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Lesson Info

Add Keywords to Images

Let's talk about keywording our images. So, the whole idea behind why we do all of this, why we have an organizer, I mean, you could just have a file browser, right? Like, you probably got some software that came with your camera that includes being able to browse your hard drive and browse your folders of images. So, why not just use that? Why not just use Windows Explorer or Finder? Well, the answer is, not only are those kind of slow sometimes, but we want to be able to do more than just browse our images. We want to be able to actually find them and obviously some of us have lots of images on our hard drives and it can be a real mess to find what you're looking for if you're not organized. So, the definition of organized will vary from person to person. Some people think they're organized if they, you know, at least know where their memory cards are. So, that's one end of the spectrum. Other people have everything perfectly downloaded and everything super labeled, they've keyworded...

, you know, everything just over the fence and beyond. Just extreme keywording and that's awesome. They can find all kinds of things, but that's gonna be, you know, more maintenance. So, you just wanna find a happy medium. The goal of this is to not feel like you have to keyword every image and you have to come up with every possible keyword. You only need to do what's gonna be useful to you. So, maybe you only care about like, 10 different keywords. Maybe you care more or less. Maybe you don't use keywords at all. Maybe you rely more on the places tags that I'm gonna show you or the events tag or maybe you just really rely on the date and time stamp and I'm gonna show you how that works. Personally, that's one of my favorite ways of finding images. So, I'll show you how that is, but first we're gonna take a look at keywords. So, the keywords panel can be found over here at the bottom of your, bottom right corner, of the workspace. If it's not opened already, you can click over here to add it and I've prepared a folder of images to be able to talk to you about keywords. So, I'm gonna navigate to that collection of images by clicking over here and I just have this little grouping with some images that we're gonna add keywords to. So, keywords are just like what they sound like. They're just like little labels to tag your images with and by default, Photoshop has created four different categories of keywords. So, we have nature keywords, color keywords, photography, and other. So, that's great, but I feel like I have a lot of my own that I would rather use. So, in this particular micro sample of my image catalog, there's basically three things that I would want to keyword, three different types of images. So, the way that I'm choosing these keywords are just things that I want to be able to search for that are not necessarily people because there's another way to handle people tags and it works pretty well, it's kind of amazing. So, the keywords that I care about are things that are not people, they're not places, and they're not events because those are going to be handled elsewhere. So, some things about my personal life that I like to tag are: I happen to be really into crochet and I do a lot of crochet pieces and I often photograph them. So, I would want to be able to find my crochet photos and on my hard drive, those crochet photos are often scattered all over the place because, you know, I've been doing it for a couple years now and so, if I were to try to just put them all in one folder, that's not gonna work because I label my folders by download date most of the time and so it just depends whenever I download the image, it's gonna be in a different date folder. So, I wanna be able to search across my whole hard drive and find all my crochet images no matter what folder they happen to be in and that's where these keywords come in handy and crochet is obviously not a person or a place or and event, necessarily. So, this is a perfect candidate for keywording. So, let's go ahead and create that keyword. Over here in the tags panel, we've got keywords, people tags, places tags, and events. So, obviously we'll talk about these separately in a little bit. So, we're just focusing up here on keywords. The best place to start is with this little plus over here in the corner. So, I will click on that and it's gonna ask me to create a new keyword tag and I'm just gonna call this crochet and I'll click OK. Oh, and it's asking me to specify a category. So, I need to decide where I want to put this. So, my choices right now are nature, color, photography, or other. I'll go ahead and put that in other and I'm gonna click OK. So, nothing much happens other than there's now a tag over here for the crochet keyword. So, we can go through this little assortment of images and select the images that I want to apply this keyword to. So, like this right here is an example of it. So, I'm gonna hold down the command or ctrl key and scroll and click through this collection. Heres some more different things. I do it a lot for baby gifts for people, makes a great gift. There we go. So, those are all the crochet images that I have in this little section. So, to apply the actual keyword to those images, I just click and drag the actual word crochet over here, I'm just gonna drag it and I can drop it on any one of these selected images. So, I'll just let go and that's it. It gets applied to the photos and you could see temporarily, at least, you could see that there was a little icon here that popped up and that let just me know, visually, that I've applied a keyword, but other than that, I'm not seeing any proof that they have actually been tagged. So, you just have to keep in mind that you may not see proof. It depends on your zoom level. If I come down here to my zoom slider and I zoom in, I can see that there's a little tag that corresponds to each of these images that I've tagged. So, that lets me know that there's some kind of tag applied to this. I can't tell from here what tag it is, but I know that there is a tag. Also, if I come up to the view menu and I hide the details, then I won't see even that little icon. So, you just have to keep in mind that you might not have visual proof right away that you've actually tagged those images, but I'll show you in a minute when we search that, you know, you can see that it's actually working. Now, what if you accidentally tag an image you don't mean to? So, let's say that I accidentally tag these peppers with the crochet keyword and I just realized it. Oh, oops, I did that. All I have to do to fix it is right click on the image and then over here we have Remove Keyword Tag from this context menu and I can see right here there's only one keyword tag applied and that is crochet and that is not an image that should have a crochet tag. So, I'm gonna go ahead an click to remove the keyword from this image. So, how does this benefit us now that we've got some images tagged with crochet? Here's how that works. Let's say that I'm looking at my whole collection of all my media. So, that could be thousands of pictures at this point. If I wanna see all my crochet images at any time, I can just click right here and it's that fast. So, you just put a little search goggles right here in this little, I call it a well or a socket, a little socket here next to the crochet keyword. All you have to do is click in that socket and instantly, I mean, it really is fast. It instantly pulled up those images. So, what I like about it is you don't have to wait. It's not like when you search your hard drive for a file or a folder or something and, you know, you sort of cross your fingers and think oh, is this gonna work and you type it in and then you get an hourglass or a spinning wheel or something and it takes forever and it searches. This is, it's less of a search and more of a find. It's gonna find those images instantly. So, that's pretty awesome. To cancel the search, you can do one of two things: you can click that little socket again to just un-search, I guess, or if we turn that back on, you can also come up here at the top of the workspace and click all media. So, this is kind of your return back to all my media view and if I click that, that will just show me my whole catalog again. So, let's do a couple of others. I'm gonna go back to that keywords folder and we'll make a couple other ones. So, I'm gonna click, this time, instead of clicking the plus which just directly makes a new keyword, we could also click this drop down arrow. So, I can see I have a few more options. I could decide instead to create a new category. If I click on that, maybe I wanna call my category, like, crafts or something and I'll go ahead and pick an icon. You have to have an icon for craft, or for your categories. What would make a good craft icon? I don't know. A house because it's like home fun stuff? I don't know, we'll click OK. Now we see that I have a category for crafts. So, there's three levels of keywords. You can have categories, sub-categories, and keyword tags. That's the lowest level. So, that's what we made a minute ago; that's our crochet tag and I'm gonna show you how we could change that in a minute. For right now, let's add another just regular keyword. So, I'll just hit the plus and I'm just gonna make another keyword and we'll call it health & fitness. I've been on a fitness kick lately which, thank goodness, I always wonder, how do I successfully get myself on the kick for the times when I fall off the wagon, I wanna know how to get back on, but been on the wagon for a while, so that's good and I've been documenting some of that so it's kind of fun to look back when I need motivation to keep going, I can look back at some of the images of all the yummy things I've been eating and that's motivational. So, I wanna be able to find all of these things. So, we've created this Health & Fitness tag and I accidentally put it in crafts which is perfect because that's what happens and I'm gonna show you how to move it, but first I'm gonna tag these images. So, let's go ahead and grab the tag. I'm gonna drag it over and drop it on one of those images that I wanna tag. We can check, of course, that it's been tagged by doing a search and then we can see, oh look, there's all the fun stuff that we have tagged with health & fitness. Now, obviously, that probably doesn't belong in a folder called crafts, so we could just try to drag this out and it's not gonna let us. Instead, we're gonna right click and choose edit. We'll choose edit and from this drop down, we can choose the category we wanna put it in. It does have to be in a category so, you know, there's some strategy to this. I could think about well, this Health & Fitness, where would I wanna put that? Do I want a higher level category or can I just keep it as just a tag? And the answer is: you don't have to have a perfect answer right now. That's what's so beautiful about all of this is that is is flexible and editable. So, I can change it as I move along and my needs change or my interest change or my hobbies change. Maybe I get really into health and fitness and I decide, well now I want a category for health and fitness and maybe I want sub-categories for, like, meals and maybe I take a lot of pictures of yoga stuff and I could have another sub-category for, I don't know, weight lifting or something. So, you could really break this down as much as you want or as little as you want and keep in mind that it's all flexible. So, you don't have to know right now what the best answer is and I think that's actually a really key point because I know for myself, when I approach this, I get sort of paralyzed if I think I have to know everything right in this minute or if I think, you know, I can't get started until I know the perfect keyword structure. It's hard to get started and just start implementing this. So, just cut yourself some slack and know that you don't have to have the perfect structure. It's all editable. So, for right now, I'm gonna move the health & fitness tag out of the crafts category and I'm just gonna put in in other because I don't need to break it down further than that at this point, maybe someday, but right now I can just click OK and so Health & Fitness ends up in this other category. I would, however, like to move crochet to the crafts category. So, I'm gonna turn off the search right now and it seems like you could drag it. Sometimes, if you're really careful and you get in the right spot, it will work for you. So, you can drag and drop, which is nice. If it doesn't, if it's not cooperating or you're just having a hard time grabbing it, you can always at any time for any of these things, whether they are categories, sub-categories, or tags, you can always come up here and click the edit button and you can rename it, change the category, or another thing you could do is right click on the tag and can actually change this, for example, here's a good example, so under crafts, like, I told you I'm into crochet and it turns out if you are a big crochet nerd, you've realized there's different types of crochet, right? And there's different things you can make, of course. So, maybe, if I wanted to, I could even break down this crochet keyword and turn it into a sub-category. So, maybe I want to be more specific. Maybe I want to have blankets, perhaps, like crochet afghans. Maybe I want to have a separate keyword for crochet hats or something different yet for these little toys which are called amigurumi. So, I could break this down in whatever kind of way that I want. We could, I suppose, let's create this crochet, let's split that into a sub-category. So, to do that, I'll right click on it and I'm gonna change it from a keyword tag to a sub-category and I don't know that it's gonna show us anything different other than we know we did that. So, it's a sub-category now and that allows us to add more individual keywords underneath it. So, if I wanted to split this and let's say, let's make a keyword for hats. So, we'll make a new keyword here, new keyword tag. We'll put it in the crochet sub-category and I'm gonna call it hats. We'll click OK and let's see. I guess I don't have a lot of them in this catalog, just these pictures, I guess, are hats. Oh, there's hats in this one, too. So, we'll drag the hats keyword over there and then, I'm going to deselect all that stuff and go to back to this. This time we'll do, let's say, blankets. This time select those. Drag that keyword and we'll make one more. Gonna deselect all of that just by clicking away to deselect it and I'll make another keyword and this one will be amigurumi and that refers to all these cute little toys. Like mermaids, and robots, and these little things. Okay, so now I'll drag the amigurumi tag. So, let's take a peek at what just happened because this is pretty cool. So, if we want to do a search now across our whole catalog, let's return back to all our media. We can do searches for either any of our crafts, maybe I have other sub-categories, like maybe I wanna put a sewing sub-category or, you know, maybe I was a knitter. I'm not a knitter, but if I was, I could have a separate tag for knitting. We could have a sewing tab. I don't know, quilting, maybe? Whatever you wanna get into, however you wanna break it down, but just to illustrate that, we could have different multiple sub-categories within this crafts category, okay? So, I could view all of the crafts at once by just searching for the crafts right here for the crafts category or maybe I wanna see just... Just hats. So, then I could just come down here to click on hats. Maybe I wanna see hat pictures, but also blankets and images that have both of those things, so images that tagged with blankets and hats or maybe just blankets. So, you have a lot of options here or images that are amigurumi and blankets. You can see how this can make it really easy to find what you're looking for. Of course, I don't care about labeling every image in my catalog to this extent. You can see how this can get really detailed. So, I would only do this level of keywording for images that I want to be able to find in all these different ways. So, that's gonna vary, obviously, from person to person, but that is a look at the general keywords go. So, the main bullet points of working with keywords are there's three different levels: category, sub-category, and the actual keyword itself and you can rearrange them, so as you continue to add more images to your catalog or as your interest in hobbies and whatever it is that you're photographing and labeling, as that changes, you can adapt your keywords to be more useful. So, keep in mind that it's always editable.