Setting file naming preferences in Lightroom

I'm going to open Lightroom's External Editing Preferences again, so that I can show you the file name area at the bottom of the Preferences window. Here you can control how files are automatically named when they are passed between Lightroom and Photoshop, or Lightroom and an additional external editor. Just above this little window at the bottom is the default file name convention that will be applied if you do nothing here, and that's just fine. In that case files that are rendered from a particular source file, I'll call the resulting files derivative files, will take their file name from the source file, and that will be followed by a hyphen and the word edit. And that makes sense I think, because it will help you to know which source files and which derivates of those source files go together, that have the same beginning number.

And having the word Edit in some files will let you know that those are files that are derivatives, ones that have been edited somewhere in the course of one of the Lightroom Photoshop workflows. But you're not required to stick with this default file name template to use Photoshop and Lightroom together. Maybe you'd like to change this word edit to something that's more meaningful to you. Or maybe you want to have different file naming conventions for different external editors you might use. So I want to show you how Lightroom's Template Editor works so that you can customize it however you like it to be.

To open the Template Editor, I'm going to go to the Template menu, click, and I'll scroll down past this list of preset file name templates, although they are useful and worth exploring when you have some time, and I'm going to choose Edit, and that opens the Filename Template Editor. Here at the top of the Template Editor is this small window where I can customize the default file name template, and these are the building blocks for that template. Or if you wanted you could build a new template from scratch. Building templates here is just a matter of typing whatever text you want in a file name into this little window, and also adding tokens from the categories down here.

This is a token for Filename. The tokens look a little bit different on a Windows machine, but they act the same way. So let's customize this default file name template for working with external editors a bit. I'd like to add a sequential number at the end of each file name, to indicate how many edits I've made. So I'll come down to the Sequence and Date area and I'll click Insert, and that will insert the Sequence token at the end of the file name that I'm building. And now if you look at the example of what the file name is going to look like, you can see that it has this 01 at the end. And I can choose a two-digit number like that, or a one-digit number, or different number conventions here. I'll go with the two digit sequence number.

I can type right into this box. So I could type any custom text, like I could type Photoshop here, and that would always appear in the file names. I'm actually going to delete the word Photoshop because I like to keep my files names as short as I can. Instead, what I'll come over here and do, just to represent being able to change text, is I'll make that E on the word edit a small E instead of a capital E. So, now let's say I'm happy with this file naming convention. At this point I could just click Done, or I can save this file name as a preset so that I can get back to it quickly if I decide to change to another file naming template.

To save this as a preset, I'll come up to this menu, and I'll choose Save Current Settings as New Preset. And I'll give this preset a name, I'll just call it file name-editno, for number, and then I'll click Create. And then I'll click Done. And now that file name template appears here as a preset in this list and if I were to switch to a different one, I could always get back to that preset that I just created. Now I do want to mention that I'm going to leave this preset as the one that I use throughout the cource, and that means that this sequence number is going to keep changing.

I've set the start number down here to be the number one, but because I'll probably edit a different number of files than you will, it's really likely that if you're working along with me, the numbers at the ends of your files aren't going to match mine exactly, and that's absolutely fine. I also want to say that if you don't want to edit the default file naming template, that's fine too, because I think the default makes a lot of sense. But if you do want to take a crack at it, I think you'll see how powerful it is. It really lets you customize your files names, as you pass images between Photoshop and Lightroom, to name them in a way that makes the most sense to you.