ORGANIZE your IMAGES in Lightroom Classic!

hey guys forrest here today we're going to take a look at organization in lightroom this is something that we haven't talked about in quite a long time and what i want to do is go over five ways to organize your images now quick note on organization everyone's brain works differently in this world and so what works for you to organize your images might be different than what works for me and that's why i'm going to go over five different tools by no means are you going to use all five of these it's simply use the two or three or one of them that works the best with your brain let's go ahead and dive in we'll take a look at all five and then we'll talk a little bit more about organization strategy towards the end of the video all right so i've got a series of images here in lightroom and the first organizational technique i want to take a look at is folders now why are folders first well folders are where our images actually live on our hard drive whether that's internal or external and all of our folder controls live over here on the left in the folders panel now you want to be careful because remember lightroom is watching your images it's looking at your images living on your hard drive and it's going to to kind of keep track of what goes on there and the problem is if you do any of this organization outside of lightroom lightroom is going to lose your images which is definitely not ideal so if you want to do any folder reorganization you want to do it inside of lightroom in the folders panel versus using like windows explorer or finder anything you do in lightroom totally fine so long as you do it within the program so as a quick example over here i've got my folders panel and i would make the argument that the folder called 2018.0515 is pretty useless i don't think there's a lot of reason to have a folder like that because i have no idea what i shot that day so i'm going to click on that folder and see oh look this was sarah and i's trip across the country well a much more useful name might be to right click on this folder go to rename i'm going to leave the date because the date keeps things chronological and that's awesome i love when things stay linear things stay in order but i'm going to put a space and i'm going to say cross country if i can spell right cross country trip and we'll hit ok or save okay so now that just renamed the folder itself in lightroom and what's really cool is if i actually go to that folder on my hard drive let me open this up 2018 you can see it also renamed it on the hard drive now if i had done that the other way around lightroom would have lost my images and i would not have had i would have gotten question marks exclamation points and caused a bunch of problems so folder organization really important one other thing we could do is take all these images from these bottom five folders these were all part of that same trick i could select all the images and move them into that top folder just by dragging and dropping super simple so now we've actually consolidated seven folders or six folders into one for that whole trip and then all i got to do is just click here and select these five folders i'm using the shift click trick to select more than one folder at a time i can right-click and remove and pull those folders out and now i've taken six folders each that had a few photos from that trip and put them all into one and yes just like before if i go into my actual hard drive where these images are being stored and i take a look at that the same stuff that i did in lightroom is reflected on the hard drive and again if we had done that the other way around it would have lost everything so we really want to make sure that we're staying consistent and doing our folder changes in lightroom one other thing i should mention is that if you wanted subfolders say you did a couple things on your trip or on that day of shooting you can always right click on your folder and go to create folder inside and as an example we took a trip to capitol reef national park as part of this trip so i'm just going to abbreviate crnp for capitol reef national park create that and that just made me a folder inside of this 2018 05 15 cross country trip and from there i can select the images that were from capitol reef here which are these ones and move them into that subfolder now a really quick thing i want to hammer home here i'm moving those images into a subfolder of our folder that has the year the month and the day and you want to be really careful with that we always want to retain that year month day structure because that ensures that everything stays chronological but inside of those year month day folders we can make sub folders that have different names for different things that we shot so that's folder organization again just to prove the point i'm going to go back to the folder on my hard drive and show you guys that inside of cross country trip now we do in fact have a crnp folder because we did it in lightroom everything's reflected on the hard drive that's folder organization thing number one organizational technique number two is keywording keywording is super powerful and instead of folders which kind of take broad strokes at what you shot that entire day keywords get much more specific and look at what you shot specifically in that one photograph so they actually go in and at the photo level you can keyword something so as an example i've got a few shots here of las vegas very simple all of these happen to be night photography so probably all four of these images could be keyworded similarly i'm going to select all four i'm going to go over to the right hand side the keywording panel here i'm going to click inside this big gray box and then i have the freedom to type whichever keywords i want real simple i'm going to put the keyword night in there now you got to decide do you want to capitalize your first letter of every keyword or not doesn't matter so long as you're consistent with it so we'll do knight i'm going to do comma space i might put los vegas something like that now you could do some other ones like maybe the las vegas strip if you have images more than some images from the strip whatever works for you we hit enter and that writes those keywords to those files and you guys i should talk real quickly about the goal of all of this the goal of all this is to get to a point where we can search through lightroom and find the images that we're interested in so i'm keywording these with las vegas in the hope that i can type the las vegas word into lightroom and have these images pop up just like that that's what we're working towards just like that i could this image right here and same with this one and this one these were all shot in badlands national park but i could put badlands as a keyword comma space maybe nature and maybe national parks again just thinking what would i want to search to bring up these specific photos so we get that typed in we hit enter and we've keyworded you guys that's really all there is to keywording super simple organizational technique number three are labels or attributes as lightroom calls them and this is just a way to mark your images for different things there's three types of labels there are flags there are colors and there are ratings ratings are star ratings one through five stars and it's very easy you can use the keyboard shortcuts on your keyboard one two three four five correspond to one two three four and five stars zero on the keyboard corresponds to zero stars so if i wanted to give this photo right here a three star rating simply hit the number three on the keyboard we're done this image right here i might give a two star this image right here might get a five star and if i decide that i want to un-rate one of these i can just click on it and hit 0 and that will remove the stars very very easy very very straightforward now color labels that's another thing we have at our disposal that is the keyboard shortcut six seven eight nine six is red seven is yellow eight is green nine is blue there's also purple but purple doesn't get a keyboard shortcut so just like that i can go red click on another image yellow seven another image eight is green another image nine is blue and then if i wanted purple i could come down to this toolbar down here pro tip you can hit t to show or hide your toolbar and i can click this downward facing triangle go to turn on color label and now i can see my colors down here on the toolbar and now i can click and i actually have a button for purple purple doesn't get a keyboard shortcut but you can still turn it on now what if we want to remove a color label well all you do is you click on the image and you hit the same color again so this image has a blue label which is the number nine i can hit nine once more and that will remove that green label from that image very very straightforward the other thing we have are flags flags are there's a good flag and there's a bad flag the good flag is p p for pick so if you find an image that you particularly like you can hit the letter p and that will give it a white flag you can hit the letter x on an image you don't like and that will give it the black flag there are some other bonuses to these flags that you can use but that's not as much the topic of this specific video basically lightroom has organized the pick flag for the images you like and the reject flag or the x flag for images that you don't like quick thing i'll mention there's no right or wrong way to use labels or attributes it doesn't matter adobe doesn't care these are all just tools that they've put into lightroom classic for you to use or not use so me personally i don't use the star ratings they don't work for my brain i love colors and i love flags other people use stars doesn't really matter it's whatever works for you all right organizational technique number four is collections very very straightforward a collection is much like a spotify or an itunes playlist it's a grouping of images that have something in common that is not a folder i want to make that distinction very clear folders are actual physical locations on your hard drive meaning if you take an image and you move it from one folder to another in lightroom like we did earlier in this video you're actually moving it on your hard drive super simple right if instead you take a full an image and you put it inside of a collection nothing is actually moving collections are made up in lightroom they are uh the spotify playlist of the lightroom world what i mean by that is you could make a collection called my favorite images and you could take photographs from many different days from many different folders put them all in one collection and you wouldn't be duplicating stuff on the hard drive you wouldn't be taking up more space it's just like a saved grouping you click that collection lightroom goes and grabs this picture this picture this picture this picture this picture and displays them all to you at once very very easy super useful for just a quick like make a container throw a bunch of stuff into that container and then use it for whatever you want to use it for great example something like a portfolio or your favorite images all we got to do to make one is in this collections panel i'm going to hit the plus sign go to create collection and i'm just going to call this one my favorite images something like that now i'm not going to include selected photos not going to set it as a target again that's a more advanced option not going to put in a collection set i'm just going to create it and that's going to give me a little collection over here on the left and what i can do is just take images that i want in there and just drag them and drop them into that collection and when i do that i'm not taking up more space on the hard drive i'm not moving anything on the hard drive i'm not duplicating anything on the hard drive i'm just telling lightroom hey when i click this button pull up those two photos for me wherever they live just go grab them and show them to me and lightroom does it just like that what makes this even cooler is if i take one of these images and i edit it let's just make it black and white real quick you can see now it's turned to black and white pro tip that's the keyboard shortcut v on the keyboard v converts color to black and white doesn't do a particularly good job but it works right convert it to black and white if i go back to the folder where that image lives you'll notice that it is also edited inside of that folder so when an image is in a collection it actually gets edited everywhere else that it lives one image could be in 15 different collections and if you edited it one place it would edit all of those places which is really nice when you think about it you no longer have duplicate files you no longer have really any of that like pane of oh i have three copies of this one photo because it lives in the masters folder the originals folder the exports folder it's just one picture and it lives in multiple collections and that's totally fine makes it really easy okay so that's collections number five is location information and if you're a travel photographer this one is super awesome for you what you can do actually if you select some images that were shot in a certain location so let me go here go back to all photographs here and i'm just going to select some images that were shot in missoula so let's select these images right here what i can do is go over to the right here in the metadata panel and in the metadata panel at the top i can tell it to look at location-based metadata metadata is all that information about your photograph that's not the actual photograph itself it's stuff like what uh what f-stop did you use what iso did you use what shutter speed did you use things like that when we go to location now we actually have spaces where we can type sub-location city state all that kind of stuff so let's take a look this was up the rattlesnake wilderness area and it's going to say do you want to do it to all of the selected photos and we do so we're going to hit apply to selected this was in missoula and i'm just typing and then hitting the enter hitting hitting the enter key in order to seal that in montana and we could put country if we wanted to usa now does it matter if you use state abbreviations or if you spell out the state not at all just be consistent with it and remember that when you go to search for these things you need to search the same way that you entered okay now that just wrote that location information into these photographs so all of a sudden these images now have their location as part of their metadata and that becomes searchable now pro tip and if you guys are interested in this definitely let me know know down in the comments and drop a like on this video but there's also a map module in lightroom which is a whole module dedicated to location that you took photos most people think the map module is only for cameras with gps but there's actually ways you can do it without that so if you guys are interested in that drop a like on the video comment down below and let me know that you want to see that and i can make a video on just that but here we are we've got our fifth organizational technique now i want to show you guys how cool this is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to all photographs and then at the very top up here there's this thing called the library filter and i'm going to go to text and what this lets you do is this lets you search through lightroom for all of those things that we just did so let me give you an example all five of those organizational techniques we talked about are equally searchable so let's think back to the first thing we looked at folders and we made a folder called c r n p for capital reef national park well i could search for crnp and if we just wait a second lightroom pops up those images just like that that's pretty cool okay what if we do let's see next we did keywords and we did a keyword loss vegas there are those images right there quick search there we are let's see what did we do next we did collections called my favorite images oh there are those pictures right there in the collection called my favorite images um let's see what else did we do we did green labels which are searched a little differently you can't actually type them right in there we'll talk about that in a little bit so labels will have to wait what about uh location information what about rattlesnake rattlesnake wilderness area there are those images right there now what if you did want to search labels or ratings or or flags that's under the attribute filter you click on attribute up here and you can click green and that will show you your green label images or your flags or your stars so all of this comes around and you've got five really great techniques and each of them is equally searchable through your lightroom catalog so there's not one or another that's better in any way than the other ones they all have equal results so here's the takeaway if you struggle with organization pick one of these things that you think is the one that makes the most sense to you and just try to take one or two minutes per import whenever you import a memory card full of images to spend doing whatever that one thing is if it's keywords take one or two minutes keywording every photo you import if it's collections drag some images into some collections that make sense for you maybe you really like to photograph portraits and you want to make a collection for each of the main people that you photograph as soon as you photograph them drag those images into that collection and you should be all set all right so that's organization now there's more to all of those things um than what i covered today and if you guys are interested in that let me know down in the comments hit a like on this video um i'd love to know if there's interest there because i can go way more in depth on collections or on keywords or all on these different topics if you guys are interested in it but there's our general overview of organization the five tools lightroom gives us hope you guys like this video if you did like it hit that like button if you didn't you know what to do you guys have a question leave it down in the comment section down below hit subscribe down there or up there to stay up to date with future videos and i will catch you guys in the next one happy shooting and hope you have a good day

Channel: Rocky Mountain School of Photography

Views: 19,808

Rating: 4.9699249 out of 5

Keywords: lightroom classic, lightroom, adobe, organization, lightroom classic organization, lightroom organization workflow, lightroom organization tutorial, lightroom organization tips, lightroom photo organization, lightroom catalog organization, how to organize photos, how to organize photos in lightroom, how to organize photos on external hard drive, how to organize photos on windows 10, lightroom tips you probably didnt know, lightroom workflow for beginners, photo editing lightroom

Id: hmTr5V-DBoE

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020