Finding, Filtering & Presets
Lesson 8 from: Organizing Your Images in Lightroom ClassicBen Willmore
Finding, Filtering & Presets
Lesson 8 from: Organizing Your Images in Lightroom ClassicBen Willmore
Lesson Info
8. Finding, Filtering & Presets
Lessons
Developing a Lightroom Mindset
08:30 2Unique File & Folder Names
18:13 3Implementing an Image Status System
12:47 4Organizing Projects with Collections
19:27 5Smart Collections for Utility & Collecting Common Subject Matter
08:39 6Color Labels on Steroids
13:20 7Keywording for Searchability
12:52 8Finding, Filtering & Presets
09:17Lesson Info
Finding, Filtering & Presets
Now let's look at various methods for finding images quickly. We've already discussed one of them in the section about key wording and that is that you can type the letters, command F. That keyboard shortcut, Control F and Windows to do a quick search and you can search based on keywords. Let's expand beyond that to see other methods for quickly finding your images. The first thing you want to do is on the left side of your screen, decide the scope of your search. Should it involve all the photographs in your entire lightroom catalog file. If so, click here or you can narrow your search based on folders or collections. In this case, I'm viewing a collection called panoramas which has 46 images. And so that's going to be what I'm searching then up here at the top of your screen is the filter bar. If the filter bar is not visible on your screen, near the upper right of your keyboard is the backslash key right above the return or enter key. And if you press that it will show or hide that ...
filter bar, typing, command F, Control F. And Windows will also make the filter bar visible. And it'll start a text search and a text search will allow you to search for keywords. But there are also other information you can search based on where I just have this set to any searchable field. Then you'll be searching for things like file names as well as keywords. But we've already done text searches when we talked about keywords. So let's look at the other choices that are available up here. The choice called attribute will present you with a series of icons. Let's just briefly look at what's there on the far right. We have the choice of searching for photographs for virtual copies or for videos. Then here we can narrow it down based on color labels. In a single click on one of these will limit what you're viewing or I notice in this folder, a lot of images have been raided with star ratings. Well here I can say I would like to see only images that are rated five stars or only images that are four stars. I can also right here say greater than or equal to and therefore I won't just see those four star images. I can also see five stars and so on. Uh and we can continue to narrow it down and if you right click here, you can have the choice to say make it exactly equal to and if so you'll see this change whereas before it was greater than or equal to. But if you click there, you can change it and then to turn off one of these, just click on the same choice a second time or in the upper right there's this little pop up menu cover this a little bit more. But if you choose the choice called filters off, then that should clear out just about everything in there. This is if the image has been edited or not edited and that would be mainly for raw files. If you have images that are layered, Photoshop files then this wouldn't truly be thinking about edits and then you can do your flag status. Is it a pick? Is it a reject or is it not flagged? But this becomes much more powerful when you go to this area called metadata. That's where you're going to have various columns at the top and clicking on the heading of each column. You can choose exactly what you're going to filter based on. For instance, maybe I want to see what type of files we have and I want to limit what I'm looking at. Two only tiff files. Then I can further limited by going to the next column to the right. We're already filtering to only viewing tiff files and now I want to view images that were shot with a Canon five D mark three and that further limits the images then I can go further to the right in further limit what I'm viewing in each one of these has a column. I could click on, I can say I want to look at what focal length these were shot with And you can also choose multiple choices in here. So if I want to get one's only shot with long lenses here, I'll click on the 280. I'll hold the shift key and also click back here at 182. So I get all the choices that are between those two. Further, narrow things down. Then I can go one more over to the right and maybe I want to come in here and look at aspect ratios. Obviously all panoramas will be landscapes, I could do landscape versus portrait or in here. Uh choose just about anything else. Maybe my ratings and I want to find images that are five stars. So now I've really limit this down because we're viewing only two files shot with a Canon five D. Mark three shot with one of these focal lengths and that is rated five stars. Now let's just say that that kind of a search is something that I need to perform regularly. If that's the case, go to the upper right where you find a little pop up menu, click there and there's a choice here called save current settings as new preset. If you choose that, you can give this a name, which I'm actually not going to do because I don't need to find this particular combination very frequently. But if I were to type in a name and click create, then that would appear in this menu and you can create as many of those presets as you'd like. Those presets also do not have to have anything chosen in each of the columns other than the heading names. If I chose the very top choice in each one of these of all, then we'd still be viewing every single picture that was in the folder or collection we're viewing but we would choose what populates the actual headings across the top of my screen, then I can save it as a preset over here. So here I have one of camera info and therefore I can very quickly narrow the images I'm viewing based on what camera shot at what lens focal length. And if the flash went off or I can come in here and say maybe I want possibly shallow depth of field. That's something I wanted to do before. And so here, I'm gonna say, let's make sure this is an aperture setting. And let's say since these are panoramas, these are only going to show me aperture settings that were actually used in these photographs. And so here we have narrow apertures. I'm going to go for a long focal length lens and then I should have things that could potentially have shallow depth of field. So if I click on an image and hit space bar to view it, I noticed the background is nice and blurry. Background is nice and blurry. And that allowed me to quickly do that. If that's something I need to do frequently save it as a preset and put it over here. Yeah. But then once you've dialed in exactly what you want up here, then there's a lock symbol on the right side, let's see what that does because if I change the collection or folder that I'm viewing. Watch this bar at the top the moment I click to go to another uh folder, a collection that gets cleared out. Where now if you look at it, the filter is set to none. I could always go to the upper right once again and possibly shallow depth of field to see if I happen to have any that conformed to it here. But again, if I switch to a different collection or a different folder that will be cleared out. Unless I click the lock symbol that's found in the upper right. When I click that lock symbol in the upper right now, I've locked this in where it's going to remain the same. Even if I come over here and switch between various folders or collections. And therefore, if I really wanted to find shallow depth of field, I could quickly navigate through everything to see if I find other images that conform to those settings. Just remember that lock symbol because if you have it turned on and you forget about it, then it's gonna be a little annoying when you're browsing your images. So remember that this is a preset. You can save your own preset right there. You can also delete any presets that you find you no longer need or you can also rename them. But we don't have to just use this filter bar at the top. You also have filter bars at the top of your collections and at the top of your folder list, I one of you all the images I've shot in texas. So I'm gonna go to the top of my folder list or I find the filter bar and I'm gonna type TX hoping that I have some folders that include the letter stx and you can see how quickly I can find them. I can do the same thing with collections. Let's say I want to find any collections that have to do with key wording because I teach keyword in quite a bit. I type keyword and now I can see all the collections that contain that particular word. So that should give you a sense for how to find your images. Using a combination of the features we talked about when discussing keywords and then using the filtering capability within Lightroom. Classic.
Ratings and Reviews
Deb Green
Brilliant in-depth, on-topic information well presented. Ben has forgotten more about LR than most people will ever know - his depth of knowledge is exceptional and he's also a polished presenter. Love the way each of Ben's words count, no chatter for the sake of it - straight to the point every time, but still engaging and friendly! I like the new office location, but do miss the excellent handouts that have come with Ben's earlier CreativeLive classes.
user-8a69fb
Ben is the best instructor! I have tried several different Lightroom organizational strategies from other instructors but find Ben's way is what works best for me. It is well thought out and makes working in Lightroom Classic a joy. Thank you Ben!
a Creativelive Student
Great ORGANIZATIONAL overview course for Lightroom Classic. Ben presents everything quite clearly. I've always been a "Collections/Sets" person and now considering working more within the Folders structure he presents. Which leads to a key concern - with Ben's "240,000" images in his Lightroom catalog - I wondered about discussing how to use Preview types (since they chew up space, and the discussion about local/internal image storage vs. external storage is an important one). Also with that type of quite detailed folder and photo naming structures, I wonder how often he runs into "character length restrictions" Overall, great organizational info and I picked up a few things, as always. Would recommend it for anyone new to Lightroom Classic or NOT new to Lightroom Classic. It's never too late to learn things or - in this case - move photos to another organization type! :)