Separate File Types in Light Room #112

Separate File Types in Light Room #112

This podcast is for Andrea, a listener in Germany. Andrea wants to know how she can separate her raw images from her JPEG images easily in Lightroom. This is gonna be a really fast pod. First, all you have to do is click on your library module or click the letter G. This will open up your library module and display your images in a grid. Then between the thumbnails panel at the bottom and the grid, you'll see a gray bar displaying your toolbar. If it's not there, click the letter T. Once it's visible, simply click on the drop-down arrow next to the word "sort" and there you go. You'll see that you have an option to sort your images by file type or file extension. So what's the difference between a file extension and a file type? File extensions are the three letters at the end of a file name that tell us what kind of file it is. Like a Photoshop file is .psd, while a Canon raw file is .cr2, and a Nikon raw file is .nef. On the other hand, a file type can be thought of as a category of files. For instance, both .cr2 and .nef files are RAW files, so they are the same file type. So if you had Nikon and Canon files, plus some Photoshop files, and sort by file type, then the Nikon and Canon files would be grouped together and the Photoshop files would be in a separate group.

On the other hand, if you group by file extension, all of the Nikon files would be grouped separately from the Canon files. If you would like to separate your JPEGs from your RAW files into different folders, right-click on the folder on the left panel and choose "Create Folder Inside". Once you do that, you can click and drag images into that folder. When you do this, you are creating an actual folder on your drive and you are actually moving the files from one folder to the next.

I'm going to talk a little bit more about this in the next pod. And that's it! Pretty easy.