This article is for Lightroom Classic, Lightroom 6 and earlier versions. It does not apply to the cloud-based Lightroom.

Have you ever had something unexpected happen to you in Lightroom, multiple times, but not taken the time to focus on it and understand what was going on? I am amazed sometimes at what I can learn when I finally do focus!  It’s hard for me to believe that I did not tune into this great shortcut sooner, but that’s what makes every day interesting — learning something new.

When you right-click (ctl-click with a one button Mac mouse) inside a thumbnail or most of the gray border around it, you get many useful choices — I use and refer to this menu in my blog all the time:

However, occasionally when I would right-click, I would get a different menu — but I never took the 5 seconds it required to look at it, or to figure out why. It turns out that if you right click — or left-click — in any of the four information fields at the top of the thumbnail, you get this different menu — and you can very quickly select what information about your photos you want to display. (Note that the menu will display larger in Lightroom than in this post.)

If you do not see any photo information above your thumbnails, you are in Collapsed Thumbnail View — type J (or View>Grid View Styles>Expanded Cells) to switch to Expanded View, so that you can display this additional information. Then you can right-click in each of the four fields to choose up to four pieces of information. Note that for all four to fully display, your thumbnails may need to be pretty large. Use the + and – keys on your keyboard to change thumbnail size.

The long way to change this information is to go to View>View Options. This method is covered in this post: Seeing Folder Information in Grid View.

Here are explanations of some of the fields:

• None leaves the field blank.
• Index Number reflects the photo position in the Grid, from 1 to the total number of photos displayed.
• Filename is the combination of File Base Name (such as IMG_5079 or Sun_Valley_001) and File Extension (.JPG, .CR2, etc)
• Folder is the folder on your hard drive (and in the Folders panel) that the photo is stored in.
• Copy Name is used to document virtual copies. Read my post Stay Organized: Name Your Virtual Copies.
• Common Attributes documents flag, rating (stars) and color label.
• Cropped Dimensions shows how many pixels your photo has — if you have cropped the photo, this reflects the total after cropping.
• Caption, Title, Copyright, Sublocation and Creator are information that you add to photos using the Metadata panel (or a Metadata preset during Import.)