Cataloging: Order your photo archive with Lightroom | Articles | Photo, video, optics

You can cre­ate sep­a­rate fold­ers on the disk, select pho­tos by sim­ply delet­ing the excess in the explor­er, and search for the nec­es­sary frames from last year’s shoot­ing by man­u­al­ly sort­ing through. Or you can clean up your com­put­er using Light­room tools. Read about how to do this in this mate­r­i­al.

Man­u­al work with cat­a­logs has the right to life if you shoot a lit­tle and only for your­self. But if you shoot a lot, the pho­tos are on a file serv­er, three exter­nal dri­ves and two dri­ves on a work­ing com­put­er, it will take a long time to search by hand. Light­room, on the oth­er hand, will help you quick­ly select good pho­tos, quick­ly find a stu­dio beau­ty shoot from two years ago, and tell you which lens you use most often.

The Light­room cat­a­log con­tains pho­tos from all dri­ves at once — inter­nal SSD and HDD, exter­nal dri­ves and net­work stor­age / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

Select­ing good pho­tos and remov­ing unwant­ed ones with Light­room
We select and keep the best
We select and dis­card the worst
Col­or labels in Light­room, why you need them and how to use them
How to use meta­da­ta fil­ters in Light­room
How to use col­lec­tions in Light­room
How to work with key­words in Light­room

In order not to store dozens of unsuc­cess­ful takes on disks, it is worth select­ing a pho­to and imme­di­ate­ly throw­ing out the unnec­es­sary.

There are two ways to select pho­tos. In one case, we select and mark the best pho­tos, which we leave. In the oth­er, we mark only the bad ones, which are to be thrown out.

We select and keep the best

This method is well suit­ed for those cas­es when you have tak­en a thou­sand or two pho­tos, from which you need to choose a hun­dred of the best. For exam­ple, it can be reportage shoot­ing of sports com­pe­ti­tions. Or two and a half thou­sand pho­tos of pup­pies, and you need to choose sharp pic­tures. Prefer­ably, on which there are not only dog ​​tails.

Dogs are cute, but it’s eas­i­er to process a hun­dred pho­tos, not two thou­sand / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

Let’s go through the footage and assign one star rat­ing to the ones we like. To do this, sim­ply nav­i­gate through the pho­tos using the left-right up-down arrows, and when the desired pho­to is select­ed, press 1 on the key­board (if you acci­den­tal­ly assigned an aster­isk to the wrong pho­to, just press zero).

To make it more con­ve­nient to work, you can hide the side pan­els with the TAB key, and increase the pre­view size using the slid­er in the right cor­ner / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

After all the nec­es­sary pho­tos have been assigned an aster­isk, turn on the fil­ter by rat­ing by click­ing on the aster­isk in the fil­ter bar. Only pho­tos with a rat­ing of one star or high­er are now vis­i­ble. Then you can start devel­op­ing (or, if there are still too many pho­tos, go through them again and assign two stars to the best ones).

If you don’t see the star fil­ter, click on the word Fil­ter to expand the fil­ter pan­el and dis­play all options / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

We select and discard the worst

The sec­ond selec­tion method is bet­ter suit­ed for those who shoot a lit­tle and are con­fi­dent in every frame. For exam­ple, you did a beau­ty shoot in a stu­dio, got one and a half hun­dred beau­ti­ful pic­tures, among which there were a dozen unsuc­cess­ful ones — the mod­el blinked, the flash didn’t work, etc. In this case, of course, it’s eas­i­er to mark bad pic­tures and throw them out.

To mark unwant­ed frames, select them and press “X”. Light­room will say that the pho­to is marked as reject­ed (set as reject­ed), and this flag will appear in the upper left cor­ner. If you made a mis­take and marked the wrong pho­to, press “U” to remove the flag /Illustration: Alisa Smirno­va, Photostore.Expert

After all unnec­es­sary pho­tos are marked, press Ctrl + Back­space, and Light­room will offer to delete all pho­tos marked with such a flag.

In the con­fir­ma­tion menu, select the Delete from Disk but­ton — in this case, Light­room will send the files to the trash. If you click Remove from Light­room, the pho­tos will be removed from the Light­room cat­a­log, but will remain on the disk / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

Don’t for­get to emp­ty the trash after that.

In addi­tion to rat­ing stars, pho­tos can be assigned one of five col­or labels — red, yel­low, green, blue and magen­ta.

The first use case is to high­light with col­or pho­tos that require spe­cial addi­tion­al pro­cess­ing. For exam­ple, when select­ing, you can mark with col­or the pic­tures that need to be assem­bled into a panora­ma or glued togeth­er in HDR.

The green col­or indi­cates the images that need to be glued into a panora­ma. To assign a col­or label, it is most con­ve­nient to use the num­ber keys: 6 — red, 7 — yel­low, 8 — green, 9 — blue. But the pur­ple label can only be set in the con­text menu / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photosklad.Expert

It is also con­ve­nient when you need to divide the pho­to into groups. For exam­ple, you filmed a report from one event for two cus­tomers at once. The best ones were select­ed, processed, and now we need to divide them and not get con­fused so that the same frame does not go to dif­fer­ent clients. To do this, we look through our frames and mark them with dif­fer­ent col­ors. Red — for the first client, blue — for the sec­ond. Or when you are doing a pho­to project, you can mark pho­tos of dif­fer­ent clients with dif­fer­ent col­ors.

After that, you can turn on the fil­ter and export red pic­tures to one fold­er, blue ones to anoth­er.

Click on a col­ored square in the fil­ter bar to dis­play only those pho­tos that are marked with this col­or / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photosklad.Expert

A use­ful tool that allows you to find among your pic­tures, for exam­ple, all tak­en with the same lens or on a spe­cif­ic date. It is locat­ed in the Library tab / Library, line Library Fil­ter / Library Fil­ter, item Meta­da­ta / Meta­da­ta.

You can apply this fil­ter to a sep­a­rate fold­er, a spe­cif­ic disk, or to all pho­tos in the cat­a­log at once, regard­less of which fold­er and disk they are in. To do this, select the item All Pho­tographs / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photosklad.Expert

There are a lot of options for select­ing pho­tos in this fil­ter. It can search for pic­tures tak­en on a spe­cif­ic date with a spe­cif­ic cam­era or lens, choose a pho­to at a low ISO or wide aper­ture.

All search options in this menu / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

Let’s take a look at some of its most use­ful fea­tures.

- Fil­ter Date / Date. If you want to see what was filmed last sum­mer or find a shoot that was done in Sep­tem­ber the year before, you need the first col­umn. In it you can view pic­tures for a year, a month or a spe­cif­ic day. Most impor­tant­ly, make sure that the date on your cam­era is set cor­rect­ly.

- Fil­ter Cam­era / Cam­era. The fil­ter by cam­era is use­ful if sev­er­al pho­tog­ra­phers with dif­fer­ent cam­eras worked at the shoot­ing. In this case, it can be eas­i­er to work with images from each of the cam­eras sep­a­rate­ly, both when select­ing images and dur­ing pro­cess­ing. Just select one of the cam­eras from the list and Light­room will only show pho­tos from that cam­era.

Note that if you click on the word Meta­da­ta again to hide the table and free up more space, the fil­ter set­tings will be reset. To hide the fil­ter and not reset the set­tings, press \ (back­slash) / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photosklad.Expert

- Fil­ter Lens/Lens. This fil­ter is use­ful if you need to apply spe­cif­ic set­tings to pho­tos tak­en with a spe­cif­ic lens. For exam­ple, you know that your tele­pho­to cam­era gives a soft­er pic­ture than the stan­dard zoom, and the pic­tures tak­en on it should be added clar­i­ty and sat­u­ra­tion. We select the desired lens in the table, and now we can increase the clar­i­ty and dehaze only for the nec­es­sary shots.

A col­lec­tion is a vir­tu­al fold­er where you can put pho­tos that are locat­ed in dif­fer­ent fold­ers on dif­fer­ent dri­ves. At the same time, they will phys­i­cal­ly remain in their places, but in Light­room it will be pos­si­ble to work with them as if they were in the same fold­er.

For exam­ple, let’s take pho­tos of the same place, tak­en at dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, and com­bine them into one col­lec­tion.

First, click on the plus and cre­ate a new col­lec­tion. Since we have already select­ed pho­tos that will be includ­ed in the col­lec­tion, put a tick Include select­ed pho­tos.

And do not for­get to check the Set as tar­get collections/ Set as tar­get col­lec­tions check­box so that the fol­low­ing pho­tos are added to this col­lec­tion / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

A start. Go to anoth­er fold­er on a net­work dri­ve. We select pho­tos with the sta­tion build­ing of inter­est to us, and press B to add files to the col­lec­tion. We repeat until all the nec­es­sary files are in our col­lec­tion. If you make a mis­take, press B again and Light­room will remove the files from the col­lec­tion.

A cir­cle appeared in the upper right cor­ner. It shows that the pho­to has been added to the tar­get col­lec­tion / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Photostore.Expert

And here is the result: in our col­lec­tion there are 42 pho­tos that you can work with with­out switch­ing between disks and fold­ers.

Light­room search is capa­ble of a lot. But so far, Light­room is not able to inde­pen­dent­ly dis­tin­guish a fam­i­ly shoot on the street from a fash­ion shoot in the stu­dio, and it is unlike­ly to find all the shots tak­en for a par­tic­u­lar client.

But you can help him by adding key­words to the pic­tures, by which he can find the nec­es­sary pic­tures. To do this, open the library tab Keywording/Adding key­words and enter suit­able key­words.

Key­words are sep­a­rat­ed from each oth­er by com­mas / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert

Key­words can be any, in Russ­ian or any oth­er. If you are a land­scape painter, these words can be the name of the area (“Kare­lia”, “Baikal”, “moun­tains”, “water­fall”), sea­son or day (“win­ter”, “sum­mer”, “dawn”). For a com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­ph­er — the name of the cus­tomer, the type of shoot­ing (“sub­ject”, “food”, “wed­ding”, “stu­dio”), genre (“fash­ion”, “fam­i­ly shoot­ing”, “lovesto­ry”, “hol­i­day”).

More­over, if you export JPEG, all infor­ma­tion will be writ­ten to EXIF ​​and will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly picked up when upload­ing to the stock and will be vis­i­ble even in the stan­dard Win­dows view­er. If not export­ed, the infor­ma­tion will only be stored in the Light­room cat­a­log.

Now Light­room can search for those words. To search in the Library Fil­ter, select the Text tab, and the Key­words item from the drop-down list.

If you leave the Any Search­able Field option, the search will take place not only in key­words, but also in the file name, fold­er name, etc. For exam­ple, the word “drone” Light­room and a pho­to with this key­word, and pho­tos from fold­ers which have the word “drone” in their names / Illus­tra­tion: Alisa Smirno­va, Fotosklad.Expert