Library and workflow
Navigating and organising images in Lightroom.
Library View
A Lightroom catalog is made up of a folder or series of folders that have been imported, and a series of collections of selected images for the imported folders.
Navigation Panels
Folders
The folders panel located on the left will indicate the physical disk or drive the images are located and the folder name of each import. Depending on which options you selected during import your folders may represent dates, or another file structure.
Each folder may contain subfolders and will indicate the number of images present in the folder. If you manually add images to the the folders without importing them with Lightroom, they won't show up in till you perform a synchronisation by right clicking on a folder and selecting "Synchronize Folder…".
Catalog
The catalog panel sits above the Folders panel and displays information about he number of images in the catalog.
You can select All Photographs, All synced Photographs Quick Collection +, or Previous Import to display the corresponding images.
Quick Collection is a way of quickly identify images you want to work with or add to a collection. Selecting an image in the image viewer and Pressing b on the keyboard will add the image to the the quick collection. Pressing b again will remove it.
You can clear or save a quick collection by right clicking Quick Collection in the catalog panel.
Image Viewer
The image viewer is where we can see all the images from the selected folder/s or collection/s. We can use the the + and - keys to zoom in and out to display more images or see larger images.
Ratings and Labels
Rating images
Images can be assigned a rating from 1 (★) to 5 (★★★★★) stars. with and image selected pressing a number for 1–5 will assign a corresponding star rating. 0 will remove the rating.
Star ratings are a handy way grouping images based on quality. Assign higher ratings to images you like more and lower rating to images that are less valuable. We can filter the images later using the Attributes to only display our best images.
Labels
Images can also be assigned labels. By default the labels are named and represented by colour. Red, Yellow, Green and Blue can can be assign to an image using the number 6–9. Pressing the number again will remove the label.
Views
At the bottom of the Images Viewer pane are five selectable views.
Grid
Grid is the default view. it displays all images based on the selected folder, and filter that have been applied.
Loupe
You can enter loupe view by clicking the loupe button or by double clicking an image. This view displays a single image and allow you to zoom in to see more detail. You select FIT, FILL, 1:1 or 1:2 from the top of the navigator pane to to zoom to the corresponding level.
Compare
Compare will display two selected images side by side and allow synchronised navigation. This is very use full when comparing two similar images or a before and after.
Survey
Survey displays all selected images on one screen removing any superfluous interface item. It eliminates the need to scroll to see additional images allows us to quickly compare the images.
Faces
This feature will help identify faces in your catalog and help build collections based on them.
Sorting and filters
We can apply sorting and filter options to the folder selected in Library >> Grid View to control which images will be displayed and in what order.
Sorting
Sort order is available from the bottom centre of the image viewer. The default option is usually set to Capture Time. This is the time recored by the camera when the images was captured.
It's really helpful if your cameras date and time are set correctly. especially if using multiple cameras.
Other useful sorting options include
- Added Order – This will display images in the order they were imported.
- Edit Time – Displays most recently edited images first
- File Name – Can be useful when using custom file names during import.
- Rating – Displays images in order of star ratings that have been applied.
Filters
filters are available from the top of the image viewer. The default option is usually set to None. This is indicated all images in the selected folder are visible.
Text
Text filters can be applied for Any Searchable Field or to a specific field. Fields refers to the the type of text, whether it's a file name, title, keyword or any other field that could be part of the metadata of the image.
You can choose whether your search must Contain Some or All, or Not Contain your query text.
Example
If you have added keywords to some of your images to indicate that they were shot during a particular part of and event. The Ceremony of a wedding. You could do a Text filter, against Keywords that contains "Ceremony". This would display only images that have the that keyword applied.
Attribute
Attributes in Lightroom refers to the values we we can apply to the images, Flags, Ratings and Colours.
You can select one or more Flags or Colours to filter.
With Star ratings to can choose whether you to display rating that are Greater than or equal to, Less than or equal to, or equal to the value you select.
Metadata
Metadata is information that is stored about the images of file that have be captured. We can use this data to filter the images to display.
By Default there will be four columns each with a different type of metadata that can be filtered. you can add or remove columns be clicking the contextual menu in the right corn of any of the columns.
Clicking the name of the column will allow you to chance the type of metadata to use for filtering.
The image below shows that all the images were shot with using 1 Camera, a Canon EOS 700D. 3 Lenses were used. Selecting 35mm would display the 6 images shot with that lens.
Filtering by camera and/or lens can be really useful on multi camera shoots, particularly if there is more than one photographer. Because each camera has different qualities that affect the images, you may want to apply the same correction to all images from one camera.
Saving filters
Filters can be saved by clicking the dropdown next to the padlock in the Image viewer.
Keywords and Metadata
metadata
metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. For digital images this includes the information relating to how the photo was captures, when it was captured, and can include lots of useful stuff like the location, the photographer and the camera and lens combination use.
Keywords
Keywords can be added to an image as additional metadata to aid our ability to search and sort our collections.
Lightroom has a few built in keyword sets that can be used, and the ability to create your own sets.
Keywords appear in the Keywording panel in Library mode. Each image can have multiple keywords, in a comma separated list.
we can use the Text or Metadata Library Filters to search for or filter our collections for keywords.