Lightroom Users – Photo Filing Tip

[Ian Crabtree]

After listening to Zach’s interview with Brian O’Keefe, I thought I’d share a tip for organizing your photos based on locations. I originally used keywords to attach locations to my images, and it was getting out of hand in deciding what tags to use. I stumbled across a video showing the capability of lightroom to automatically organize photos based on location.

You can either apply these tags on import, or you can retroactively edit the metadata for your library.

Like so:

After making all of the changes, you can browse through your photos based on location.

I’ve cut the number of keywords I’m using by two-thirds. It’s probably obvious to most of you, but thought it was worth sharing.

[Zach Matthews]

Actually that’s pretty awesome and I was totally unaware of it, Ian.

[Ian Crabtree]

Just highlight multiple groups of photos with a shift click if they’re in a row or cmd click to highlight random photos if they’re scattered, editing the metadata on the right will change the tag for all of the selected photos.

The browser on the left has a section for photos that haven’t had any location information attached to them that makes it easy to determine which photos haven’t been categorized yet. Photos without a country label will be identified as “unknown country” ones without a state – “unknown state” etc.

[Ian Crabtree]

Oh, and while I’m thinking of it. You can also filter photos with the metadata browser. For example if you’re looking for white river photos, you can navigate down through – us – arkansas – mt. home – white river. But… if you only want white river photos from say… 2004, then go through and select white river photos. Then, scroll up to the date section of the metadata browser and command click on 2004. This will only show you white river photos from 2004. You can also go even further by filtering for only photos taken with your D70… with a specific lens even. Amazing.

[Jeff Moore]

Zach,

What is the difference between “one of those GPS rigged cameras” and being able to record GPS data with your D200?

[Eric DeWitt]

I’ve been doing the exact same thing Ian, i was going to get a post going this week on that and some other workflow issues i wanted to get input from others on.

[Eric DeWitt]

Another cool thing i like is the easy number rating system, just hit a number, 0-5 as your are flipping thru, and then you can sort and view based on the rating system.

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