How does Lightroom help organise photos?

D

Dale_tem

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Dale
Edit My Images
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I've read lots that lightroom is great for organising photos, but how does it do it? What does it do?

What do people mean by workflow? Is this just selecting a group of photos and batch processing?

Perhaps I'm being dim and it doesn't do much but show thumbnails of folders , or I'm hoping it will do something amazing
 
Download the trial and find out would be my recommendation to you.

You can tag images in batch on import or individually if required. apply presets on import such as lens/camera corrections.
You can use it to sort your images to find the best ones from your shoot using star ratings. You can then take the images into develop module and do 85-90% of adjustments you would make in PS. You can automatically export images to most online services you can think of and last of all you can use it for profiled printing.

I can't imagine using the OEM software anymore or doing it all manually it's basically brilliant.
 
Yes you are being dim :) And it does do a lot more than show thumbnails of folders.

The key thing is meta data and the ability to search, group and view by meta data, but yet only have a single copy. Forget about folders that constrain you to find and group photos. With meta data (data about data simplistically stated) you can create any view you want.

For example if you want, all photos that have you child in when he/she was two years old. Done in seconds on the provision you entered the appropriate meta data during the work flow of processing the photos. But the next time you want to search and see which focal range do you use mostly with your camera, and that same photo of your child may appear or may not...
 
You can organise your photos by subject, location, or whatever, and Lightroom will mirror this organisation, i.e. it will show you the folder structure that's actually on your hard disk. You can also organise them in sets; you could have a set for all of your portraits, another for landscapes, and so on. You can also assign tags and search for all photos containing a particular tag. You can also search for photos by camera used, lens used, aperture used, whether it's a JPEG or RAW file, and so on. You can search for text inside any EXIF or IPTC field. And you can assign stars to rate photos and/or colour codes for whatever purpose you can think of. I'm sure I've missed out one or more feature; I'm in Linux at the moment so I can't run Lightroom to check.

Workflow is the sequence of jobs you do from the time you get the photos off your camera all the way through to printing and/or uploading to the web. For example, using Lightroom it can include:

- copying RAW files or JPEGS from to your PC from your camera via USB or from the memory card
- synchronising Lightroom so that it finds the photos; or importing them specifically from a particular hard disk location
- looking through the photos, deleting the obviously unviable ones
- star-rating them, assigning tags, deciding which to process now and which to leave until later
- filling in the IPTC and EXIF header information
- doing preliminary tonal and colour corrections, initial noise removal and possibly initial sharpening
- applying gradient filters, removing red-eye, spot removal
- taking photos into Photoshop, Elements, PaintShop, or whatever, to do cloning, healing, filters, portrait touch-up, or anything involving layers
- applying any finishing touches to colour and tone, final sharpening
- uploading to the web if you have a portfolio or a Flickr/500px/Photobucket/whatever account
- printing your photos

If you're a professional, there are a few other steps involved, depending on the type of work you do.
 
Can it tag photos automatically like picassa and Facebook do? Ie if I tag my daughter in some photos, will it recognise her and auto tag lots of photos for me?

Or can it only organise based on manual tagging?

Are the tags stored in the files or in the LR database? Ie if I share the files via DLNA and the software can sort by tags, will it pick up the light room tags?
 
You can create catalogues independant of folders, you can rate images by colour or number to group images in the way you want, you can use key words or find images by camera, lens or any other item of metadata. you can create web pages, slide shows ad the editing is fantastic - for some things even faster than Photoshop!

Indespensible
 
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