The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book: Managing Photos in the Library Module

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book: Managing Photos in the Library Module

Lightroom is designed to help you organize and catalog your images from the very first moment you import them. From there on, Lightroom provides a flexible system of file management that can free you from the rigid process of having to organize your images within system folders. Although Lightroom does still let you manage your photos by folders, it can also manage your images globally by letting you use metadata to filter your image selections.

A good example of how such a system works is to look at the way music files are managed on an iPod or by using iTunes. If you are familiar with importing music via iTunes, you know that it doesn't really matter which folders the MP3 files are stored in, so long as iTunes knows where all your music files are located. When you select a track to play on an iPod, you use metadata, such as the song title, album title, or genre to search for the music. Lightroom works in exactly the same way by encouraging you to add keywords and other metadata to your images either at the time of import or as you edit them in the Library module. Through the use of custom metadata and keywords, you can make image searching just as fast and easy as locating music on your iPod.

Working with metadata

With a folder-based organizational system, your file searching success will depend on your ability to memorize the folder structure of the hard drive and know where everything is stored. Anyone who is responsible for maintaining a large image archive will already be aware that this method of file management can soon become unwieldy. What is needed is a cataloging program that can help you keep track of everything. Therefore, the trend these days is to use file management by metadata, where you search for a file by searching its attributes instead of trying to remember which folders you put the pictures in.

As an image library grows, you will come to rely on the Lightroom Filter bar and Filmstrip filters to narrow selections of images. Some examples have already been given, such as the use of the Filmstrip filter to narrow a selection of photos and view only those images with ratings of 1 star or higher, 2-star images only, and so on. We have also looked at how to use the Folders panel to manage the image library. But the real power behind Lightroom is the database engine, which enables you to carry out specific searches and quickly help you find the photos you are looking for.

It is in no way mandatory that you follow all of the advice offered in this chapter, as each person will have his or her own particular image management requirements. You may, indeed, find that you just want to use the Folders panel to catalog your library images and that is enough to satisfy your needs. But one of the key things you will learn in this chapter is that the time invested in cataloging an image collection can pay huge dividends in terms of the time saved when tracking down those pictures later. The image management tools in Lightroom are far from being a complete asset management solution, but they do offer something for nearly everyone. Some people may find the cataloging tools in Lightroom insufficient. But even so, the data you input via Lightroom will be fully accessible in other image asset management programs.

The different types of metadata

Metadata is usually described as being data about data that is used to help categorize information. For example, a typical cable TV system will allow you to search for movies in a variety of ways. You can probably search for a movie title using the standard AZ listing, but you can also search by genre, release date, or even director. Lightroom also lets you organize your image files by metadata. For example, you can sort through images in various ways: by folder name, image rating, or favorite collections. By using the metadata information that is linked or embedded in the catalog photos, Lightroom is able to quickly search the database to help you find what you are looking for. This method of searching is far superior to searching by folder location or filename alone.

As I explained earlier, the way Lightroom uses metadata is fairly similar to the way a program like iTunes categorizes your music collection. For example, when you search for a music track on an MP3 player such as an iPod, instead of searching for specific tracks by opening named folders, you search for them using the metadata information that's embedded in the individual music files. In the case of MP3 files, when you buy a music track the necessary metadata information will already be embedded. But you can also use iTunes to automatically locate the metadata information for newly imported music CDs via an online database, or you can use iTunes to manually add or edit the tracks yourself.

NOTE

Remember, there can only be one physical copy of each image in the catalog, and a catalog image can only ever exist in one folder (or else it's unclassified).

The metadata used in Lightroom falls into several types. One type is informational metadata, such as the EXIF metadata that tells you things like which camera was used to take a photograph, along with other technical information such as the lens settings and image file type. In the case of Lightroom, most of the catalog information will have to be added manually by the person who took the photographs. Custom metadata is, therefore, information the user adds manually, such as who is in the photograph, where it was taken, how to contact the creator of the photograph, and the rights usages allowed. Another type of custom metadata is keywords, which again you have to enter manually. Keywords can be used to categorize the photos in your catalog, and if you are skilled at keywording, this can help you manage your photos extremely efficiently, as well as improve sales if you are in the business of supplying photos to an agency.

It is true that you will need to spend time entering all this metadata information (although there are various tips coming up in this chapter that show you how to avoid repetitively entering this data for every single image). But the trade-off is that the time invested in cataloging your images in the early stages will reap rewards later in the time saved retrieving your files. In most cases, you need to configure essential metadata only once to create a custom metadata template. You can then apply this bulk metadata automatically to a set of imported photos. You can take metadata cataloging further and assign custom metadata information to individual images. It really depends on whether this is important for the type of work you do. Basically, the effort spent adding metadata should always be proportional to how useful that information will be later.

There is a lot of detailed content coming up in this chapter about how to apply, edit, and use metadata. I thought, therefore, that the best way to introduce this subject would be to provide first a quick example of how metadata can be used to carry out a search of the Lightroom catalog.

A quick image search using metadata

One of the key features in Lightroom is the Filter bar, which can be accessed at the top of the content area whenever you are in the Library Grid view mode. The Filter bar combines text search, file attribute, and metadata search functionality all in one. The following steps suggest just one of the ways you can use a metadata filter search to find photos quickly and save a filter search as a permanent collection. We'll be looking at keywords and collections later in this chapter, but for now let's run through a typical image search procedure and thereby demonstrate the usefulness of tagging your photos with keywords.

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Let me begin by showing how you can search for photos quickly, without needing to refer to the folders that the images are stored in. In the example shown here, I wanted to search for photos taken in a town in Spain. Now let's say that I couldn't remember the actual name of the place I was looking for, but I did know that it was somewhere on the island of Mallorca. You need to be aware that the panels on the left define the source photos, and the Filter bar filters whatever is selected. To carry out a complete catalog filter search, I first selected All Photographs in the Catalog panel. I then went to the Filter bar, clicked the Text tab, set the text search criteria to Keywords, and typed Mallorca. This initial step filtered the entire catalog to display all photos that contained the keyword Mallorca.

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I have visited this island several times and taken over 1,700 photos there. To narrow the search, I clicked the Metadata tab. This revealed the Metadata search options, where I clicked the 2007 year date in the Date list.

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I could now see a narrowed set of keywords in the Keyword list next to the Date panel. As I expanded the Places keyword subfolders, I came across the keyword for the town of Sineuthat's the place I was looking for! I clicked the Attribute tab and then clicked the 2-star filter to narrow the selection further.

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I hid the Filter bar (), applied an Edit Select All to select all of the photos, and pressed the key to add the selected photos to a Quick Collection.

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I pressed again to reveal the Filter bar and did a new search. This time, I used a text search for photos with the keyword Malta and with a rating of two stars and higher. I again chose Edit Select All, and pressed to also add these to the current Quick Collection as well.

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The Quick Collection now contained 23 selected photos and it was time to make this temporary collection more permanent. I chose Edit Select All to select all of the photos, clicked the Add Collection button at the top of the Collections panel, selected the Create Collection option, and titled this new collection Mediterranean Towns.

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Here is the final stored collection, which represents the combined result of the two separate Lightroom catalog searches. This quick introduction by no means covers everything you need to know about metadata searches and collections. But it does at least give you a rough idea of how and why it is useful to use keywords to tag photos in the catalog and also why you don't necessarily need to be concerned with how the photos are actually stored in the system folders.

Metadata panel

Let's now look at the Metadata panel. video tutorials shows the default Metadata panel view, which displays a condensed list of file and camera information. At the top is the Metadata Preset menu with the same options as those found in the Import dialog Apply During Import panel (see page 140 for more about creating and applying metadata presets). Below this are fields that show basic information about the file such as the File Name and Folder. Underneath these are the Title, Caption, Copyright, Creator, and Location fields. These are all editable, and when you click in a blank field, you can enter custom metadata, such as the image title and copyright information. Below these are the image Rating and Label information, followed by the basic EXIF metadata items. This data is informational only and shows things like the file size dimensions, the camera used to take the photograph, camera settings, lens, and so forth.

Figure 4.1 Here is the default view of the Metadata panel information, which shows just the basic file info metadata. The action arrow buttons that appear in the Metadata panel views provide useful quick links. For example, if you click the Folder button (circled), this takes you directly to a view of the folder contents that the selected photo belongs to.

Many of the items in the Metadata panel have action arrows or other buttons to the right of each metadata list item. These provide additional functions. For example, if you click the action arrow button next to the Folder name (circled in Figure 4.1), this takes you directly to a Grid view of the source folder contents.

Metadata panel view modes

If the Metadata panel in your version of Lightroom looks different from the one shown in Figure 4.1, this is probably because you are using one of the ten other Metadata panel layout views. If you click the view menu shown in video tutorials, this lets you access the alternative Metadata panel view options (video tutorials compares some of the main Metadata panel view modes). Each photo can contain a huge amount of metadata information, so if you want to see everything, you can select the EXIF and IPTC view. But if you want to work with a more manageable Metadata panel view, I suggest you select a Metadata panel view more suited to the task at hand. For example, the EXIF view mode displays all the non-editable EXIF metadata, while the IPTC view mode concentrates on displaying the IPTC custom metadata fields only, and there is now also a new IPTC Extension view for displaying additional IPTC Extension data. The Large Caption view mode displays a nice, large Caption metadata field, which gives you lots of room in which to write a text caption. (The large caption space here does at least make the Caption field easy to targetclick anywhere in the Caption field and you can start typing.) While you are in data entry mode, hitting or allows you to add a carriage return in this field section instead of committing the text.

Figure 4.2 The Metadata view options.

Figure 4.3 This shows most of the different Metadata panel view modes in Lightroom 3.

The Location panel mode offers a metadata view that is perhaps more useful for reviewing travel photographs. And finally, the Minimal and Quick Describe view modes are suited for compact Metadata panel viewing, such as when working on a small-sized screen or laptop.

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