The start of a new year is always a time to think about change and improvement. One common resolution is to get more organized. In this age of digital media it is even more critical that we keep track of our digital assets. Lightroom has many features to help you organize your images.
Organization can come in many forms and at many levels. You can organize your images at the drive level (by using a system of folders, subfolders, and file naming conventions) and/or at the metadata level in Lightroom. You must first decide what organizational workflow fits for you. There are many websites and books devoted to this topic. You should do a little research before embarking on this adventure.
The best website I can recommend to you to delve deeply into industry standard organization practice is dpBestFlow.org from the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the Library of Congress. The site is full of suggestions and videos. Get ready to spend some time there!
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Collections were a great idea in version 1 of Lightroom. It was so good, in fact, that Adobe decided to expand collections in Lightroom 2. Now you can access your collections in other modules via the Collections panel that appears in the left panel set in every module. But did you know that collections come in different flavors? We’re all familiar now with collections, collection sets, and smart collections. But you can also create slideshow collections, print collections, and web gallery collections. They even have their own distinct icons so you can tell them apart!
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Smart Collections are a powerful organization tool in Lightroom. The power lies in a Smart Collection’s ability to automatically update the images contained in the collection. Unlike regular collections, where the contents are fixed and you add or remove images manually, Smart Collections use a set of rules you define. Whenever an image matches this set of rules it appears in the Smart Collection. When you combine Smart Collections with Collection Sets you can get some amazing results. So let’s get started!
We’ll start with the simple premise that we’ve used color labels to organize some images.
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