Staying organized with Smart Collections In Lightroom
Smart collections is an awesome feature of Lightroom that I use the heck out of to help me stay organized. There are so many things you can do with smart collections so if you haven’t digged into them yet you are missing out bigtime.
As opposed to a normal collection, where you decide what photos is put into the collection, smart collections are live and updates themselves on the fly, according to criterias you setup.
One use for smart collections that I use a lot is to create a smart collection that shows me all the non-rejected photos that has not been keyworded yet. I select that smart collection once in a while when I have some down time to see if there’s any matches. Then I just select the keyword spray can tool, type in keywords and spray the photos that maches, change keywords, spray some more until the smart collection is empty and I’m done, knowing that all my photos are keyworded so I can find stuff easily later.
Here’s how you setup such a smart collection.
First select the collections panel. Click on the plus icon and select Create smart collection.
In the smart collection name texbox type: Without Keywords (RAW/DNG/TIFF/PSD)
Match: All
First criteria: Keywords – Is Empty
Hold down ALT and Click on the hash icon at the end of the last entry in the criteria list to add a special criteria. Accept the default: Any of the following are true
From the last item in the criteria list below the Any of the following dropdown select File type: Digital Negative
Click the plus sign at the end and add another criteria.
Again select file type and select RAW
Add 2 more file type criteria: TIFF and Photoshop Document. I skip JPEG because I never use jpegs for anything but intermediate exported images for web or clients so no point in keywording those.
Click OK to save your new smart collection. You should now see a list of all your DNG,RAW, TIFF and Photoshop files that are not keyworded. Go ahead and start adding keywords to them. As soon as you add a keyword the photo will dissapear from the list as it no longer matches the criterias.
