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Previewing Images in the Navigator
I’m not sure at what point this snuck into Lightroom’s preferences (it could very well have been there since the initial release), but somewhere along the way it managed to become unchecked: the “Show photos in navigator on mouse-over” option in the Interface tab of the preferences window.
However, the group the preference belongs to (“Filmstrip”) is a little mis-leading, as the preview is not limited to just when hovering over photos in the filmstrip. When checked, the canvas in the navigator module (at the very top of the stack in the left-hand panel of the Library & Develop modules) will display a photo thumbnail when your mouse hovers over…
- an entry in the Folders module will cause the first photo in that folder to be displayed;
- an entry in the Keyword Tags list will display the first photo that has that keyword applied to it;
- an entry in the Collections module will display the first photo in that collection;
- an entry in the Metadata Browser will display the first matching photo of that criteria;
- a photo in the Filmstrip module will display that photo in the Navigator
The utility of this preference is negligible when scrubbing through the filmstrip; however, it provides an easy way to jog your memory with the contents of a folder or other container without having to interrupt your workflow by selecting the item with a mouse click. As to whether or not there should even be a choice provided for this relatively minor behaviour, well… that’s open for discussion.
Comments (1)
The preview-on-mouseover came in 1.1. I thought that it was so cool that when I wrote about it at the time, I replicated the functionality in javascript to illustrate it (about halfway down on this "Lightroom 1.1 Released" post: http://regex.info/blog/2007-06-27/502 )
It's an option that defaults on; I suppose they allow you do turn it off for privacy reasons (some might not want other clients' photos displaying during an errant mouse move while showing photos to a client, for example)...