Lessons

Lesson Info

Keywording Part 1

key words are just words you attach to your picture taken later search on it's similar having other metadata like your shutter speed and aperture setting weaken search on those things as well but with keywords it's text that we type in purposely there are many different areas where you can add keywords the first place you might notice it is in the import dialog box if I click on the import button in the lower left you remember how you could point this out of particular folder or a compact flash card on on the right side we could tell it where the images should be copied too well right above that is a field called keywords if you type anything into this dialog box it will tag all of the images you're about to import with those particular words you khun separate keywords with commas so let's say I was going to come in here and import a bunch of images from hong kong if I used the key word in the past it already exist it's been tagged on one of the pictures it will automatically try to co...

mplete it for me but if it hasn't been used in the past there won't be any auto complete but I could type in something like that maybe the location I was in and that could be also having do with countries states cities anything like that whatever it is though should apply all the images in that particular folder so most of the time when you put him in here they have to do of locations I'm not going to import any pictures right now because I don't want to take some other images with random words instead I've already done this awesome images and I just want to say what would happen if you've already gone through this process how easy it becomes to find your images and then if that's exciting to you we'll learn more about taking your images and all sorts of ways so we could make that process relatively easy so what I'm going to do is go appear the top of my catalog works is all photos I have two hundred and nineteen thousand photographs in my catalog at the moment how the heck am I supposed to find anything well going through the folder list is that going to be much help looking along the folder lists are instead I'm going to go up to the filter bar up here that's where we could filter by things like star ratings if he wanted to well one of the choices up there is to filter based on text so I'm going to choose text and then you can choose any kind of texts you would like to search on and if I zoom up here so you can see that here are the choices I have by choose any searchable field then it was search for file names boulder names keywords anything that would contain texts and I could try to find something or econ drill down into something that's more specific in this case I'm going to choose keywords now this is only going to search for things that I have purposely tagged on these images and I haven't taken all my images in here and only take some but let's see if I can come in here and maybe find a monk so I just type the word monk and look at how long it took for me to come in here now it thinks monk well isn't that the beginning of the word monkey is well eso if I want to get monkeys I just might continue on typing there and now I'm only seen monkeys or let's say I come in here in type in water well now look at how many images having to do with water I confined now the problem with this is if you tag too many images if you tag not only your good images but all of your image is the one's you haven't processed yet the ones that you might end up throwing away then what happens is eventually you come down here and you get this random collection of dunk where you're like why would I think of this stuff see that so when I first got into key wording I would keyword everything and just thinking that would be helpful and it can be helpful for some people that depends on your workflow oh if you end up taking everything so you get more these random pictures in here is well that aren't processed and cropped looking great then you can narrow down your selection further by coming in here in clicking on attributes appear at the top and if I choose attributes now aiken say sure show me the ones that have the keyword of water but why don't you show me the ones that have at least a one star above rating remember our rating system one star means we're to keep it and ignore it though so we're going to have too many images showing up in there it's going to still be a relatively long list I want to narrow it down further so let's tell it to do two stars or above and that's going to narrow it down even further if you want to see how many images you have down in the filmstrip you actually find some numbers and here it tells you we have one hundred three pictures right now out of my whole catalogue of this whereas when I had it set toe one star and above I had one hundred forty so I don't have that many one stars and if I didn't limit how many stars that I had I had eight hundred thirty eight showing up so you see how I can narrow it down so I can come in here and say I want pictures of water and I only want the really good ones all right here's the ones that are five stars or above well there's no above but five stars that have are tagged with water those probably going to be some pretty good ones and not all that many of them so other things I could search on first let's get rid of our star rating there and just go back to the the choice over here called text and we could just try searching for a whole bunch of things I want to see if I have oh let's see let's look for anything where I framed it like I put it within a frame usually use a doorways and archways and things will if I have tanked things with word frame I should be able to find a lot of images where I've used that technique of framing so now I could now I could look at that coming here and I can suddenly do a slide show of where I talk about framing it made him doing a talk on composition and I want to talk about how I used that as one of my techniques but I can type in whatever I want in the more words I type in if you look at how this is set it says contains all so that means if I come in here in type in let's say monk I could type in monk in then temple two words and that narrowed it down to one picture I have one picture that has a monkey in it and a temple in at the same time and therefore I can narrow it down if I had too many again I could go to my star ratings toe narrow it down further so is this sound kind of exciting as far as being able to find just about anything very quickly so let's look at various ways of key word in your images and let's look at some of the key words that I've applied to some of these images and it really depends on your particular workflow on ly tagged the images with things that are useful to you some people end up spending a ridiculous amount of time taking their images with things they've never even ever think of like blue sky in this picture if that's important to you find but otherwise it's just something else to clutter up your list of key words so over on the right side when I'm in the library is an area called key wording and when I click on a particular image it will show me the keywords that this particular image has been tagged with so this one if I look at the actual picture I'll hide the left side of my screen here you can see it's a monk and he is jumping between little parts here so it has the key word of jumping monk portfolio because it's something I might want to actually have in my portfolio and then temple because there's a religious place and I can change that word temple to something more specific if it's a stupid church or whatever where I could be more generic and say religious building you know that kind of stuff and I'll show you how to make it so you can have synonyms for this and organize these in useful ways so what I'm going to do is just throw some keywords on some images I have some images that I've pulled over here take me just a moment to find them all right so here are some key words or some images that need keywords if I click on this image over here in the keywords area you'll find it's empty nothing there all right so if I look at this particular image let's think about what I might keyword it with now is on ly ki wording it with things that would be useful to me personally if I think I want to locate this picture in the future so what I might think of in this particular case is a cow I just get the the comma I might think of graffiti and I've already used the word graffiti in the past so it auto completed it there and I don't have to continue typing the rest I can just hit the the kama key to say I wantto type in another one in this was taken in a place called cadillac ranch and so I'm going to take it with that in case I think of it based on its location so I start typing cadillac and I noticed that there's some words similar that one of which is cadillac ranch it's the second one down so you see use the arrow keys on my keyboard and just use the down arrow to get that and I'll hit the comma and I might also want to just tagged the word cadillac because that's the brand of carl it's there and I might be searching for certain brands of cars and so I mean again start typing c a d for cadillac and I find it press return to accept it now other things you could put in here if they were useful to you would be overcast or there's a little can of spray paint here spray paint or some other thing things like that but it I would only do that if you truly found it to be useful to find this particular picture but now whenever I go to the filter bar and I tell it to search for text until the keywords if I typed any of these words this photo would be part of the results now to make it finalized this is still highlighted in white medium still like able to type I'm just going to hit the return or enter key so that it just changes to gray meaning it's not active anymore and now that particular image has been tagged with those keywords so let's keep word a few other images I'm just going to press the right arrow key to switch to the next picture and this is a garage it's the interior garage is very old photo that I took it's grungy hdr but in order to find it in the future I think I would come in here in tag this with garage looks like I've used that key word before then I hit comma I'm going to say this is the interior of the garage and I'm going to call it a hdr because that's kind of a style that it is and I might also call it grunge grunge doesn't look like I've used before and it's not auto completing it now you're going to find though that the word grunge once I show you my list of key words which we haven't seen yet it's just going to be sitting there all on its own know that when I usually add a keyword I try to put it in an organization system which I'll show you in a few minutes but those are the ones that I might tag in this particular case I might if I think this place is abandoned also type in abandoned make sense so then I think I can find that picture based on those all right so here let's see it's a mine so I'm going to say looks like having done a mine before and what else would I call this one I could call it well it's a person in there so I can call ivan take help people and I don't know what else window maybe I could say it's a guy looking through a window in a mine but that find a picture for you that's what you want to think of is what words would you have in your head when you wanted to see this photo and so I might come in here and say window and maybe say rust because there's rusty things around it makes sense so now hopefully I'll be able to find that image but if you really don't think that those words are going to make you find it then think more about what would it be you can also be taken based on its location but I don't remember where I shot that at the moment but I can easily do that now this is a technique that I use cold light painting so I'm gonna do light and they're says like graffiti like painting like graffiti is usually when you concede e the actual strokes which is what this is so I'm going to take it with both light graffiti and like painting because lycra feeny is like a sub category of light painting and this is cadillac ranch style type cad alack ranch on and the time of day might be a clue for me to find this one this looks like it's twilight this guy's a little bit got a little bluer it's near either sunrise or sunset I don't remember but I'm going to call it twilight and so hopefully that's enough although I see some graffiti on the cars so I'm gonna type in graffiti okay now I'll take that one now it really all depends on do you really need to find this picture in the future if you don't don't tag it you know if you never need to see it there's no need to put keywords and stuff you never need to find but this is my buddy randy and death valley and those were the two words that I need to know so I'm going to say randy and I'm going to say death valley that valley national park and it's in hd are so I might take it with fdr so anyway so far all we've been doing is typing inwards and this is oftentimes what people do when they keyword they do it when they import the photos typing in the locations where they've captured the images and then sometimes they click on a few images and they add a few key words and that's a serious is they get but let's look at where those keywords kind of go because there's a list of all the ones you've used with all the photos you've ever have imported in the light room then really quick actually before you move on you mind if I ask you about entering uh suzanne matthew is wondering why you're typing in that big box not in the clique here tto add keywords panel beneath is there a difference between those two boxes there is a difference in this particular case there's not as much this is where you khun ad keywords in the setup I currently have up here I could either add them or if I go to a photo that already has them like this one I could edit them so if I want to remove a keyword come in here and say oh I didn't mean to put twilight on that and I could highlight it and hit the lead and then press return to say I'm done it will update the picture so down here I can't remove one I can only add them but the reason why that's there is because you can actually change what this displays and if you have it set to not be set to this thing called enter key words then this might not be available type in and if this is not available to type in then you'd have to use that part down there this part always works for typing and stuff this you can change based on this little menu and just to give you a preview remember we take these names well watch what happens if I say will export did you see a longer list it says america texas united states where did those come from I didn't type those in well those were automatically added based on what I typed in but only because I told it to be set up that way and that's what I want to get into in a minute here where you khun tag something with a very simple keyword in suddenly a whole bunch of other keywords will be associated with it but on ly if you have it set up that way I can also come in here and to give you a hint on what that is here it says keywords and containing keywords just think about that is if it was the word folders folders and the folders that contain them you know like you're deep in a folder structure but let's see now it's a little bit different tells me north america texas united states what where just gives you a hint that there's something going on I'm excited to see that let's see in the keywords bucks are their spaces after each comma or not can you use spaces in the keyword and then bob barr is also looking for advice about pleura ls and capitalization capitalization matter okay well first off you can use spaces in key words you could have like this one cadillac ranch with a space in between them I believe you can't have a space at the beginning of a keyword here it might look a cz if there is one that's just it trying to space these out to tell you what's attached and to make it so they're not crowded together with just a common between it automatically puts that space in just for formatting but I don't believe you can have a space at the beginning of a keyword the capitalization is up to you and it's good to have a standard and you can tell here I'm not standard because these are initial caps on everything is for light painting is small and so it's good to have a standard for that but when you search for them in the filter bar it ignores capitalization but also these get exported if you tell it to you when you send a photo to somebody else and if it's somebody that would actually look at the key words you might want to see what their standards are maybe it's a stock photo company that you're going to submit images to where they're going to sell the images for you people are going to find those images based on the key words you tag then you probably want to use their standards a lot of people will end up using on ly lower case just to keep it simple but it's up to you there's not a huge standard when it comes to the industry it's still developing so anyway the reason why there's this click here tto add keywords is if this is changed to one of these bottom two choices you can't click in this area to add anything it's just displaying what is attached to the picture and you'd have to use that so that's always safe but if this is set to the top choice which is just called anarchy words you can use either spot I'm just used to using this because sometimes I want to delete one or or something and I find that to be convenient then let's say that we're going to go to a car show and at a car show there are all sorts of brands of cars but some are pretty popular in common you're gonna have buick chevy cadillac forward you know all sorts of them we could have the keyword set let's say maybe instead we shoot weddings you might want to take bride groom wedding party reception that kind of stuff and just make it so you don't have to type them in all the time well there's an area just below where I could type in my key words down here called keywords set and if I open this up you can set up your own keywords and so let's see here I have my default keywords which is my wife's name my name the name we've given our one of our vehicles actually our home on then certain kinds of images hdr images panoramas the textures because I collect them to apply to pictures skies something you might use is a background replacement in light paintings so if I click on a picture and I want it let's see maybe I like the texture that's on the wall here my applied to an image I just click on the word texture here and you'll see it up above after I click it just tagged it with that so I could create these for whatever purpose I like if I go to the side menu that's here there's a choice called edit set and I could come in here and say ford hopes about spell ford it's gonna ignore the text that was there ok I can do chevy or chevrolet I could do whatever if I'm going to go to a car show and that's what I shoot on a regular basis I'm not going to do that instead I'll show you just a couple of the wounds that I used on a regular basis this is the one that's usually sitting there if I go here I'm a I live in a bus usually and there's vintage buses that I keep a lot of photos off these air the models that I keep track of and I came very quickly tagged them with its like me easily find the particular model so you maybe you're a indo some hobby and there's a very specific terms related to it you'll see that when I'm done with my rating system that we use from the star ratings I try to convert him over two key words and so we have rejects which are ones that could be deleted we have out takes which are ones that are the keeping ignore one's calm out takes there's rescues those are the ones that are two star above which means I hope I can rescue this with processing on there's things that are good for a slideshow portfolio and what I call a superhero but this will get into a little bit later this is how I convert them into key words but you can create these as much as many of these you find to be useful that's another way of applying keywords or right above that is an area called keywords suggestions and this is where it will try to figure out what it thinks would be appropriate based on the images you've been working on recently and you could click on these if you like them sometimes it's good at coming up with suggestions sometimes it's terrible uh it's just to see if you like it it's not that often I used that what I might use though is in the area below where I could set up my own presense there's just one called recent keyword and that I used quite often because oftentimes I'm looking at a folder that contains very similar stuff it has temples and buddhas and monks and all that stuff because I just came back from south east asia so if that's what I take recently I probably need him again and again they'll be sitting there all right so those are some other ways of adding keywords and that again it's the limit that some people put into key wording but that's not what it's exciting let's get into the exciting part there is nothing here called keyword list and if I open it it gives you a list of every keyword that you've ever applied to an image if you're one of the people that have only used keywords and the way I've described up until now this list will be chaotic it will be a random list of alphabetized words that you're like where did this list come from it might be five hundred words long it might be a thousand words long and it's just going to be an alphabetized list of all the key words you put in but look at mine first off there are some in here that we made today today we weren't made grunge mine randy and rust those air one I'd never used before and you see that they're just thrown in here well I wouldn't usually just throw him in here I would have used a system to put him in here where they wouldn't clutter the list and I'll share that system with you in a few moments now if you think about the use of what I do is I divide up my key words in the general categories of keywords and these are mine if you ignore the words we made today in this list in fact let me move them ignore how I'm moving them will show you in a minute you're not seeing any of this wait a minute okay and I put this you could put these in there where they should go close enough okay usually when I come to my list this is what it looks like so I take and think of all the key words that I'm tagging images and I put them into these general categories remember this list is alphabetically sorted so I'm not controlling the sword order if I wanted teo I could put numbers at the beginning of each of these two kind of force it to be sorted in a certain order but I find that with this few categories it's not really necessary insolence just kind of look into these and see how these things are structured and then I'll show you how to create a structure like this so first I'm going to hyuk who in with who I haven't really fleshed out who all that much yet right now it just creates contains people in something that I always put in called unsorted unsorted is where I put in new keywords where I haven't figured out where they should go within my structure which just means I don't want him to clutter my list so they're going to be in this thing called unsorted the reason it starts with the letters e is it makes it easy to tag I type the letter z in it suggests the choice of unsorted and there's a way I can add to that to say put this new one inside there I'll show you that in a few minutes but here I'll open this one called people inside I confined people based on their gender are they male or female and I haven't take that many it tells you how many because I'm just starting to put those in I rarely need to filter on those so I haven't made it a priority I can come in here into the role that they play are they chefs craftsman dancers dentist drivers guides and if I ever want to find every single photo that I've tagged with this particular keyword in my entire light room catalog all I need to do is move my mouse over it and on the right you see an era I'll tag it right there I just clicked on it and it just found all of the images that are tagged with actor and it's hard for you to tell cause there performers and costumes and things that are on stage really intricate stage here but it brought me to alter twenty two of whom are here I only have two chefs so I'll come in here it maybe make this a little bit bigger when you see people cooking there I have fifteen craftsman so these air people doing some sort of craft related thing and let's see I got four dancers I would dentist in here how the heck did dennis get in there you know that type of thing and I confined it with a single click here's just random tourists within my images so you can see how quickly you can find every single picture you've ever tag with that with one click of a little arrow the other thing you can do with the key word list if I go over to the images that I wanted to keyword I just have a folder here called keyword me I could come in here in click on a particular image here there's people so I might click on those two images I could select more than one at a time I'd like and I can say they're people so I just click there's a little kind of check box area to the left of any keyword over here if I click there it's going to take the images that I currently have selected and it's going to tag them with that particular keyword but if let's say I didn't have that there I just came in here and say what's their gender their males if I do that since this word male is inside this thing called gender it is inside this thing called people clicking right here just tag it with all those it so it it automatically gives them their parents or their containing key word and so that's how I could do something like tag something with the word cadillac ranch and if cadillac ranch happens to have a parent which is called texas which has a parent called united states which has a parent called north america all those things automatically get tagged along with it the moment I use the the uh the key word so if I look up here now in my key word being here it says the key words I've entered that's what I put on all they put on was male but if I changed this to say what would export with this if I actually export the file what are all the keywords that automatically got at it not the ones I manually put on you see how it automatically is going to put on people man male because that's the structure of what's there and in here if I say keywords and containing keywords it also mentions gender gender is keyword I told not to export because it's just for my use of categorizing things I'll show you how to do that so let's take a look at the structure a little bit more and I'll show you how to create your own structure but you can get a sense for some of mine in these air still very much developing because what's happened with me is I've been on the road for home alone like eight or nine years where I mean constantly about shooting and I'm doing stuff and then I right now have a time where I have about five months where I'm in one fixed location and I'm like I'm gonna finally go in there and develop my system and that's what I'm in the middle of so you're seeing kind of a in progress system here but you can see I've created something called role so I can easily organize thes they're not going to clutter up the list and they're relatively easy to find I also have when it comes to people I have a jj so I can see doe I want children babies adults elderly people that type of things that I find that occasionally it's nice to be able to find things based on that I have something called a roll which is what I've shown you and a style style is just what are people doing in the in the image right now photo bombs in a selfie you know kind of thing but I'll come up with other ones and I might rename that from style to something else if I find it to be more useful there's one here called model which are the names of people that I have shot and that's where randy should have gone when I posted take brandy so all I'm going to dio collapse down that thing called model and I'm going to take randy just drag him on top of it and he just went inside there if I now look under model I should be able to find randy and if I click there I can find that one photo so it's a matter of figuring out what you think would be the best way for your particular work flow to organize the words that you would tag mohr you organize them the more useful they become so we've only looked at the one called who let's just take a look a few of the others here's where so in here area of interest is where I'm just going to put generic categories that aren't like this covers multiple states and you know things that could be within the united states but I just put area of interest because I think I'm gonna have some other things that I'll be shooting where other things I need to categorize that won't be specific to a state it will be spread across so I might end up doing this but I can always decide later on to put this somewhere else and if I move this key word by clicking on it and dragging it somewhere else it automatically updates all images that are tagged with it so they automatically take on all the parent keywords and all that so it's like you can take it now and decide later where to put it in all those pictures will update which is I think really cool so there's continent and if I open that up here the various continents I can come in here and say africa and these are only the places I've been to in africa and aiken narrow down his faras I've keyword it whatever I found to be useful so let's come in here and look at maybe some in north america I'll go to the united states and let's go to probably been to a lot of places in california have to expand this out so you can see it so in california then I take different cities or various location's however I find it to be useful to find those photographs not sure what I put there's a sub topic of death valley there's a place called teapot junction you don't have to get this granular as faras getting down to those little details think about what would be helpful to you don't just do it because I have it there because what you do not want is an overly complex system that doesn't serve you you want to get this focus to exactly what would help you the most so that's a continent if you want to see other things I have museums and so in here I simply put the names of museums that I've shot at s o I can very quickly find those particular places I found it more useful to remember museums under the top of comfort museum because I'm not going to remember that the being no railroad museum is in where is it it's in atlanta I don't remember but I found I will remember that it's a museum and I can find it more quickly here national parks this is just some of the national parks not all my images are tagged yet I can very quickly get to them and then if there's a sub area within them that I find to be important I could do it because what's really cool about this is tagging one image with this automatically take is it that automatically takes it with this yeah I've only been across the atlantic on a boat so that's pictures I took in the middle of the ocean rooms this is where the interior that of that gas station got tagged so I know if I go to room I confined interiors and if I click this I should find it looks like I have two versions of that image but if I found it to be useful to find an image based on it there it is um I'll add more rooms as I find them to be useful I have state parks and then if later on I want to figure out where historic keyword I know it has to do with where the picture was taken not what senate or who's in it so I know it should be underwear but I don't know yet where it's going to go then I have this category called z unsorted and you'll see why it has the letter z itjust makes it easy to get to and it puts it at the bottom of the sorting but this is one where someday I'll figure out if it's in one of these other categories or if there should be some other way system for for that but for now I just don't want to clutter this list and that's why it's in that area so for win we have occasions birthdays conferences holidays we have seasons they want to find out my fault pictures time of day if I want to find everything that was shot let's see at night time during twilight all right here's fourteen pictures taken a twilight see how easy it was to find them but it takes time to develop your own list and if you invest that time if you ever invest the time to start the structure of these things like this you can start to find images like crazy and it becomes kind of exciting to be able to explore your archive and not have to use your brain to remember where things are instead you can very quickly get them and you can do fancy stuff here under years I put the various decades so I might take some just might be a car from the nineteen seventies that kind of thing or if I want a specific one I only put those in when I have something specific so nineteen sixty three I'm guessing it's a vehicle yeah it's my bus I have a nineteen sixty three bus nineteen sixty seven o k it's o sixty seven whatever it is but you could also get fancy by using sub ones so I call vintage anything that is in this range so if I want to search for the word vintage it's going to find everything that is tagged with anything inside of vintage that means it's going to find that nineteen fifty six whatever it is that thing when I typed the word vintage did I have to tag it with vintage no I just put the year of that vehicle on it it automatically tag dollars parents and it automatically made it so that I could do that so how do we do this stuff you know what is the contents is an activity and animal architecture all that kind of stuff in how it's different techniques that I use this in black and white is it a panorama was I panning the camera across was it a reflection let's look at pictures with reflections in them but it's on ly what's useful to you you probably don't need all the detail that I'm putting in mind so before I show you how to create these so that their nested within each other and I show you how to prevent them from exporting if they're ones that are only for you and I show you how to use synonyms so that when you tag the word cat you also get the word feline automatically without having to think about it what questions do we have about what I've shown you thus far amusingly enough you actually were answering questions okay they were being asked okay wth the only the only one that kind of I don't think you really covered with step land how do you organize a completely unorganized list if you've already got it in existence oh yeah and just need toe organize it you're gonna cover that yes I will beautiful so first we need to learn a little bit more about how you make these and then we can talk about how do you deal with what you got now