Skip to main content

9:00 am - Importing & Organizing Images

Lesson 1 from: Workflows with Lightroom 5

Julieanne Kost

9:00 am - Importing & Organizing Images

Lesson 1 from: Workflows with Lightroom 5

Julieanne Kost

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

1. 9:00 am - Importing & Organizing Images

Lesson Info

9:00 am - Importing & Organizing Images

Welcome, thanks for coming this morning. Like all day toe learn software. Uh, okay, I've got it to not me, so we're gonna start in light room. And since I know that there's a variety of different skill levels both here and also online, I think the best thing to do is just if you're a beginner, I speak quickly way will be covering a ton of information in the next two days. So that's great if you're a beginner, I think what's really important is not that you write down every single step that I do, but that you just kind of watch and follow along and the new no where to go and look for the features that you're interested in learning and then for people have been working with it for a while, then that becomes easy will pick up tips and advance people. You'll get those little golden nuggets throughout the day, but we are going to start as if there is there's nothing in my catalog, so I'm in the library module in light room. One of the first things I just want to spend, like thirty seconds o...

n is just people always ask me, should I use light room or should I use photo shop? And I think the better question is, should you use light room or should you use bridge and camera raw? Because really those air kind of the equivalent even though I use light room for probably ninety percent of my in a batch processing an individual photo tweaking and manipulation I'm still going to use photo shop anytime I want to do any composite work or anything so it's really does the library module in light room in the way that you organize your files and the whole database or catalog aspect of it and the develop module do you would you prefer to be in the light room environment or would you prefer to be in the bridge and camera wrong environment and the great thing is it's the same technology for both for both applications so really you can go back and forth and we'll do that a little bit tomorrow as well so ok, so with that taken care of we'll start the library module and we should just take a very quick tour over the interface so for people who aren't familiar with light room up across the top of these air all our different modules so light rooms very workflow oriented so basically as you take your photographs through light rooms workflow you'll be moving from one model to another and for me that's super helpful because you know I'm just teaching people in photoshopped it could be very daunting when you just launch photoshopping like everything's there and everything is accessible all the time and people don't know where to start so this is very workflow oriented. So those air your modules when I refer to your panels, those they're going to be on the left and right hand side, and then the film strip is down here below and there's a little tool bar in some of the modules. Not all the models have a tool bar, but a lot of people accidentally tapped the tiki at some point when they're using light room in their tool bar goes away like maybe they're adding key words or something so just know that if you tap the tiki, you got to tap it again to bring your toolbar back. All right, so great, what do you do? How do you start? Well, we've got a little clue right here click the import button to begin so there's kind of two ways that people import, and my goal, when I teach, is to try to get as much information to you so that you can then make an informed decision. So I know some people like you know, I'm not the type of person that's going to tell you you have to do it this way. I'm gonna tell you why you might want to do it this way or my why you might want to do it that way, and then you can make up your own mind. So there's really two different ways that people import the first way that they import is they actually use light room to import so they would have there their card and they would insert it into either their card reader directly into their computer and they would import directly from the card on tio their computer using light room and that's fine, I would say like, you know, forty nine point nine percent of people do it that way the other forty nine point nine percent of people do it the second way, which we'll talk about in a minute so this way let's just walk through that so I've got the card obviously attached through the card reader and I'm just going to click import and once I do that I get the import dialog box and it should be broken up into like three steps and I kind of wish there was a little number here because look at the way the panel's highlight so this is your kind of step one this is where you're actually telling it where your information is so in this case it's on this device so there's also a preference which I'll show you in a minute so that when I plug in the car this device or this import dialog box could simply come up I think I actually have that turned off because I don't want popping up every time I put in a device but here's, obviously your your device here's. All of the hard drives that you have attached here is thie image area where you can actually see and navigate. So if I wanted to double click, I could zoom in, it gives me the zoom tool. We can click again, it gives me the hand tool and then I can move around and see what the image is all about. So what I'm doing here is I'm going through what's basically called your grid view and then your luke view and you can access those with little icons right down here. We will also see these icons in the library module, but you can also tap the geeky. The geeky will give you your review and the ae qi, we'll give you a loop of you used to say it was loopy view, but I guess that's for in large, so all right, now you have your options as what you want to do with these files, you want to compliment, you want to copy them is dandy and this is up to you. I don't know how many of you guys were using d n j d angie's just another final four minute. The nice thing about the file format is that it's not proprietary, so adobe actually makes the dandy file format, but we've opened it up so other developers can access the file format and they can read and write to it. So why this is important is because it's not proprietary it's not a locked file format eso you know, if later on anyone else wants to write dmg files there's a competitive aspect anyone can write them and competition is always good for companies so those air dingy so you have your option right? Is you import, you could convert your raw files here any f so you're cr w's into dmg files or you don't have to personally, I do it later in my work flow because I throw away a significant number of my images so I don't want to take the time to convert them all right now I'm gonna wait and then after I do my edit and throw away because I do throw away a lot of images, then I'll go ahead and convert them later so at this point I would need to copy the files right? Because they're on an external drive right here or an external device and so I'm going to copy him over and then we go over to this third section over here writes we had pick your source what you're going to do with the files do you want to look at your files all of that? And then over here we can actually determine where we want to put those files so there's a lot of different options here file handling this is going to depend on how much of a hurry you're in so minimal is going to be the quickest setting here if you choose minimal it just means that when these images are imported light room will just use there's going to be a j peg file and all of these images so I know you're probably thinking wait, I'm shooting wrong what do you mean I'm not shooting rob plus jpeg which the jake when you photograph in raw the camera adds a little j peg preview to your file so when you choose minimal here that's the first preview you're going to see so this is really like if you're a photojournalist if time is of the essence here to say yeah, minimal I just want to see the images come in but we're not going tio put the emphasis on color managing and building a larger preview right at the beginning we're going to actually wait and do that so I mean and it will happen you'll see it kind of chunk through as we process the files. All right? So personally I choose standard standard means that it's actually going to create a larger preview and the reason that I do this is just because I would rather take the time up front and say okay, I'm gonna import my files I'm gonna walk away and put away my lights, I'm gonna do whatever it is I need to do, and I want this those previews built so that when I moved from one image to the next in the library module it's going to do it quickly so I do standard, you can do one to one, that means it would be faster when you zoom all the way in, but it depends on how much hard drive, space and everything you have. I prefer to do one to one on a very conscientious level, like if I have to zoom light room will automatically make that preview, so if I don't zoom all my images, then I'm not going to build it and take that extra time, so so I'll choose standard and building smart previous this is new, this is new light room five with this is going to allow me to do is it's going to allow me to work with these files while the files are off line? So if I were and I'm not right now, but if I were to copy these images under this external hard drive and then I were to leave this external hard drive at home when I go on the road, if I want to be able to edit those in the developed module, if I want to go in there and change color balance and total values I would want to build these smart previews otherwise if your files are offline if they're not on the physical drive connected to it, you cannot use the develop module and you can't use the quick quick develop either all right, I'm gonna build the smart previews I'm not going to import suspected duplicates so let's say I photograph fifty images on a card and then I downloaded those and then I went and shot more without reform any my card, which I wouldn't recommend but if you did now all of a sudden you have another fifty images well, you've downloaded half of them already I don't want like them to download them again I want to ignore the ones that it's already aware of and it's looking at the date and the final name and all that so it knows what's already in the the database or I shouldn't say the database we say the catalog because if we say the database then it sounds scary and your hair will light on fire so we called a catalogue all right? But we know behind the scenes under the hood it's a database and that's what makes things super fast in light room I can bridge if you're searching if I would just try to search and bridge through ten thousand files it would take forever right? Because light rooms a database is gonna be super fast ok and if I wanted to I could make a second copy to another location so that's great like if you're on the road and you want to download and put your files in two locations at one time that's great all right then we get to rename our files how do you guys how you re naming your files are you reading your files and you know ok that's a great okay, so the name in your files is really easy and you could do it in a plethora of different ways we have a bunch of kind of custom names here that you can just pick from so for example file name and sequence that's great because all you need to do is put in um actually no let's not do file name in sequence let's do let's let's be more difficult? We want control that's what we want this is advanced class we want to edit this we want to make our own all right so we're gonna go to edit and I'm gonna take out everything that's in this example so I'm just going to tap the delete key all right so now there's nothing in there now I can put these little tokens in there based on what I want or I could just type so I don't know if it's important or not for you to have your name as part of the final name maybe your client's name let's do it this way let's put my name in for now all right so jay cost and in an underscore that's just gonna help separate and it gives me the little example right up here all right and then I can put something else for example let's put the date so you'll notice there's a lot of different dates that we can add it's up to you how much of a date you want in there personally the date is in the meta data so I don't know that you actually have to include the date in the name of the file because in light room you can always filter based on date and to me it's more important like it's more important that I might put in well it's not that important that I put on anything because everything is searchable right but you can put in whatever you want so we'll put in the date now when I say insert this little token this little bubble thing right here that means that it's going to go look in your eye image and find the date that captured eight that's in the image so you don't have to type in you know, two thousand thirteen here it went and found that if you brought in images from your digital camera that had a different date like two thousand twelve two thousand eleven it would automatically add the date for you the correct date the capture time okay, all right and then let's add something we have to add one more thing because we have to have something that makes them different right? And so I'm gonna come in here and I'm going to add a sequence and for my sequence we can just add any of these probably I actually do well, I'm very and I said we don't call it a database we call it a catalog I also call myself tidy, not obsessive compulsive because it just sounds nicer, right? So I'm very tidy, so my entire year has a single sequence number. Yeah, I know. All right, so if this wasn't enough to insert all those zeros, we could actually just put another zero in front of it, but then we have to keep track of that, so I'm just gonna leave it like this. And then once you create any template in light room, whether it's a final naming template or I meditated template or pre set in the developed module, you'll want to save that so that you can reuse it. The great thing is it's like even though we're in the import module right now, if we save this file naming template it's going to appear throughout the application, so if we forget to rename something we can still use this later, if we're exporting, we could use the same final naming template. All right, so we will just go ahead and we will save this as a new pre set, and I will just call it create, live something that okay, trash me. No, you wouldn't name it that, but I just don't want this to get confused, so we've got create live jay cost and then in c final naming convention and we hit create so now we've got a preview here that's our preset we click done if you want to change it, obviously we can now access that right here from the drop down menu. So there's our final naming convention there's one other one I do want to mention though, so let's go back in and edit and make another one. This one's quite nice this one if you just add like custom text and then we'll just do the date and the sequence again. I like this because watch what happens if we say save it is new preset and see it all custom and we hit create now watch what happens over here in the dialogue in the file renaming you can see there's custom text so I see a lot of photographers use a final naming convention like this because then every time a new client comes in the door, they could just say, oh you know, it's, the costs or it's the smiths or it's the browns, and they'll just add that in every time and then you can see once you type, it'll go ahead and give you that preview right down here. So there's a lot of ways to rename I don't care which one I do. I care deeply, but it's going to be an individual choice as to how you rename your files. All right, so now you know how to make your templates, and I'm going to go back to the final naming convention. All right, so that will rename on import let's. Take a look at what else we could apply during import so we can apply develop settings, meta data and key words. So develop settings. Interesting idea. If you were a photographer in the past, you might have chosen a different film for your portrait work versus your landscape work. Like maybe you liked fuji film because you liked how vibrant the colors were if he went outdoors. So anything that you do in the developed module, like if you increase saturation, if you give your images a little s curve to give them more contrast, you can say that is a preset, and all of those presets can be applied here on import. So this could save you a step like if you knew you were going to convert all of your images to black and white you just say, oh, well let's go ahead and use one of these black and white preset is it a permanent change? No anything you doing light room you can always take off so don't worry about that in fact, while we're talking about that, I get a large number of e mails of people asking like what would happen if I did this this and this so what I always do is I always keep, like twenty files on hand that I don't care about that I could just take those twenty files and tested like, well, what what happens if I rename it like this? I'm no here's twenty files it won't hurt you to test it and I promise it will take you less time to test it than to email me and you'll get the results way faster because I'm not speedy on email okay? All right, so any of those presets you can actually add right here while you're importing, you don't have to if you don't want tio metadata, I would strongly strongly recommend that you d'oh right? So meta data here you're going to want to add information, so here I've got some presets we'll go in here and we'll go ahead and let's edit the presense just so that I can kind of cheat a little bit here, so I don't have to type in all this information, I'll just pick one of my presets, and it will fill in the data so you can see right down here like the ptc, my copyright information, I want that applied to all of my images, and why not do it on import? So this is going to apply the copyright it's going market as copyrighted it's going to give a u r l so that if somebody finds my image online and they want to know who photographed it or how to contact me, that's all of this information down here and it is super important, I mean, if you're especially if you're selling stock or something, you know that an art director is not going to stay at a company forever. So if you've sold their work to one, our director and, you know, embed this information in your file, how's the next art director going to know where that image came from her house, the next client who sees your work on the web going nowhere. That image came from so super important, so you would just fill in all the data that you want, tio now again, right now, because I'm doing this and on import it's going toe import this data to all of my files if you had something like just a little bit of messaging or some other template you can add more than one template all right? So once you get this filled in just like we did with the file naming preset you would just come and save this currents and as a new precinct so we could do a c l jay cost meta data all right click create and then done and then that appears on the list so all that information is going to be applied directly on import and the nice thing I mean once you've done this like you don't have to do it again I think the hardest thing is the first time you walked through light room because you're setting up all these templates after you've set him up we'll never have to do me in all right now keyword here I could get a little bit specific so the's air all cactus um they're all still life they're all what else I could say they were all photographed in san jose and that's in california so you can enter in as many key words you want here but you want to be careful because they might not all be cactus right but minor because these were just have these crazy cactus they are so neat looking they love him well maybe you won't think they're needed but look at that and you know what someone's going to say they're not cactus their succulence I don't know they should come and key word my images of people from the desert with us so perhaps that was the house we'll get some of those comments will wait to see okay well, like an orchid to may no, no no. Ok, not a market. All right, so I'm just warning, you know, like, if I had a mixed a number of images, some daisies or some roses in here or something, I wouldn't want to put cactus because this is going to be applied to all of the images. All right, what else can we do here? We need to pick our destination. This is the most important thing and that is what people always forget that can can already and they imported and they're like huh? When my pictures go so you gotta pay attention to where your destination is. Now there are two shortcuts which is really nice. This little arrow right here this little arrow actually would take you quickly to the desktop if you wanted to navigate their and same with over here, you can see that I can quickly go teo recent sources and stuff but if I wanted to save to the desktop that's how I would do it, I don't want to go to my creative life folder inside here, you can see it's like organizing this whole structure based on date and that's, because I haven't organized by date right here, I'm actually not going to do that. I'm going to say please organize into a sub folder. I'm going to name that folder cactus and I'm not going to organize by date I'm going put them all into one folder, so now you can see that in the creative live folder I'm gonna get one folder called cactus I actually know what I'm going to drop down one more I'm gonna go inside my image vault because this is where my photos are you can say about another folder there called australia, so I'm gonna import them all here at that point, what other things do I just need to tell you? You can choose to eject after import if you want to, you can see how many gigs of data oh, ok, five gigs we probably don't need to wait for five gigs tio to download so let's do this. This is a good feature as well. When would you want to do this? I'm not sure when you would want to do it, I just want to do it for my demo, I don't wantto import all of them, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to say uncheck all and then I'm just going to say, you know what I just want for right now for the demo, I just want to import these, so I've got him all selected. I just used the operating system keyboard shortcuts, so I selected the first one held down the shift key selected the last one, and then I can just click on the check mark and they'll all be checked because they were already selected. So now I'm only important importing eighteen photos four hundred twenty seven makes all right, we can sort in different manners final name, media type captured time if you want to, you could make your thumbnails larger, smaller. I think we talked about that, so I think that should do it so you can also make a present. So if you're constantly importing to the same location, using the same settings, make a preset that's, what light room is so good at is automating things, and I'll tell you when you're in a hurry, if you've already got your final naming and you already got your metadata template and you've already got your import preset, you've already got your develop setting presets and everything. You're not going to make those mistakes that you make when you're tired and you're in a hurry and you've got to choose all of these different options. All right, so try to make your presets so you can see if I said save the current settings, it would just name it and it's going to create a preset with all of this. So for example, I have a specific folder where I download all the instagram images that I have, and it always goes the same folder, and I always want the same key words applied all you though you can, you can change the key words if you want to, but it just tidies it up, so I have to click one button and everything imports all right, so I don't need to guess so. The question is, is a preset? Are there any options that cannot be saved as a preset? Probably. I hate to say no, you know, like absolute because someone will find something it's going to save your source, your destination and all of these options and your copy options and stuff whether or not it's sticky too, like your zoom level that I don't know, but I don't think that would matter as much. So I'll say the blanket statement is yes, everything that's useful it's going to save, including like your destination area and whether or not you're going imported into one sub folder, and in fact, if I use this little triangle right down here we or if you can you can tap the tab key then you go into kind of this condense mode so that you could go in and say oh yes I want to use that pre set but you still have access to it here so you could say oh yes my folder has now changed its not a cactus it's going to be the southwest right so now every time I import all the settings would come up as the presets say but I could say all right, well, this is quick I'll just southwest and maybe I need to change my metadata preset or my key words yeah ok so let's go ahead and import those but I want that in the cactus folder way have important and those will come on over all right? So you can see that it's copying the files and importing them oh, I've gone into this kind of other screen mode if you hold down the shift key and you tap the ft f as in frank it toggles you through three different screen views, so this is kind of your basic screen view. See this little bar right up here like that's wasting screen real estate I told you I'm very tidy, so shift after will hide that little bar and then shift f again hide your menus at the top but as soon as you position your cursor and you go on top of them and use their up there so you can access them all right, so two operations are in progress. The first thing it's doing is it's copying those files and the second thing that's doing is it's building those previews and if we hover on top of the the two options here it'll actually tell you what it's doing all right so it's going to tell me that they were built and that's very kind of it and I appreciate that and I'm sincere and I lifeflight room but I don't ever need it to show me that again so we will make it be a little less chatty and just say ok all right so if we look at the catalogue area we brought in eighteen photos those air all my photos that's, my previous import and that's how many photos I now having this catalog all right, so let me show you now so that's a great way to import files it's great and tons and tons and tons of people important files like that I actually do a little differently. I take the images off my card not using light room I copy them through the operating system so I would come in here and in my operating system I would go and I would find my drive so let's say I told it to eject after it it was finished copy and so I just unplugged the card and put the card reader back in so that it would show up here yes, we don't need that so in the operating system here we should see this digital alright camera so I would come in here manually through the operating system, select all these files and copy into my hard drive. Why do I do this? Because usually when I go out shooting I will photograph all day and so I'll have multiple cards and so what I want to do is I just want to sit here and go from one car to the next and I just want them all in my hard drive and then I'm gonna use light room and I'm gonna import them all at once because even if I have multiple card readers light room can on ly download from one card at a time so in citizen and be like, ok, download from that card and wait, wait, wait, wait, wait and then put in the next card and then download on wait, wait, wait, wait, wait and then go who are the cards on my left side? Are these the ones I download their the cards on the right side? The one I you know and I would forget because I would see a shiny object and then I wouldn't remember, so I download them all, and then I import them all at once and just between you and me without letting the product managers know. I don't know why, but it is much faster it's much faster to do it this way. It is faster to copy the files through the operating system, to your drive and then have light room import them. I don't know why we might not know why if we knew why we'd probably make it faster. All right, so the second way is, and we're just going to pretend here that I have already done this because I have inside this creative life. Older, I have my little image vault, all right, you might have a folder called pictures. You might save your pictures to your pictures folder again. It doesn't matter where you save your pictures, they could be your internal drive that could be your external drive. There could be a network drive. Just know that you want to put your pictures and your fastest drive, so a lot of folks put there. Current work the work that they're doing and working on right now on their internal drives but then they won't have enough space for everything so they'll have their external drives like their raid drives and everything that have kind of all of their either archives are all just calling that's just my body of work, right? So I have, you know, one hundred thousand images on an external rate I can't if it that many images on this internal drive and this internal drive as a solid state drives so it's quite zippy, so I like to take advantage of that. All right? So I've got my image vault here we've got australia and the cactus folder, so this folder light room has no idea that that folder exists because I haven't told it that it exists. So in order to do that, if you've copied your file's already the hard drive, all we need to do is say, import, which, really, what we're doing is we're making light room aware of the images so here instead of bringing them in on the on the card and look, you can see because I have this don't import suspected duplicates, you can see they're all great out it's like, no, those files already in there, but we're going to navigate, so I'm going to use the arrow here to go to my desktop and then we're gonna look we're going to go into the creative life older and they were going to go into my image vault and by the way sometimes and I know this because when you guys will open up another very robust catalog it minute and you'll see how many like sub folders I go, so if you don't want to see anything else that if we just want to look at this creative life older and nothing else, I can dock it by double clicking on it and then look like yeah, it still shows me user jay cost desktop, but it doesn't show me all those other folders, which is quite nice and tidy, so I'm gonna go ahead and select the australia folder I'm going to add it, I'm not going to copy it already copied it it's already where I want it, I just want to add it, I want to make light room aware of this folder and now I have a few fewer options over here for a file handling we see the same things except I can't make a second copy because it's like no you already completed so you I'm assuming that you're taking care about if you're so smart that you don't let me import, then I'm not going to make an extra copy for you alright then apply during important we've got all these options so when we add the files, if they're already on my hard drive, I can't match the name on import, but I can always battery name later, and I'll show you guys have, all right, so we're going to apply no develop settings were going to apply our metadata, and we're going to apply keywords australia and I'm adding a comment after each key word that will separate your key words. So you want to add, like, australia comma, but here's a good example where I wouldn't want to add, like tree because not all of my images have trees or seaweed or whatever. All right, so now I'll go ahead and import these, make sure I'm good to go here. Okay, so we'll import those and this is going to a lot faster because light room doesn't have to copy the files. I already copied the files, but even like I'm not trying to fool you like even though the time that I copied the files, plus the time I have to come in here and do that light room import is still gonna be shorter than copying from the external card, but it's quite convenient. So I think that's why people do it because until I figured out that it's slower, I I always did it this way. All right? So it's importing those now we can see if we go to the catalogue area. We've got all of our photographs here. We now have one hundred sixty of them previous import was one hundred forty two here's our two separate folders, australia and the cactus folder and there's some preferences that I want to show you. So I'm gonna go into the light room menu. If you're on windows, you go into the edit menu come over here to your preferences, here's the preference to show the import dialogue when the memory cards direct detected. So I don't care for that because every time I plug in, like then it's going to pop open and I don't want that because member, I'm copying the of the operating system select the current previous import collection during import. That just means that if I'm off in some other folder like let's say I was in the cactus folder and I imported the australia folder light room's going to change its focus to the folder that I'm importing, some people like that, some people don't so that's the choice right here, you can turn that on or off all right while we're in here, I'm going to scoot over to the catalog settings as well. So I can use the little button right here to go to the catalogue settings, or if you weren't in this dialogue, you could come up here to light room and you could go to your catalog settings, so we have preferences, which are the preferences for the application for the light room application, but we know we have an application, and then we have the light room catalog or database, and since you can make multiple catalogs, we need to have setting that air specific just to those cattle locks. Now, personally, I only use one catalog that's kind of a lie because I have a demo catalog and I have my home catalog for my real work. I know that people use catalogs sometimes for every job, which is fine, especially like if you're a wedding photographer, air portrait photographer and you really are never going to go back to those images again. But I need access to all my photos because I do my composite work and it's like, well, I want to cloud photo well, I don't want to have to open a bunch of different catalogues because you cannot search across multiple catalogues, so that's, the big draw back and I don't I have a hard time imagining that that would happen soon I can't talk about announced products. So I go to my catalog sevens and just so you know, here under the file handling this is actually where you would tell it what size you want those standard previews so when I built those standard previews, my standard size is pretty small if I'm on like a big cinema display monitor, I want to make sure that I put this up to twenty eight eighty because otherwise if I'm making little teeny standard previews and my monitors really big when I'm in the library module and I moved from one image to the next in the loop view it's going to say, oh, I only have a thousand pixels across and you can see more, so now I need to redo the preview like, well, wait why'd I spend all that time doing it so this is a very important setting I should have gotten here first and set this up to twenty eight meeting because I have a high resolution monitor, so that will make it much easier when I now am in luke view many and I double click and I move from one image to the next and I'm just doing that using my arrow keys all right because otherwise it's going to say oh, I built an image preview that's really small and you have more space and now I need to build a bigger one and it's gonna have to redo it all again okay, all right, so we should talk about new folders so here's where light room you got to know this because it's a database program you really want to move around files within the database program because if you import your files in the white room and then you quit light room and you move files around behind light rooms back like rooms, I got to know where they are right like a flight rooms quit and you're on the operating system and you move a folder of images from a to b light room next time you launch it lightens were like, hey, hey, I have a question you told me where some files were and they're not there you'll be like, oh sorry you'll say my bad you'll apologize and then you'll have to really your files it's easier if you just do that through the folder area so there's a plus icon here here's where we add a folder or a sub folder all right, I can add a folder anywhere I can add a folder on an internal drive I can add a folder on an external drive we'll do that in just a minute right now I want to add a sub folder because if we are in this australia folder and I tapped the geeky look at we've got the grid in the loop you write like we did in the import dialog box if I tap the geeky and then we come down here, you can see I have a whole bunch of images that look very similar. All right? These this is just a time lapse, a sequence of images, you know, I'm at the same place and then my photograph and in every like five seconds and then this giant boat comes by, so I would like to separate these out. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on the first image in the siri's, and then I'm just going to scroll down, and then I'm gonna hold down the shift key, and I'm gonna click on the last image of the siri's. Now you don't have to select them before I just figure that's just the way my brain works like I'm going to select the images and then I'm gonna make a new folder and put the images in there. I could just make a new folder and then go selecting images and drag him. It doesn't matter which way, so we click the plus we add a sub folder because I wanted to go inside australia, we'll call it time lapse all include the selected photos hit, create and light room actually moved those files on the hard drive, it actually created the folder on the hard drive, and it moved the files on the hard drive. Do not be afraid of this at any point in time. Really? Yeah, like for like what do you mean it moved it and let's go look let's go look on the finder here's australia, here's all my images ah, but wait at the very bottom we have a time lapse folder and that's where all those images are and if we don't know where those files are, which I can't imagine, I'm sure we all know where all our files are all the time it's like not knowing where your children are. Ok, you can control click or right mouse click on windows and you could just say, can you show me that in the finder polite I am could you please could you show me that in the finder? I'd love to know where that file is. Oh, it's right there. Great. I feel secure and where my files are. Okay, so we'll close that so that's how you would make a sub folder? We can see that sub folder here but the thing is something is awfully weird. I'm in light room I'm in australia but I can see all the images in the time lapse older if I was in the operating system like we just were, you would just see the folder you wouldn't see the contents of the sub fuller I'm actually seeing the contents of the time lapse folder with in this folder so why is that happening? Because we have an option here under library to either show or not the photos in the sub folders so when I turn this off now all of a sudden I'm in the australia folder and that the total count went down to like seventy six and I can't see the folders or the images in that sub folder I'd have to go down to time lapse and see that now what if I wanted tio make another folder like a parent folder what if I wanted to see where are these folders these two folders on my hard drive well again you khun right mouse click or control click and then you can say could you show this parent folder this is oh well sure I will show your director if you want to see more of your directory or path I can show that to sew on your hard drive you folder called image vault inside there you have australian cactus you say ah but I wanted to folder called two thousand thirteen so that I could put australian cactus in there not a problem just goto image ball add your sub folder two thousand thirteen it create and then grab australia grabbed cactus you can move more than one folder at a time the sub folders going to move with it and just drag it there and it's moved it on your hard drive so you can do whatever you want here if I want to move those time lapse images if I want to move these sixty six images to this external drive I can't see the external drive all I can see is my mac hard drive right here uh but we can say hey can you add a sub folder oh no not a sub folder sorry can we add a regular folder and now I've just got the operating system to navigate so I say yeah we need to add that own ox see how sincere hugs kisses ox ugly dolls anyone okay never mind maybe someone online we'll know in an ugly doll is it's a thing okay, so we create a new folder here called new folder and we call it and we look and see if already have something called archive adobe archive me so no, this is fine so we'll hit archive and then we'll hit choose and then sure enough look it now I've got my man car drive and I've got my external drive called ox and there's my folder called are ok and I go to my time lapse and I move these now here's an important safety tip though I'm actually moving them I'm not making a copy of them if we were using our operating system we would be making a copy to that external drive, right? Because any time you take something from one drive to another, the operating system copies it light rooms like, no, no, no, you've got one set of master files. You want me to move it over there, I'll move it over there, but it won't be over here anymore. I've moved it, okay, so there's, a little bit unique, but otherwise that one of the biggest complaints we get, people who don't know where their images are, and they don't. They have, like all, they all have copies of them everywhere. So you kind of get your archive and backup, which we will talk about the end of tomorrow, because if I talk about right now, your heads will explode.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

LR5 Shortcuts Tips and Quick Reference Guide.pdf

Free Bonus Material

LR5 Develop Module Shortcuts Tips and Quick Reference Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Valerie Pinsent
 

Julieanne Kost has an amazing way of sharing her knowledge on photoshop Lightroom, with humour and simplicity that keeps you wanting more. The 2 days that this workshop lasted could have seemed long but was in fact very, very short. This course gives you all the ropes to use this amazing program, with all its shortcuts and techniques that probably aren't in manuals with a few extras from photoshop which are just as amazing. She is so contagious that you want to pull an 'all-nighter' just to put in practice all the wonderfull things one has learned. Thank you very much Julieanne!!!

a Creativelive Student
 

I follow Julieanne on FB and on her blog, and looked forward to this event. It did not disappoint, and in fact offered a few surprises. The exactitude of her content is always there. But the free-form, informal nature of this course kept it engaging over the many hours. I admire her style of speaking seamlessly to all skill and experience levels at once. Quite a trick -- I've had the good fortune to learn from the best, and I count Julieanne among them.

Julie Coder
 

I started using LR about a year ago, but I hadn't yet set up my database and work flow process. This class was perfect and really helped me dive deeper into into the program. Julieanne knows her stuff, and she provides some excellent tips for both organization and editing. Love her teaching style, as well as her photography. Some of the more recent tools (such as the range mask) are not covered, but the content is still relevant and Julieanne's tips are fantastic. Highly recommend!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES