In the last post we talked about merging catalogs into one single master so we could use Lightroom’s organizational tools. If you’ve decided to put all your images into one place, the next step is figuring out how to find time. While I’m speaking in terms of Adobe Lightroom 3, many of these principles apply to other image organizing tools like Aperture, iPhoto, and Picasa.
Collections
Now that you have several years worth of images in one place, you need to decide how to access them. If you’re like me and use a year/month/day folder structure on import, it’s especially valuable to start organizing your images into collections or folders. I shoot a wide range of subjects, so I’ve created collection sets like People, Landscapes & Nature, Fashion & Beauty, Film & Theatre, Travel, Personal, Event, Sports, and Stock. Inside each of those I have tiered sets of collections and collection sets that allow me to find my images by general subject.
If I want to browse a category of images I can simply drill down through my various collections to see a range images that might include photos I’d forgot I’d even taken. How detailed you get with your collection structure will depend on what sort of things you shoot, and how many images you take in a given year.
What if my images aren’t in collections yet?
This is where the work comes in. We all want to have good habits right from the beginning, but what do you do if you’ve let your image collections fall into disarray? Smart Collections can help you quickly isolate images that are not in a collection, missing keywords, or that were taken within a single period of time.
With a small collection, I can allow Lightroom to organize my images by Year/Month/Day folders and still find them relatively quickly. With 3 years of images in one place, that’s not so easy. After merging all of my catalogs into one, I wasn’t really sure what was in a catalog and what wasn’t, so I set up a quick Smart Collection to find these images for me.
So what’s going on here? A Smart Collection automatically pulls in images based on a set of rules defined by you. In the above example you can see that Lightroom 3 is missing the crucial ability to search for blank fields. To cheat this, I’ve asked Lightroom to search for all images where the Collection is not equal to a letter of the alphabet. This returns blank results and allows me to see all images not in a collection. Because I had a large number of images to go through, I also limited it to one year so I could work in smaller batches. After I was done with 2009, I moved on to 2010.
To save you time searching for blank fields, you can copy this:
a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z
To find other uses for smart filters, create a new one and just start adding rules to see what works for you. If you’ve updated your location meta, you can easily use smart folders to find all images shot in a specific country or city. If you don’t store your images in one location sorted by year/month/day, you can quickly create smart folders to find all images for a given year.
The important thing with collections, or folders for those of you in other applications, is that they make sense to you. Think about what type of shooter you are, and think about how you might possibly want to access your images down the road. Maybe you’re a wildlife shooter who only wants to sort by different types of animal, or perhaps you only ever shoot landscapes and want to organize by land/sea/mountains/air. The goal of getting organized is to make your library useable, so set it up in a way that works for you, and don’t be afraid to change it as time goes by!
Read the next article on Keywording, possibly the least enjoyable work you can ever do with photos.
