Lightroom-News.com

Lightroom Forums Guru Mark Sirota has written a most excellent tip over at Lightroom Forums

“Since the very early pre-1.0 betas, I’ve wanted to organize my files by date, but using a hierarchy unavailable in Lightroom — specifically, YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD. In other words, shots from today would go into 2008/2008-10/2008-10-30.

Lightroom offers eight different ways to organize by date, but this isn’t one of them. I’ve just discovered how to do it.

The Trick:

Add the following two lines to your TranslatedStrings.txt file (include the quotes):

Code:
“$$$/AgImportDialog/ShootArrangement_5/Template=%Y/%Y-%m/%Y-%m-%d”
“$$$/AgImportDialog/ShootArrangement_5/Label=By date: 2005/2005-12/2005-12-17″

Here’s the location of TranslatedStrings.txt. If it doesn’t exist, create it.
Mac: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom 2.app/Contents/Resources
Windows XP: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2\Resources\en\

(The locations are similar for Lightroom 1.x; on the Mac it’s just “Adobe Lightroom.app”; not sure about Windows.)

(Someone please correct me if I have the XP location wrong, and tell me what the location is for Vista. I’ll update this post accordingly.)

(LRN note: please use the forum post for this)

How this works:

Lightroom uses the TranslatedStrings.txt mechanism for international localization — that is, this is how it changes text throughout the application for non-English languages. I’ve identified the strings used for the folder templates, and replaced them with my own. Other possibilities and permutations are possible.

I also use the TranslatedStrings.txt mechanism to change the formats used to display pixel dimensions and f-stops throughout the application, mostly to make those strings a little narrower to save screen space.

This example replaces the third template, “2005/December 17″, with my own. I chose that one because I find it the most useless. I can’t explain why the third one is number 5, but that’s how they’ve done it.

Jeffrey Friedl gets considerable credit for planting the seed for this, initially through his Lightroom Configuration Manager, and then this morning through a post on a private discussion group that got my wheels turning.”

Just as a warning, the TranslatedStrings.txt file is an internal App file. On German and French versions of Lightroom, this is the file where the translated text for menus etc. comes from. If the file exists before you try this, BACK IT UP! Lightroom News is just pointing out the tip and bears no responsibility for it’s use.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Lightroom Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.