A semantic divide can be observed in the distortional modesbetween those which are intended (or designed), and therefore contribute to a canonical symmetry representation, and those transient deviations which are below this arbitrary threshold. Canonical representation is not something we will delineate; this may be a conformation profile consistent with spectroscopic results, observed in solution-state conformational studies or in most crystal structures, or simply a common conformational cliché individual to a structure type. Smaller modes can be thought as the accessed components of a convolved vibrational structure upon crystallization; while potentially useful in the assignment of vibrational and vibronic spectra, these are also indicative of the conformational compromise critical to minimize the combined lattice-conformation energetic terms. These modes and deviances are typically ignored in structural discussion. Structural variance under polymorphism would indicate multiple local minima of this combined functioneither small (in disorder) or largeas two or more distinct self-catalyzed precipitation processes, such as (2,3,7,8,12,13,17,18octaethylporphyrinato)nickel(II)which exhibits distinctly different near-planar and ruffled polymorphic examples with the same chemical composition. SCSD-generated magnitudes can be used in a similar manner to how Normal-coordinate Structural Decomposition (NSD) has been used for porphyrin analysisto determine the effectiveness of any distortion-inducement strategy, such as metalation, oxidation state change or peripheral substitution, and to correlate these strategies with photophysical attributes and biological functions in small datasets. With this program, a large database of conformational information can be generated for structural review and cluster analysis on any near-symmetric molecular subunit, an easy method of surveying the conformational landscape of a component. Comparing structures generated by screening methods or through serial crystallography often requires the selection of choice attributes of the crystal, like a select bond distance; symmetry coordinates are an easy, fast global parameterization, and normal coordinates are ideal for turning this insight into bidirectional quantitative relationships through curve fitting.