Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Collection

The last topic I definitely don't want to miss, though, is how to create collections and a little bit on smart collections. So I use collections in light room. Any time I want to pull together a group of photos, it could be a subset of photos from one photo shoot. It could be photos from various folders. So let's say, for example, I'm putting together a calendar for 2012. I need 13 photos. They're gonna come from various folders, so I'll set up a collection for that. So let's look at how to create a collection here on the left hand side. Let's scroll down to collections here towards the bottom Click on the sideways triangle. If yours is collapsed and to create a new collection will click on the plus to the right of collections here, so plus and then create collections. So just a regular collection. Zoom back out and I'll call this calendar. Now. A collection set is just a folder of, you know, to put collections in to keep them organized. I haven't created them at this point, so we'll k...

eep this at top level, and then I have a photo selected out here somewhere in the grid. I don't even know what it is, so I'm not going to include selected photos. I don't want that random photo in my collection, and then I'll click create Now, here in the collections panel, I now have this calendar collection with no photos in it, so the next step is to select photos and to drag them into the collection. So let's go ahead and just select a subset of photos. You can select one photo at a time. Remember, select by clicking in the border and then click and drag from inside the thumbnail down into drop it right on that calendar collection. So again you can do one at a time, or you can select click on one controller command click on another click inside one of the thumbnails, drag it down. Whoops. Gotta keep going into the calendar collection, and then I can go to a different folder of photos, maybe and take some or put them in that calendar collection so a collection can have photos from various different folders. Now, in the old days, I would have had to create a folder on my hard drive and then create copies of all the files that I wanted to pull together for whatever purpose it might be. So in this case, I'm not duplicating files. I'm just creating this kind of virtual grouping. So now that I've assigned photos to the collection, I'm gonna go ahead and click on this collection. I'll zoom back out and you can see the seven photos that I was signed up to this point. Now, as I mentioned these air, not duplicates of the files. So a lot of these air from my Victoria shoot they don't live in the collection. They still live up in the folder that I've got here for 2000 and six. I haven't moved them. I haven't created a second copy. This copy is exactly the same one that's up in the folder. It's just again away toe. It's basically just in instruction that says, Show me, you know, Show me photos. Numbers 18 and 23 when you click on that, um, collection and describe that very well. But anyway, it's a virtual grouping. One of the advantages of collections, of course, is that you don't have to duplicate files. Another one is that you can rearrange files within a collection independently from how they're arranged in the fold. So let's say instead that this is a collection that you're gonna build a slide show on so aesthetically visually, you may want a particular flow to the slides to the pictures so you can click and drag photos in a collection to rearrange them. And it's not affecting their order. In the folder I went back to my Victoria folder. The photos would be in exactly the same place, so that's particularly handy for the slideshow module. For when you're creating books, you can go ahead that creates your collection. Here, bring your photos together, arrange them how you think you might want you want them to be and then go to an output module to work on your book or slideshow or whatever It may be one more thing, and then we'll see. If I have questions on that, and then we'll go to the smart collections. Let's go ahead. Let's say that I put this photo in here by accident, so I've got the photo selected. Now I'm gonna hit the delete key and just watch what happens. It's gone now. Didn't I tell you earlier that if light Room was gonna delete something, it would actually warn you. It didn't warn me, did it? It just It's just gone. So, um, I didn't delete it from my hard drive. When I'm in a collection, I click on a photo and I delete it. It's just taking it out of the collection. It's still sitting in your folder, appear in the folders panel. It's That's how you on a sign from a collection, doesn't warn you because it figure it is not that big of a deal. If you If you want to undo controller Command Z and light room, we'll undo your, uh, removing from collections. All right, we're getting really tight on time, and I just want to introduce smart collections to you. So I'm going to defer questions and just jumped to that and sail through this. I apologize that there's no time for it to kind of gel, but we've been working with manual collections. I could call them dumb collections, but I use them all the time, right? I mean, they're the main go to collections, but you have to you drag photos to them, and sometimes That's the only way you're looking for photos for a calendar, you just have to visually decide which ones are going to be assigned to it and drag them to the collection. But there are also smart collections. Smart collections are rule based collections. So here in the collections panel, let's click on the click on the plus to the right of collections and say, Create smart collection and let me just set this up. Let's make this my five star nature photos. Okay, so just type in five Stir Nature and again a Collection said. It's just the folder that collections could be organized into. I don't have one yet, so next to is just fine right here. Next. I'm gonna say what rules these photos have to meet. So I said I wanted five star nature photos by default. Light room shows me rating, which is in fact, what I'm gonna use. So rating is greater than or equal to five, so I'll click on the fifth dot there, and then I'm gonna add another rule. He were t equals nature, so I'll click on the plus to the right here and in this second row here I'm gonna choose, Not rating but keyword Key word contains nature, and I'm sorry I did that so quick. But key word contains nature, and then you would hit. Enter Teoh to finish that up. So we have now in the collections panel this wonderful five star nature smart collection. The little wheel here means that it's a smart collection, and it automatically has photos in it as long as you had photos with five stars and the keyword nature in your catalog. So it just automatically searches through your entire catalog and displays you those photos. So it is basically a saved search. Now I love these because they're just the way to always have my favorites of various categories available. If people want to see some of my photos, for example, here's the the one more cool thing about this. Let me go ahead and go into this folder here, and let's say that I gave this thes three photos, five stars and I'll come over and give them the key word. Nature. Uh, cat spill caps lock on hit, Enter. Come on. I school down here to this five star nature collection. You'll see that it's automatically up to date, so it is constantly scanning my catalogue for photos that meet that condition. So that's what makes this really cool. These smart collections air always up to date based on the rules. I don't have to think about updating them every time I assign, you know these criteria to the photos. So when they work, when you can use rules rather than just visually what you like or what makes sense, they can be very powerful. All right, questions. Oh, I'm sorry. I just have a comment really about the smart collections. I've never used him. And now I think I'm going to use them all the time, especially for wedding photographers. I get a lot of brides who say, You know, let me see a portfolio and sort of going through and you know, them seeing your entire wedding, you can just start creating smart collections and have it right there. And then every wedding you dio, I think, will be invaluable. Thank you absolutely. And some photographers also use smart collections to manage their workflow. I don't know if you guys have been Teoh Light Room solutions dot com. It's John Beard's worth site, and he has. I don't know if it's still there, but in the past he has had this set of smart collections that basically help you walk through your workflow. So you know what you've worked on toe? What point? It's, You know, it's a fairly sophisticated workflow, but you could use that as an idea. If you're a particularly wedding photographer where time is money, you know you gotta you gotta be very efficient and know exactly where you are. There's some other examples here of smart collections the leg room team has built in. If I click on this sideways triangle to the left of they're smart, Collection said here, uh, they're just showing you some examples. So here's a five star smart collection. Videophile Smart Collection. Here's a great one for all of us to work on photos without keywords, right? The idea is to click on this and then keyword until this gets down to no photos all the way down to zero. Okay, if you want to edit a smart collection, you can right click on it. I just right click on five Star Nature and say edit and you're back in the dialogue to continue to modify or add rules. So more questions? Yeah, Sam Cox asks. Can you delete a photo from a smart collection other than other than by changing the photos attributes? No, you can't because it's just strictly rule based. You don't have direct control over it. Okay? And there was a question. Can you describe from Shasta? Can you describe sets versus regular collections? Sure, So right now, let's say I have, um, I'm gonna have a bunch of different portfolios. Let's say they'll be smart collections. This doesn't matter if they're smart collections of regular collections, but I want to create a set. And then I'm gonna put my five star nature five star portrait's etcetera into their. So let's take a look at that. Here in the collections panel, we'll click on the plus again and I'll say, Create collection set and I'll call this portfolios. I'm not gonna put it inside another collection said. I'm just gonna hit create. So now I have a portfolio's collection set that is empty. It's just a folder to store collections in so I could take my five star nature collection, put it inside of port whips that was not supposed to select all those that was opera here. Air. Okay, select my five star nature click and drag error. We go up into portfolios, and of course, I would have many more in here. But when I'm not using this portfolio set of collections, I can click on this downward triangle to collapse it so that it's not taking up so much space. So it's a way to really manage real estate inside of the collections panel and to be able to organize your working a wedding, you may have six different collections for different subsets of photos. You're going to deliver in various ways, put him in a Smith Family collection set and collapse that collection set when you're done with the wedding. Well, think it's reached that time of the day? Yes, and we want to thank Laura for so much information on this just the first day of a three day light room for workshop. And it's, um, we have still to form to more full days to go and just thank you everyone online and around the world for being here in our studio guests for being here. So just give Laura around reports, please. Thanks to everybody here in the staff and the crew and tell you guys online. Let me just give you a little bit on what's coming up tomorrow because tomorrow is really the exciting fun day. You know, we've climbed the steep hill of the roller coaster and now we're gonna get this adrenaline rush of fun with Hey, John, mostly with the develop module. So I'm gonna start out first thing in the morning with a little bit of time on the map module. And I know a lot of you are thinking I'm just going to sleep in and skip that part. But I would encourage you not to, because I think you're gonna find that the map module in light Room four is more valuable than it first appears. It's very cool, but it's also very useful, so I'll spend a little bit of time on that, and then we'll spend the rest of the day on fixing and enhancing your photos with the develop module. So I look forward to seeing you tomorrow