Part 1: Lightroom Catalogs, One or Many?
Part 2: Lightroom Collections
So you’ve loaded all your photos into your catalog(s), created some collections, and are now ready to take the next big step in organizing your photos and being able to access them when you need to. That step is easily the most work, the first thing to fall behind on, and one of the more difficult tasks to execute effectively.
Keywording
What is keywording? Simply put, it’s adding key words to describe your images. By adding a series of keywords you can later filter through your entire collection to pull out the images you want. Since Lightroom, or whatever software you’re using, can’t search images based on content yet, you have to rely on other methods to find your images in the mess of photos you can amass in even a few months of consistent shooting.
In Adobe Lightroom, you’ll want to be looking at the Keywording box on the right pane of the Library module or looking at the Keywording box in the Import window.
Where do I start?
Let’s take this image and work through some possible keywords. Remember that keywording is very subjective, and you need to implement your keywords in a way that makes sense for you and your potential buyers if you’re uploading for stock.
Right off the bat we can begin with describing the obvious elements of the image. I usually start with location and content.
USA, California, Inyo County, Death Valley, Badwater Basin, desert, salt, salt flat, girl, female, Sarah, person, mountains, National Park, sky, lakebed
Now that we’ve described the obvious, we can get into the broader scope of classification:
landscape, outdoors, nature, travel, attraction, road trip, summer, Fuji, Velvia, film
The last big step, and where you’re really moving into quality keywording, is to start describing the look, feel, and story of the photo. Think beyond what you’re looking at in specific terms and try to focus on feelings evoked by the image.
adventure, attraction, roaming, exploration, exploring, heat, hot, dry, arid, intense, vastness, expansive, lonely, memory, youth, discovery, learning, destination, texture, walking, moving, movement
When we put these simple elements together we’re left with the following block of keywords:
A quick note on workflow.
Keywording takes time and patience, there’s simply no way around that. One way of easing the burden is to apply batch keywords on import. If you’ve just spent all day shooting an event in your hometown, you can add location and other relevant keywords that apply to the whole collection of images during the import phase. After import, you can drill down and deal with specific keywords that only apply to each image. A quick way to apply batches of keywords to selective images in grid view is to play with the Painter Tool in the bottom toolbar.
What can I do with these keywords?
Back in Grid view, we can filter for our keywords, and in this case a rating of 2 or more stars, to pull up a quick list of images that meet all our criteria.
So let’s say you’re a hobby wildlife photographer and you come across a contest looking for your best photos of birds spotted on Vancouver Island. A quick search for the keywords ‘birds, Vancouver Island’ will pull up a list of all your relevant images to work from rather than trying to skim through row after row of unrelated photos.
Do I really need to do this?
If you’re in any way interested in accessing your images after the initial period of capture, import and edit, you should probably be keywording your images. The ability to search through your catalog with text instead of trying to skim through visually and remember where certain images are, can be worth the effort in the long run.
A reasonable exception is if you’re already disciplined with entering your Caption and Headline IPTC info and already know that you don’t need keywords for your long term workflow.
That’s all for this series of Lightroom organizational tips, but at some point in the future I’ll also talk about updating your Location, Caption, and Copyright metadata, so stay tuned.
