Today’s Question: When I make a virtual copy of a processed image, all previous processing history is lost, and the only history documents creation of the Virtual Copy. Is there any way to retain that previous History or to import it into the Virtual Copy history?
Tim’s Quick Answer: No. A virtual copy retains all adjustments you’ve applied to an image, but not the list of history states in the History section. The history states are retained for the original image, of course.
More Detail: When you create a virtual copy by right-clicking on an image (or going to the Photo menu) and choosing “Create Virtual Copy” the history for the virtual copy will initially only show a step for “Create Virtual Copy” with a reflection of the date and time you did so. The virtual copy will inherit all metadata updates such as star ratings and keywords, along with all Develop module adjustments. It is just the History panel that won’t reflect the steps that had previously been applied to the original image.
The virtual copy will then retain its own history moving forward based on changes applied to the virtual copy as opposed to the original image the virtual copy was created from. This allows you to have two (or more) distinct versions of the same image.
Note, by the way, that metadata updates applied to a virtual copy are not applied to the original, and vice versa. For example, if you waited to apply keywords to the image until after you had created a virtual copy, you would need to synchronize metadata updates if you wanted to apply the same updates to both the virtual copy and the original.
