Mastering Lightroom Classic CC - 4: Collections

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series and mastering Lightroom classic CC in this video we're gonna talk about collections we've already learned that Lightroom keeps our images in folders and those are the actual folders that are on our computer so if you look over here at the left-hand panel of the library module you can see there's a tab folders and you can see the file structure its raw files then under raw files I have two folders Buffalo History Museum Buffalo zoo and inside of those folders I have folders that actually contain the images and those are the actual folders that are on my computer in the same file structure RAW files Buffalo History Museum Buffalo zoo then folders that contain the images so that's great what you're seeing over here is actually what is on your hard drive but there are times when you may want to group images together for a specific reason in the case of animals maybe I want to group all my Eagles eagle images together and all the arctic foxes images together but maybe I went to the zoo a dozen times or to use that analogy I used in a previous video maybe I went to 30 different zoos and I have dozens of folders of animals and I have Eagle images in dozens of folders and I have arctic foxes in dozens of folders but I'd like to group them together in their own group so I don't have to go from folder to folder to folder to find all the Eagles or all the arctic foxes well that's where collections comes in you could put images from different folders into the same collection so you could find them process them look at them whatever all in ones place you don't have to go searching for them now there's three different types of collections in Lightroom one thing I should add about collections they're virtual they don't take up any disk space so actually I could make a folder called Eagles if I wanted to and then I would maybe drag my image up into this Eagles folder well it's actually going to move the physical image on my hard drive into Eagles folder I could make a copy of the image and put a copy in that folder but that takes up more disk space collections are great because they don't take up any more disk space only lightroom knows about them so if you close lightroom down you won't find any evidence of any collection being on your hard drive but again it's very powerful because you could go across folders and group things together and I started to say there's three different collections in Lightroom the first one we're going to talk about is called a quick collection if you look up here under catalog in the left hand panel of the library module you'll see that there is quick collection and it has a little plus next to it right now it has 0 images in it that little plus means it's a targeted collection and what targeted means it means that with a mouse click or with a keystroke I could easily add an image into that collection because that's the targeted collection now for example if I want to move maybe all these images of arctic foxes into that targeted quick collection to do that with a mouse click if you look at the postage stamp of the image in the filmstrip you'll see in the top right hand corner there's this little circle if I click on that circle it adds it to the quick collection you see it's right there so it automatically will just put that image in that quick collection when I click on that little circle so you could easily go through your images on the filmstrip and click on that little circle and it will add it to the quick collection another or a way to take it out of the click click quick collection is to just click on that little circle again and I removed it from the quick collection you can see there's 0 there now so if I want to go through I could again just click on that little circle or I could use a keyboard shortcut of B B isn't boy so if I want to put all the arctic foxes in there quick collection I'll just hit the B key now I have Auto advanced on we learned that in our last video so I automatically went to the next image I'll just hit B I want to add this it's an arctic fox b b b b and b so we added all those images to the quick collection we'll go up there and there they are by simply hitting the b key on my keyboard now if you want to take them out of the quick collection just hit the b key again so b b and so on and now they're all removed from the quick collection so it's very easy to add images to the quick collection just click on that circle or hit b now i mention that's the targeted collection because it has that little plus sign here now you could move your targeted collection to a different collection and that's where we're going to talk about next just a normal everyday collection if you look over here at the left panel you can see that there is a tab collections this tab is in all the modules so you could put images in your collections in a specific collection and access it in any module so a lot of people when they're creating a book or a slideshow they'll put a bunch of images in a collection then they'll go to the book or slideshow module and they're there they're easy to access and add to their slideshow or their book and we'll cover that when we cover those modules but whereas with the quick collection that's only accessible in the library module so you have to go to library module click on this to go into that collection and then you could go to the develop module and process the images so collections are available everywhere now if you want to create a collection click on this little plus sign right here a little menu will pop up and there's three different choices at the top great collection that's what we're gonna do in a second create a smart collection that's the third type of collection in lightroom we're gonna talk about that in a minute or create a collection set that's really just a folder that contains a bunch of different collections maybe you have a folder of zoo images so you have a zoo collection and then under the zoo collection you have a number of collections bald eagles arctic foxes black vultures things like that so you could then put them or keep them ordered or sorted in a very specific way now I'm gonna create a normal collection right here Creek collection and now we could give our collection a name so I'm gonna call this arctic foxes arctic fox that's good enough now do I want to include the selected photos I'm actually not selecting I'm not clicked on a fox if I was maybe I'd included just to save me that step so I'm not gonna do it but you know below that - it says make new virtual copies we're gonna talk about virtual copies in a future video but you could make a copy of an image that doesn't take up any more disk space it behaves just like it's its own image so I could have two copies of this image they're identical in every way but I could process one one way and process another one a totally different way maybe make one very colorful on black and white there are two copies processed differently they don't take up at any extra disk space you don't have to copy sitting on your hard drive their virtual just Lightroom knows about them a lot of people like to add virtual copies to a collection they don't like to add the original image it's up to you I personally usually don't you put virtual copies into a collection I will put the original image so I'm gonna not include the selected photo because I'm making a collection of arctic fox now set as target collection that was that little plus sign up here so if I set this as the target collection I could easily add images into it by clicking on that little circle or hitting the B key on the keyboard so I'm gonna set this as the target collection and click on create now I have this folder or this collection it's not really a folder of arctic fox and you can see the little plus sign is there that's indicate indicating that it's a targeted collection now I could come through and I want to put arctic fox in there I could just take one from the film strip drag it and put it in just like that and that is probably the typical way most people add images into a collection just drag and drop again if you wanted just because I made it a targeted collection I could just hit the B key on my keyboard or I could click on that circle I'm just gonna hit the B key and because I have Auto advance on I'm going to the next image every time so you can see now that the images are in this collection now to remove the image from the collection because I made it a targeted collection I could just hit that B key again that will toggle off the target so that it is no longer in the collection or I could hit this little circle right here and that takes it out of the targeted collection in this case the arctic fox but what if we didn't have this as the target collection for instance let's go back up to quick collection I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna go set as target collection so I've removed the target from arctic fox and I put the target back on the quick collection so there's if I hit the circle now it doesn't take it out of this collection it put it in that collection as well well I don't want that I don't I want to take it out of this collection just hit the Delete key on your keyboard when you get the Delete key it just takes it out of the collection you're don't worry you're not deleting it off the hard drive you're just deleting it from the collection so we could hit that Delete key and take those all out of that collection now I mentioned that there is a kind of folder where you could keep multiple collections if we click on this little plus sign again and we create a collection set and I call this zoo animals and I click click create you can see that that is there all by itself but I could take this collection of arctic fox now and just drag it into that into that group so now I have it you could see how it's in that structure now that it's underneath zoo animals so if I create another collection you know called bald eagles I could drag that into that collection set as well so I have them all group together and then I could close up the collection set with this little expose triangle there so that is what the collection set does now I mentioned that there's a third type of collection it's called a smart collection this is the most powerful collection there is now I'm gonna go to a folder here and let's just go to loop view so we see an image so I'm going to create this smart collection let's click on this little plus sign again and we're gonna create smart collection now a smart collection looks for some attribute that you assigned to an image and it will automatically put that image into a collection now I'm gonna let give this a name instead of smart collection let's call this flagged okay and you could put it inside of a collection set I could click on that I'm gonna put it inside of the zoo animals collection set that I already created and you could either have it match all of the rules you specify or any of the rules or none of the rules well we're gonna have it I'm only going to create one rule for this demonstration so we'll do all so you can create multiple rules and you could have it either if it satisfies any one of those multiple rules that will go into the collection or if it satisfies it has to satisfy every single one of those rules to make its way into that collection now what I'm gonna do here is there's all these different like attributes for the image that you could choose from you could even choose from different metadata so as you import images they'll automatically go into the smart collection so you could it's very powerful so you could get things into the collection automatically without doing anything now in this case I am talking about flagged image so it's going to be the pic flag and I want it to is or is not flagged on flag to reach so I want all my flagged images to automatically go into this collection now I could get another rule by clicking on this little plus sign right here and I could have another one now I could have the rating be equal to three stars there's two star or something like that so it has to be greater than or equal to two stars and it has to have the pick flag on for it to make it into the collection I'm not I'm gonna remove this last one but you could just keep adding rules and then the image either has to satisfy either one of the rules or all the rules to get in and you choose that right here so we're going to get rid of this here so only images that I have the pick flag on will go into this collection so I'm gonna click create so there you can see that I already have some that had the pick flag on them from our previous video so you could see they automatically got put into the collection if I want to get them out of this collection I have to turn that flag off so I'll hit the U key for unflagging you can see that it removed the flag so I'm removing the rule that put it into not removing the rule I'm not satisfying the rule that put it into the collection to begin with and that's how you get it out of the collection so we'll go back up to our animals and let's say I want to go through these I'm culling images and this is what a lot of people use collections for they'll color images using the pick flags and they'll automatically get put into the smart collection then they'll go to the smart collection to process their images so I like this one I'm gonna hit the P key this one I don't really care for but I don't want to delete it so I'm gonna hit the U key the U key the U key the P key that was a little blurry youqi youqi P key P key P key u key P it's kind of weird saying that oh so I guess oh I could quickly go through these is the point so we'll go through some of them all right so I went through these images like that one too so we'll go through and we have them flagged many of them flagged and if I go to a my flagged smart collection there they are so I could come in here now and easily just process them or maybe I want to make a book or maybe I want to make a slideshow something like that they're right here in this collection and again I could go across folder so I could come over here and just hit and flag a bunch of these and they're going to be in that smart collection there they are down here see him so you could go across folders that's where collections are super powerful and they come in really really handy the three different kinds of collections quick collection regular collection and smart collection and remember you could move the target around from a regular collection to a to the quick collection up here in the catalog and very easy to move the target if I wanted to now make this arctic fox folder that has nothing in it a targeted collection just right-click on it set as target collection and it removed the plus sign from the quick collection and it put it there so now any image that I come in and hit the B key or hit this little circle will get put into that target collection if I want to put the target collection on a different folder I could just go back up let's say to this quick collection right click set as target collection so you can move that around if you want to remove a collection or collection set just click on the collection you want to remove click on this little minus sign you'll get this prompt then just collect delete and you'll remove it again you're not deleting any images you're just removing the collection if you want to remove this smart collection just click the minus sign and you removed it now we have this collection set if I want to remove that just click that minus sign and that is gone as well so it's very easy to create collections or delete collections and again you're not removing any images from your hard drive or from the Lightroom catalog when you either delete the image from the collection or delete an entire collection that's it for this video thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 41,940

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, collection, smart collection, quick collection, targeted collection

Id: Ld8eAh9PlZA

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018