In this Quick Tip (How to Remove Unwanted Collections when Exporting Catalogs in Lightroom), Julieanne demonstrates how to quickly clean up an exported catalog of any extraneous collections.
Just as an FYI – I had a great talk with the engineer who works on the Import/Export as Catalogs (after I recorded this video), and he provided an excellent synopsis on why those extra collections are there. As it so often turns out, the topic is much more complicated than my little brain imagined:
The idea is that for every single photo that is included in the export, all information related to that photo is included. Let’s take for example that you have a collection of “Tree”. One piece of information that is related to some of these photos is “I’m in the Tahoe collection” so the Tahoe collection appears in the collection panel, containing those photos. The Tahoe collection doesn’t contain all of the photos it contained in the original catalog of course, but only the photos that were part of the source (Trees) that was selected for export.
Perhaps this behavior seems odd. We could change the behavior, but it’s a dangerous, slippery slope. For example, what if the source you selected for export wasn’t “Trees” or “Tahoe” but instead was a folder that contained photos, some of which appear in both Trees and Tahoe? Should neither of the collections appear in the exported catalog? I think if we start dropping information from catalog exports, we’ll quickly hit scenarios where we’re dropping things that customers don’t actually want us to drop.
Hence, you now have a simple work around to quickly remove the collections that you don’t need, while still making sure that you still have the option to see all of the information related to those photos when you do choose to export a catalog. : )