7 Reasons Why You Should Use Collections in Lightroom Classic

[Music] [Music] all right happy Monday everybody welcome to Adobe Creative Cloud on Monday is photography day Monday's photography day Tuesday's InDesign Wednesday will start to become back to the basics but as it stands right now happy Monday welcome everyone I see a bunch of people in the room already so let's start with Bell dear good afternoon all the way from Brazil Colleen from from Cape Town I was thinking Johannesburg but Cape Town Rochelle welcome everybody eight off Victoria welcome as well on the Facebook side and I see people popping in Cheryl B from Twitter and just it's gonna be a party hey Paul what's going on good evening and good afternoon and good night so today we're gonna be talking about Lightroom because I was just at a photo conference teaching Lightroom and Photoshop and a lot of questions came up around collections in Lightroom classic because people are used to their images coming in and folders and then just doing everything from the folder and they're like well why would I ever need a collection so I started explaining some of the reasons and then as it because became clear that more and more people just didn't get it I said you know what that's gonna be Monday's video so Jessie welcome first time viewer and so today we're going to be talking about seven advantages to collections as opposed to working with folders in Lightroom classic now if you're on the other version of Lightroom the newer version which is the cloud-based version the terminology is different there are folders but those are folders of albums and albums are collections so there is no folder to manage your photos in that version but in classic there absolutely are folders and what we call collections so let's jump over to computer socket or to the computer so I can show you what I'm talking about and give you those seven reasons all right so here I am in Lightroom I taught a tethering class last week just showing people how to do tethering and these are some of the sample shots I was just taking we had a volunteer model there others taking some shots showing how the tethering worked inside of Lightroom and I was shooting with my my nikon z6 mirrorless camera alright so we've got the shots in here and of course they came in in a folder I even showed how to do segments with tethering so I got different folders for different shots and and that's great and so you you probably say well Terry I can see my photos print my photos edit my photos develop my photos well I can do that all from here or why would I need to work with collections if you're doing it in two folders you're doing it now I wouldn't say the wrong way but you're doing it the hard way you're missing out on some benefits that collections give you that folders just don't folders are physically where your pictures are they are where your images are in the hard drive so this whole folders panel over here on the left hand side this is literally a mirror of your hard drives if you have more than one your hard drives that you've used to import images into Lightroom so when we say import really all Lightroom did was look at that folder that you told us to import from and it says okay I know where those 30 photos are there on this drive they're in this folder or they're in this location and I'm just gonna show them to you in Lightroom so they physically aren't in Lightroom Lightroom is just a database or a catalogue looking at your images on your hard drive that's what the folders are so if I were to right click on this folder and say show it to me in the finder it will go to the operating system and show me those how many of our shots there are here six shots and it's the same success that are here so if I delete one out of here Lightroom is not going to know about it anymore it's going to give me an air is gonna say I don't know where happened to that photo so I always tell people don't mess with the operating system make all your changes in Lightroom you want to rename if you want to move things around you want to do all that do that in Lightroom and I've got a video on on how to move your images around the Lightroom but that's not what we're here for so that's I just explaining how folders work in Lightroom now let's talk about collections and why collections so reason number one is that if I like this image and I also like this black and white image and I also like maybe a third image let's say just for example this image well they're in three different folders and if I'm working in folders the only way I'm gonna be able to see all three of them together is either physically move them change their location on the hard drive in Lightroom drag them to it into a different folder which I don't want to do that that's going to screw me up or I'd have to do a whole bunch of filtering all the time I'd have to go up to the filter menu I have to go to the filter options here and say show me these three photos some kind of way and that would be a pain in the button but if I were to go in and create a collection and collections are just further down on the same panel you have a collections panel and I were to go in and click and create a new collection I can say for example Imani her name is Imani Imani favorites and when I create that collection it's gonna automatically by default include any ones that I've already selected so I've already got one selected so it's going to import it I'm not going to do this just yet so I'm gonna import that or include that one so I'm gonna go ahead and click create and there it is the Imani favorites collection and so let me twirl up some of these so it won't take me so far so long to get to them alright so there it is and let's say now I want to use some of the other ones that I liked I liked go back up here I like the black and white so I can take the black and white now and drag it into a money favourites and now there are two there I can go back up and go to that other folder and not that one this one there we go and there's one that I retouched so let's go ahead and drag that into a money favourites so now I've got my three favorites in a collection that came from all different folders when I pull them into that collection that didn't move them they're still in their folders there's still an hour drive where they originally work but now I can organize them the way I want I can change their order I can edit them if I edit them I am editing the actual photo so when I go back to the folder it's gonna be edited too so for example if I were to go to this photo let's just do a quick crop and I were to crop it like so and I'll just get off the crop real quick and go back well when I go to that folder wherever that came from it's going to be cropped because I'm cropping the actual photo but working in collections benefit number one lets me pull together different images from different folders they don't all have to be in the same folder if I want to work with them together and a classic example I give is let's say you have a favorite vacation or travel spot that you go to pick one Hawaii so you go to Hawaii every year and every year of course you have a new folder from Hawaii 2017 Hawaii 2018 Hawaii 2019 and so forth and so on now that those folders could have hundreds of images in each one but then when you want to put together your favorite Hawaii shots well you don't want to move them from the folders they were in you would put them in a collection so think of collections the same way you manage your music yeah but your whole music library and you have playlists and play lists can contain songs from different albums different artists that you want to hear together and the order you want to hear them in so that's benefit number one benefit number two let's say that I also have a collection or I want to create a collection called favorite black and white so BMW black and white well I'm going to include that black and white photo and now that photo is in favorite black and white it's in Imani favorites and it's still in a folder because that's where it lives so benefit number to a photo can be in multiple collections and not take up any extra space if you start duplicating that image on a hard drive to put it in multiple folders you are taking up extra space and then folders there is no other way for the same image to be in multiple folders you'd have to duplicate it so with this I have the ability to have the same photo in multiple collections and work with it or edit it or do whatever I want to do with it and again if I go back to the black and white one it's there and I'm gonna start pulling in other black and whites from different different sheets so for example let's say I go here and let's say that was not a black and white yet but let's say I pull it in to my favorite black and whites and now we just go into the develop module and we quickly convert it to a black and white I just hit the letter B I didn't style it or anything but it gave me a black and white so now we're talking about two totally different shoots two totally different people in the same collection and without touching the folders without moving the images around the images are still where they used to be all right that's benefit number two the same image can appear in multiple collections benefit number three and this is a big one this is definitely I can't do with folders if you want to see your images on your mobile devices well there's Lightroom for iOS there's Lightroom for Android so you can run Lightroom on your iPhone you can run it on your iPad you can run it on your Android devices the only way to see those images on Lightroom on your mobile device is to sync them and you can only sync a collection you can't sync a folder so if I say hey I would love to have my favorite black and whites now synced well there's a little checkbox that all I would do is just enable syncing and now those two images will be synced and it will show up as an album on Lightroom on my iPad my iPhone or my Android device were all three if I had multiple devices all right so that's benefit number three is that they can be synced to mobile devices benefit number four and this is a big one too so let's say I go back to this one and let's say for whatever reason I want to remove that black that black shadow there it's a shadow it's supposed to be there but let's say I wanted to take it out well it's easier to do that in Photoshop then it would be to try and do that in Lightroom well so if I right click on this photo and I go up to my I could also do it from keyboard but if I go edit and Photoshop that'll pop me over to photoshop it'll open up a copy of the original because I'm working with a raw file and once it opens that up I'll be able to make changes to it and I think it opened paratis okay so now if I were to go in and I would say hey I would love to remove this shadow let's go ahead and patch the whole thing out it's not gonna be a great job at it because I'm just doing this for a demo but let's say that we also do and we could try it on normal let's see what happens well patch it out there we go actually I did better than I thought it would and I'll patch that out too and it will patch out a little bit of that shadow halo on the left side okay so Shadow has been removed so now I save it you saying oh my god you didn't make a duplicate layer you're saving up no saving on copy remember because it made a copy from the raw file so when I closed it because I was in a collection it always puts it right next to the original so benefit number four it's a more streamlined process when you're editing and round-tripping from Photoshop back it will put it right next to the original in the same collection if you do that in a folder it could stick it at the end of the folder if you got 300 images in there good luck you have to find it you're just going to take more work if you do it in a folder and a collection puts it right next to it okay is there an indicator where the original image is there is no indicator other than in your harddrive it will give you the path of where the folders do you ever want to see where the original is you can always right-click and you could say show it to you in the operating system or go to the folder where it is so there are multiple ways to get to where it is where the original is and keep in mind this is the original I'm working on the original now there is no copy so to speak this is the original I'm just working on it in the collection but yeah you can get to where it is on the operating system or where it is in a folder just by right-clicking on it and choose it okay so next one benefit number five and this is one that I wasn't really thinking about because I've always been using collections but if you go into another module let's say you go into the slideshow module you want to run a slideshow well in every other module except library you only have access to your collections your folders aren't even here so if you wanted to access images in a different folder you'd have to go back to the library first choose them in a folder then go back to that module to work on them but if their collection collections appear in all the modules folders don't so there's another benefit right off the bat alright benefit and that was benefit number five collections appear in Alba modules benefit number six and this is a big one for me now so let's say I go back to that folder we were talking about or these folders so let's say I want to take all of these images that I was working on and well not yeah that's not the test actually let's do with this this and this okay so I want to take all of these images and by the way while we're here we're going to delete that rejects let's get rid of those so now those are all gone I found in the folders now these are the actual images and I take all of her images from the three different folders that I shot I'm gonna select all I'm gonna create a new collection wrong spot let's go down here we go create a new collection and when I create that new collection and I'll call it a money gallery I also have the ability and again this is something you can't do I already talked about this you can't do this with a folder but right on the spot while I'm creating this collection I can sync it with Lightroom on on in the cloud so once I do that it will create a synced collection and the benefit of doing that is if I want to share this with her now I can go in and hit make public so make public means I'll get a link to this to give her to just look at these images and there's also collaborative proofing now which is a technology preview so if I say make public it was just showing me the steps it is already it has already has already there we go it has already generated a custom URL to those photos and I can now click that URL and it'll take me to those photos on the web and show me her gallery and I would just give her that link hey or give whoever you shot these for or whatever a bit you were doing whatever family function whatever it was you want to see all the photos I just shot here you go here's a link you can go look at them and then as a Lightroom as a Lightroom clouds or a Lightroom subscriber I can also control what they can do with the link so I can turn on or off downloading they get down those JPEGs or not they can also download a zip file I can also I can control how they see the images I can control the sort order and all that so I have controls over that if I just simply head over to Lightroom to do be calm so here I am in Lightroom done Adobe comm where I'm just gonna refresh and there are the two Galit there are two albums now two collections I just shared here's the one that already says it's shared behind my head here there we go see it says share down at the bottom and that one's already shared if I want to share this one I could but how do I control the sharing options I would go right up here and I would click and I would then be able to not only get the link I can control who can view so anyone can view it right now or I can say invite only only the email addresses that I put in that will get shared I can also choose how they will be displayed so I can arrange the photo so forth and so on and more importantly I can allow different settings so if I want hurt her or anyone else to be able to download these I can turn on JPEG downloading or not I can turn on showing the metadata showing the copyright information the location and all that stuff I can also control whether or not they can come in or not so I can turn that on or off the other big thing about being able to put these on the web like this is down here in the lower left corner there's a button for collaborative proofing this is a technology preview it's a beta but you now have the ability to not just share a gallery with your client and have the randomly go through them in and message you back or you know heart them or whatever you have the ability to actually go in and turn on proofing and when you do that it'll generate a different link so this is different than the sharing link this will be the one you give to the client where you want feedback you want the images that they chose and you can also limit the number that they can choose they can see them all but contractually maybe I said I'd only retouch seven of them so she or he or whoever would be able to pick the seven favorites they want and then they would show up here the ones they picked when i refresh this page after they do it so this is again cuz he can't be done with a folder impossible all right so that was number six is that you can share collections you can do collaborative or client proofing with collections none of which can be done with a folder alright last but not least and this is kind of a really cool one is that all the collections I've shown you to date are manually generated meaning I'm dragging images in or out of collections so for example in this one since I have the PSD and I have the original file with the shadow I don't need the original file because I retouched it I don't need it in this collection so I can hit delete and it just removes it from the collection it's still in big folder where it exists on our drive so this way I can control minimize what the person or what I'm seeing based on that but here's the cool one everything I've done to date everything I've shown you so far is manual and yes the published images are JPEGs as I've said a few times the everything I've done so far is manual but what if I want Lightroom to generate a collection based on criteria so for example you have the ability to go in and create what's called a smart collection so created a collection is just a manual collection you're gonna add images to it drag images to it take images out when you don't want them in there anymore that's all manual but a smart collection you don't put anything in it manually it builds the collection based on what you tell it you want so for example a smart collection I can say let's call it just favorite nikon z6 so as a space in z6 okay so my favorite nikon z6 shots all right how does that work well I would first of all I have to tell it use the camera so I can I can use any one of these pieces of criteria or multiple criteria so I can say camera fo the camera not to be very specific or at least use it contains or starts with or whatever and I know the way this cameras is recognized in Lightroom as is Nikon zSpace 6 so if I don't do anything else and just say create that will create a collection of every Z 6 shot I've taken in Lightroom so all 3919 shots instantly appeared in that collection just like that I don't have to go looking around I want to figure it out I want to go folder by folders by folder trying to figure out which ones were shot with a Z 6 and which ones weren't it just does it now I said I wanted to see my favorites well my favorites could be determined several ways it could be a 5-star rating it could be a pick flag it could be the color green it could be whatever I want so I'm going to just pretend that my favorites are all 5 stars so I'm gonna right click on that collection I just built and edit it so edit the smart collection and now I'm going to add a piece of criteria not only do I want the ones that were shot with a Z 6 but I also want rating 5 stars and I could keep going I can say Nikon Z 6 5 star rating shot on a Tuesday you know so forth and so on and it will keep building new criteria that I tell it and it will give me those shots and these are all the different pieces of criteria you can use you can use it has a pic flat or not it has a certain color or not has a smart preview or not has snapshots or not the source is in a folder a particular collection a public collection or published via its out a particular file name sequence or not it's in a particular date range whether it was captured or edited its particular camera I want to see all my z6 favorite shots shot with an F or a shot with a shot at f/4 or shot with a 24 to 70 lens so I can even specify what lens I'm looking for I can say is shot in a particular location so show me all my favorite Z 6 shots 5 stars are more shot in Hawaii I'm in Hawaii yet with this camera but I could do that so it just goes on and on and on and on all right so now I've told it Z 6 5 stars only save and boom it just narrows it down to just those with 5 stars now what if I go in and say oh well these / - were pretty much the same shot if I make if I turn off the 5 stars on one of these shots watch what happens if I just do anything four or less it immediately removed it because up doesn't meet the criteria anymore it was shot with a Z 6 but it's not 5 stars so takes it right out if I now go win and go to bed go back to a Z 6 shot let's go back to one of the amani ones because that was those are ones I shot with the Z 6 so let's go to black and white and now give that a 5 star and I come back to my my wherever this favor of Z 6 that black and whites in there now because it was shot with a Z 6 it didn't have a 5 star rating but it just gave it one now they're there so this collection constantly updates based on information that meets the criteria or stops meeting the criteria if it stops meeting the criteria taken out meets the criteria put in and it stays in until you don't meet the criteria until it doesn't meet the criteria anymore and you can have as many smart collections as you want alright can you use command Z to undo that a smart collection yes can undo it would be the undoing of five stars and that should work switch module took the five stars off so yeah you can undo is undo it doesn't matter whether or not it was done with a with a smart collection around so if I go back now that one's gone if I go back to that black and white and put the five stars back on now if I put four stars on is it going to be in there it better not be because it's only four stars I told us to look for five stars or more so if I go back and make it note that's a five star now it puts it in there because it's five stars so you can play around with that all day long smart collections are awesome now the only disadvantage to a smart collection as opposed to a I would call it a dumb collection a manual collection is that smart collections unfortunately can't be synced so they have the same limitation on syncing that folders do but they have every other benefit and there's nothing stopping you from taking let's say you did want to sync these at this point in time there's nothing stopping you from taking all of these and making a dumb collection from them and then syncing that so we can go in we could say create collection we can call it dumb collection include the selected photos in syncing with Lightroom and now I've made a dumb collection now this one's frozen in time this one will not update automatically but it will sync so if any given time you want to do that you could all right so I've got I've got basically the seven reasons so the seven reasons quick recap photos can be in a collection from different folders so for example paper black and whites these are two different images from two different folders the same photo can appear in multiple photo of multiple collections so here's the black and white in this one here it is in this one here it is in this one it can appear in as many collections as possible without taking up any extra space you can edit oh you can sync your regular collections to a to the to your mobile device now where I use that the most and where I really dig doing that is in my TWP terabyte photography collection set I've got all my portfolios as collections so if I go to my portfolios for for example for drone ography for drone shots this is my drone portfolio so if I ever want to show someone my portfolio on my phone or my iPad well it's synced so all I have to do is bring up that bring up that device and here you go they can swipe through them or I can hit present mode and they can present through them without doing any XML editing and anything I add to this will automatically be synced anything I take out of it will automatically be not synced anymore to that collection and it's a it's my favorite way to have my current portfolios with me at all times on my mobile devices so that's another reason why I love love the collections for syncing all right number four is when you're doing edit which we did we did the Edit here and it put it right back to the next thing where I took the original out but it puts it right next to the original when you do an edit round-trip to Photoshop number that was number four number five collections appear in all the modules the develop model the book amount of the slideshow module someone said can I do do a slideshow well it's really just a matter of going to the slideshow module and customizing the settings so if I hit play now that will play the slideshow which I'm at the end of it let's go back to the beginning there we go let's try it again now to play the slideshow slideshows can be synced with music you can go full screen you can export a slideshow out as a video you can do all kinds of things with your slideshows let's try that again arrrooo so playing the slideshow here it is playing the images even doing a little panning and zooming of the images kind of like a Ken Burns effect and if I want it to export this out I have the ability to export it out as a video somewhere down here I have the ability to save it as a video alright so another advantage to collections is that whatever I want to run a slideshow from I can choose that right now here in the slideshow module without having to go back to the library model just to switch folders number number six you can share your collections on the web so they appear as albums in your mobile devices they appear in lightroom adobe.com and number seven you can create smart collections so smart collections stop this smart collections are awesome I have och I have a whole folder of smart or whole collection set of smart collections that just give me instant access to all kinds of images based on the criteria that I'm looking for can you make smart collection based on keywords absolutely let's see if I missed anything else can you put a range of stars absolutely so I want images that are from three to five stars not just three not just for not just five you can put a range in absolutely make sure to miss anything all right Thomas can hear me loud and clear I didn't change anything but thanks Deb Davis is in the house Kevin Stewart's in the house welcome and all right I think I got all the questions I saw there let me see if I can see any questions I missed here that if not we'll call it a day are these published picture already answer that they're JPEGs yes with that one can you multiply photos using Lightroom depends on what you mean by multiply fall if you're talking about putting together like a collage I guess will be the way I would think of multiply it can be done in the print module so if I go to the print module I have the ability to select multiple images and have them appear three up four five up any way that I design this page so if that's what you live by multiply then yes that can be done as you've just seen all right so I think that was it for what I saw in questions if I missed your questions sorry about that well two new comments hang on jump down here you're welcome all right cool cool cool all right so with that said cheers everyone thanks for watching and we will catch you on the next one tomorrow's InDesign Tuesday so if you would like InDesign one know more about InDesign same time same channel except for on Facebook it will be the InDesign Channel cheers everybody thanks for watching we'll catch you in the next one which is tomorrow bye everybody [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Terry White

Views: 11,761

Keywords: Terry White, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, How-to, Collections, Lightroom Tutorial, Image Manipulation, Collections vs. Folders, Tutorial

Id: kbM6b4q17MY

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019