    type = "LibrarySmartCollection",
    value = {
        {
            criteria = "hasAdjustments",
            operation = "isTrue",
            value = true,
        },
        {
            criteria = "hasAdjustments",
            operation = "isFalse",
            value = true,
        },
        combine = "union",
    },
    version = 0,
}

and rules are defined in these structures:

{
                criteria = "hasAdjustments",
                operation = "isFalse",
                value = true,
            },

So what you can do is to export the source smart collection, open the file in a text editor, copy the rules you are interested of (in clipboard or file). Then export the target collections, open the files in the text editor, place previously copied rules, save files and import them in Lightroom.

Note that after this operation you will have two copies of the target collections.