+Snapshots – Versioning Made Easy

Snapshots in Lightroom are a little discussed feature, underappreciated and often undervalued in many a workflow. Most often, Snapshots are overlooked in favor of Virtual Copies, but in certain situations Snapshots can be useful.

A Snapshot in Lightroom is like a picture of an images development settings. You can process an image, create a Snapshot and then revert back to the image as it was upon import. Then you can proceed to reprocess the image and save your new version. Many photographers and their respective workflows do without Snapshots, utilizing Virtual Copies instead.

In general, Virtual copies are more versatile and as they create a second version of an image in your catalog, are generally more visually appealing.

Virtual Copies are treated much like separate images in Lightroom, containing its own develop settings, referring only to the original RAW file for its content. This is an advantage as you can have your original version and the virtual copy both active, to compare and alter side by side.

The downside is, you can clutter up a catalog rather quickly if you need to produce multiple versions of the same image. This is where Snapshots improve upon Virtual Copies, you can have multiple image revisions inside the metadata of a single image and spawn Virtual Copies of said revisions as needed.

via +Snapshots – Versioning Made Easy | x=blog+stay+informed.

This seems to answer in a very elegant way a question I’ve been exploring in Lightroom recently: How do I manage a set of variations on an image once I’m done processing it.

Take this scenario: I take a RAW image and do my normal post processing. Eventually I decide “I’m done”, and I have a final image. This is effectively the “digital negative” of the image that I want to use moving forward.

Now, I want to take that image and make various versions of it – wallpapers in eight sizes, an 8×10, 11×14 and a low-rez, watermarked version for flickr.

I can do that with virtual copies, but catalog management gets interesting fast. Snapshots seems to be a cleaner way to do this, and an interesting hack to explore. which I’m going to go do, and see if it works like I hope it will…

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