Today’s Question: I make a collection in Lightroom Classic and send it to someone. Then I modify the collection by adjusting the images in the Develop module or by removing images from the collection. Is it possible to “freeze” the original collection I made before making changes?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You could preserve the original collection by duplicating it to create another version that you apply changes to. However, you would need to use virtual copies for the images if you also wanted to preserve the original appearance.
More Detail: Preserving a collection before making changes is easy in terms of which images are in the collection. Once you’ve created the initial collection simply right-click on it and choose “Duplicate Collection” from the popup menu. This will create a new collection that includes the exact same images, and with the same name except that “Copy” will be appended to the end of the name. You can right-click and choose “Rename” to change the name of the collection.
In this way you can preserve the initial collection, but then make changes to the copy of the collection, such as by adding image to or removing images from that duplicate collection.
Things are a little more complicated if you want to preserve the original versions versus updated versions based on changes in appearance made in the Develop module. For that you would need to create virtual copies for the duplicate collection.
For example, after creating the initial collection you could duplicate it as outlined above. Then select all images in the duplicate collection, right click on one of the selected photos, and choose “Create Virtual Copy” from the popop menu. This will create new virtual copies for the images in the collection. You could then select the original images and remove them from that collection.
In this scenario you would have, for example, the original images in the original collection and virtual copies in the updated collection. This would enable you to preserve the initial state of the images in the original collection, while modifying the virtual copies in the duplicate collection.
Managing virtual copies in this way certainly has the potential to get a little confusing, but the point is that by duplicating a collection and using virtual copies as needed, you can keep track of the differences between the original collection and the updated version.
