which can contain tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of images, keep-
ing track of what we’ve done and what
we haven’t done can be tricky. For many
of us, it can be more ebb than flow.
Thankfully, Lightroom Classic does
provide ways for us to organize by
“state.” What images in my library
still need keywording? Which images
have been developed and which have
not? Which images are RAW, which are
JPEGs and which are PSDs? Can I eas-
ily separate my videos from my stills?
The good news is that Lightroom Classic
provides a simple way of keeping track
of all of these and much more.
Looking back to the very first article
in this series, one of the things I covered
was the Library Filter, which is arguably
the most important tool in your organi-
zation toolbox. The Library Filter is the
hub, the center of it all, and where you
actually find the images you need to find
and filter out groups of images you want
to filter out.
With the Library Filter, you can search
for images or groups of images in an
almost endless combination of ways. You
can search by filename, file type, color
ratings, star ratings, flags, date, keyword,
camera used, lens used and on and on. In
short, you can isolate images or groups
of images by any kind of metadata that’s
attached to your file. Such a tool makes
it almost impossible to lose your images
if you have a basic understanding of how
to wield it.
Bearing all this in mind, there’s a way
to save and organize search criteria.
Please allow me to say that in a differ-
ent way because it’s so very important.
Lightroom offers a tool that allows you
to create parameters to search for groups
of images in a huge combination of ways
that can be saved and organized.Smart Collections
As we covered in article three of this
series, image Collections are a great tool
for organizing images for a particular
type of end use. I can create subsets of
images by selecting them and placing
them in a Collection for slideshows,
printing, submissions to clients, social
media...the sky’s the limit. In any
instance, creating Collections takes time
and effort. There’s a curation process that
happens, and images need to be added to
the Collection during the process.
Enter the Smart Collection. For start-
ers, a Smart Collection will populate
itself. There’s no time required by you
to populate a Smart Collection. It’s all
automated. Better yet, a Smart Collectionis essentially a way to save a Library Fil-
ter configuration and can organize your
images by the state they’re in. And again,
it does it all automatically.
To create a Smart Collection, go to
the Collections panel header and click
on the “+” icon. Next, click on Smart
Collection to bring up the Create Smart
Collection panel, as shown in Figure 2.
Next, name your new Smart Collection,
then decide if you want to place it in an
existing Collection Set or not.
Next comes the interesting and fun
part. Let’s create a Smart Collection that
will filter out a specific set of images I
find useful.
Many photographers today take both
stills and video. And many photographers
often ask me if there’s an easy way to
separate still images from videos. Trying
to find everything by scrolling through
thumbnails in Lightroom’s grid view is
tedious, to say the least.
So, notice that I’ve named my Smart
Collection in Figure 3 “Videos.” You
can see a dropdown menu that provides
a series of search criteria. I’ve selected File
Type, and then selected “is” in the drop-
down menu to its right, and then selected
“Video” in the dropdown menu to its right.
As a last step, I’ll hit the Save button in the
lower right of the panel. From here on out,Figure 1. There are many ways to
“get organized.” In this final article
in our series on organizing images
with Lightroom Classic, we’ll look at
organizing photos by their state in
the overall processing workflow.Figure 2. Click on the + icon in the
Collection panel header and then
select Create Smart Collection to
launch the Create Smart Collection
panel.Figure 2
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