Friday 18 September 2009

Using Relative Paths in Lightroom part 2

In part one of these ramblings I noticed that although you could force Lightroom, kicking and screaming, to use relative paths. It's good friend Photoshop was having none of it.

Not to be discouraged I put on my hacking trousers and through together a solution. If there is anyone out there who cares, here is how you fix the problem:

Download This install file and run it in the normal way (press next at all the prompts) - if you don't have the .Net framework 2.0 installed you will need to download & install that too.

Now nip into Lightroom preferences and create a new External Editor.


You need to hit the browse button and chose the program you have just installed (yes I know DaDoRunRun.exe is a rubbish name bt it was the best I could come up with at the time.

Now when you chose to use this External Editor this dialog box will appear:


Just click Edit and a new dialog pops up.


Click on the browse button (...) and point the program to the right path for Photoshop on your machine. Now click OK and all being well Photoshop will open with the correct file.

This is a bit intrusive so next time you call the editor click on the "don't show me this dialog" button and the box will never appear again.


That's it problem solved! Well except that Lightroom won't stack files in different directories. Now that is a weird limitation, I thought the whole point of Lightroom was that directories weren't that important any more - looks like I'm wrong on that one.

I bet no one ever uses this information but, I still feel I should make it available - as a public service. Of course I am happy for someone to post a comment telling me why relative folders are such an evil concept that they should be banished...

Related Posts
Using relative paths in Lightroom part 1

1 comment:

Kiff Backhouse said...

Well, it's a year later and a new big release of LR and still no relative paths. And yes, there are others out there, like me, who want them! Like you, I want to process my tiffs in a subfolder, which is fine by lightroom, but then I want to out put them from the tiffs folder to a sibling "output" folder

-shoot folder with raw files
---tiffs folder used for working copies
---output folder with final jpgs
---hdr folder with photomatix output
---any other sub folder I might need

This doesn't seem to much to ask does it?

Thanks for the work arounds btw.