🎥 Linking pictures to shoots

Linking pictures to a shoot is useful for a number of reasons – firstly, so that you can use Light Blue to keep track of where you’ve stored all of the images from a shoot, secondly, so you can link images to invoices made from this shoot so that you can your client can see exactly which pictures they’ve ordered, and thirdly, so you can build web galleries for the shoot. Those latter two cases are the subject of other bite-size tutorials, and in this one I’m just going to show you how to link the pictures to the shoot. 

First, you need to make a folder for the shoot, and you do that on the Pictures tab. You can put that folder anywhere you like, but I’m just going to put it on my desktop for now. 

You’ve got two options when you make a shoot folder. Some people like to use Light blue to help organise both their raw files and processed images, and to do that you’ll need to use our subfolders. Other people prefer to simply link a folder of the finished, post-processed images to the shoot, and for that you choose the xxx option. I’m going to use subfolders. Light Blue will remember what you choose, but you can change your choice on the General panel of the Preferences window whenever you want.

OK, so when I’m using subfolders, I’ve got a ‘processed’ and an ‘unprocessed’ folder. You put the files off the camera into the unprocessed folder. Then, when you’ve processed your pictures in whatever program you use to do your retouching, save them in the Processed folder which Light Blue created for you. When you’re done, import the pictures into Light Blue. That’ll pull in your processed pictures and generate thumbnails for you. 

It’s worth noting that Light Blue leaves the image files alone on your hard drive. We don’t store the images themselves in our database, as it’d swiftly become very large. Instead, we generate thumbnails and store them. 

If you’re using our online services, it’s only the thumbnails that are synced between your machines, so you’ll be able to see those on all the devices associated with your online account. 

If we look on the General panel of the Preferences pane, there are a few options for picture importing. Light Blue can rename your image files, if you want it to, so they’re sequentially numbered within the shoot. The default’s to leave the file names alone, though, and that’s what most of our customers have it set to.