Knowledgebase: Duplicate Finder
Smart Collection is empty in Lightroom 3
Posted by Jim Keir on 27 April 2010 07:57 AM
A bug in the public beta of Lightroom 3 has broken the "Smart Collection" feature. It is not able to access metadata defined by plugins. This means that although duplicates are still identified by the plugin, the "Duplicate Images" collection always shows empty.

This has been reported to Adobe and is currently under investigation.

In the meantime, there is a workaround available in some cases. The "Library Filter" feature is still able to search plugin data, but it doesn't allow a specific field to be searched. This workaround will only be useful if there are no other active plugins which define metadata.

- Run the duplicate search as normal.
- Define a Library Filter as "Text", "Any Searchable Plug-in Field", "Contains", "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9". The last entry should have spaces between each number, but no quotes.
- The main Library thumbnail display should now show only those photos which have a plugin ID defined. This is essentially the same thing that the Smart Collection does.

Comments (1)
Catherine Lucas
11 May 2010 08:10 AM
I have the same problem... The only smart folder that has pics in it is Needs Sync, but I do not find how to sync it... A pity... LR3 is so much better then LR2, so I am a bit hesitant to go back to LR2... I hope it comes out soon so we can buy the full version and be done with LR2...
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