Lightroom - collections & keywords

Janice

Janice

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Janice
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If you make a "collection" of images in Lightroom called Churches and have all church images in it from all over your computer... then whats the difference between that, and calling up the keyword church and having them all come up that way??
 
surely the idea of a keyword is that an image can have many keywords associated with it, and searching for that keyword will bring up any 'matches' whereas setting up a collection will entail you telling the computer which images you want in that collection.



does that make sense? i havent actually looked at lightroom to confirm this.
 
Janice said:
If you make a "collection" of images in Lightroom called Churches and have all church images in it from all over your computer... then whats the difference between that, and calling up the keyword church and having them all come up that way??
Click to expand...

Not much in Lightroom, but with keywords you can submit them elsewhere with the keywords embedded. Also using keywords can bring up more specific searches, for instance if you keyword the location of the churches you can search for "churches yorkshire", "churches london" etc. Where as having collections for churches in every location you shoot them would cause chaos.

Obviously the more keywords you add, then the more specific the searches can be.

Some obvious church keywords which come to mind are church, inside, outside, graves, graveyard, alter, stained glass window, location, country ... I'll stop now :bonk:
 
It's all down to how you use Lightroom. An individual image may have a number of keyword associated with it, For example
a/ The name of the church ( St Brides),
b/the location ( Lincoln ).
c/ ( the subject ( The nave ) etc.
This means you could search for all churches you have photographed in a particular town or city, or maybe all the pictures of one particular church.

This type of key wording helps particularly when you have effectively a picture library operation. A client will ask "Do you have a particular type of picture" or " Do you have a picture of..."

Collections are useful where you want to group sets of pictures together for more permanent reference, such as possible Calendar pictures for next year.
 
As Chappers said it depends how you want to use Lightroom.

Its like do you want to know that you have bottles of wine in your winerack or which wines do you have in the winerack.

If the former example is adequate for you a Collection is simplest, if however you want a more detail selection/filter ability the later example - keywords - is best suited to you.
 
I use collections to group together particular jobs, like a a photoshoot or a wedding. Then I have them very handily available. The fact that you can put collections inside collections means it becomes very convenient to organise.
 
I tend to use collections for organising by shoot etc, as no one will see what my collections are. Not all shots go into collections though.

Every shot gets key worded, a lot of the key words also have synonyms behind them, these are embedded in the picture when exported.

I think like a lot of things in Lightroom there is more than one way to organise your images, it is just a case of finding what works for you...

For instance I find that I never use the folders information on the left side of the Library module, whereas I use the collections a lot...
 
Thanks guys. Id have thought a specific shoot would be in a folder. :shrug:

Anyway, I think I am getting the general pattern of things though... thanks again.
 
If you organise it like that, just ignore the collections then, kind of the opposite to how I work, but will have the same outcome...
 
It is really having a system where you know where to put the files on your hard drive and then the most efficient way of finding them. It's what works best for you - no 2 offices have the same filing system.

In my case I have a default folder for all images, called data, then sub folders for year within which there is a sub folder for month within which a sub folder for date e.g

Data > 2008 > Oct_08 > 281008.

Files from today would imported, via Lightroom into that folder & keyworded on import.

Once imported I can select images from that folder and also additional folders into a specific collection for that event.

Alternatively I can search via keyword(s) and build a collection from that search.
 
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