How do I identify and track panorama photos in Lightroom 3?

Question

I stitch together a fair number of panoramas (using AutoPano Pro) and I'd like a way to better organise them in Lightroom, in particular:

• I want to mark the fact that a photo was taken as part of a panorama
• I want to mark the fact that an imported photo is a stitched panorama
• Finally I want to be able to link the stitched panorama to the original photos that it was created from, so when I find a panorama I want to edit I can find the originals.
• The ability to launch AutoPano pro automatically with the selected pictures is an added bonus.

I'm a programmer myself and the SDK seems straightforward enough, so if it comes to it I'll just write a plugin myself - I just wondered if someone else has already done one?

Answer 1

Here's a partial answer based on how I track my HDR photos (similar situation where an external app, in my case Photomatix Pro, creates the images and they are then imported to Lightroom).

When I save the tonemapped images out of Photomatix to be imported to Lightroom, I include "tonemapped" in the filename. I then use a Lightroom Smart Collection to automatically identify my tonemapped HDR photos.

I solve the "link the finished photo to the ones it was created from" by using Lightroom's Stack feature to group the HDR with the original source images.

Perhaps this will help you begin some organization or at least inspire you as to possible solutions.

Answer 2

An easy way to quickly identify any panoramas in your entire library is in the Grid mode (press g) to sort by Aspect Ratio. If you choose "z-a" your panoramas will be at the beginning.

I'm using Lightroom 4, so I'm not sure if this worked in Lightroom 3 but if not hopefully this will help anyone on the current version trying to find all their old panoramas like I just did!

Answer 3

There are many ways to do this in LR3 and it comes down to personal choice.

One of the often overlooked sorting tools is assigning a color attribute to photos. I assign shots that are solely used as part of a pano to have a red attribute. Then I can filter my collections to exclude them automatically. This way only finished images including finished panos are shown. The underlaying images that make up the pano are hidden unless I specifically want to see them.

The filtering can be done by making a preset (upper right corner of the grid display) and these presets can be locked so that they affect every module by default.

I'm not claiming this method is the perfect answer, but it works for me and I think that's the point. Figure out what makes sense to you and your workflow - keywords, flags, color attributes, rating stars, stacking, filtering, collections, whatever. They can all be useful.

Answer 4

I've got the panoramas labelled 'panorama' and the sources labelled 'source' so I can identify in which category something falls but not which source made it into which panorama.

Note that it is not a one to one relationship because sometimes I take shots and form several panoramas from them, say one 360-degree, one stereographic and one more typical wide one.

Someone suggested to me to use stacking to remove the visual clutter but I have not tried it yet since it is minimal because I have the sources and panoramas in different folders.