In Lightroom how can I see all photos that have been modified after they were exported

Question

I am using Adobe Lightroom 4 and shoot RAW+JPG. I normally post process all my images and then bulk export them back out to JPG when done overwriting the original JPGs but sometimes I might forget to export a day or two. Is there a way in Lightroom to display all the photos that have been modified but NOT exported?

I imagine there is someway to define a filter or smart collection to do this but have not been able to find the correct combination of fields to choose.

Asked by Joe Solano

Answer

According to the Lightroom 4 Missing FAQ the only place that you can currently determine whether a photo has been exported is in the develop history, which is not searchable, ruling out filters/smart collections.

A hard drive publish service would keep track of unexported photos, but you would need to manually add the images to the service, and unlike the export dialog there is no option to automatically import the images back into the catalog, you would need to synchronize the folders containing the published images every time.

Until Adobe makes it possible to filter images based on being exported the best approach would seem to be either, as @Akram suggests, use a specific collection for images that need to be exported or have a 'not-exported' keyword added to your images when they are imported, which would permit you to create a smart collection of images that both have adjustments and have not been exported. Either way requires manual intervention to keep accurate however.

Answered by Steven Cunningham

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