Lightroom – Virtual Copies

Lightroom – Virtual Copies

Lightroom is an amazing tool, it not only allows you to catalog your photos and batch process them, it also allows you to create many copies of the same image, but virtually. So you don’t use up valuable disk space playing with different editing processes. Creating multiple copies, then of course allows you to view them side by side in Lightroom.

So, how is it done.
Start with the original and process that as desired.

When you are happy with the image, right mouse click in it or its thumbnail and select ‘Create Virtual Copy’ another thumbnail will appear next to it, with a “folded corner”.

As well as the virtual copies icon, you’ll see how many images are in the ‘stack of photos’, if stacking is turned on and the filename show a copy number too. Again, if that option is selected in view options.

Now just edit that photo as before. You can reset the settings to put you back to the original, or just continue with those as a starting point.

You now have the option to create as many as you like. When you’ve finished, you can select the edited thumbnails and press ‘N’ on the keyboard to give you a Survey Mode.

So, it’s that easy to create different versions and you can happily keep all of them knowing that you are not using megabytes of disk space.

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