Collection Efficiency              05/09

Once a month I attend a local Audubon bird photography meeting, held at the local Unitarian Church in Kirkland. We bring in digital images on flash drives for show and tell, discuss field trips, and teach each other tips and techniques. This tip grew out a recent meeting. A bunch of us use Adobe Lightroom 2 to manage images. Before Lightroom, it took me an hour or more to find and prepare images for the meeting. With a functioning Lighroom Library and some specific Lightroom 2 tools, the timeframe now is more like 10 minutes.

For the relatively simple task of creating photos to share, or assembling images for submissions, using Lightroom is very efficient. To get to that point required some real deliberation about how to store digital images—about setting up a folder, retrieval and archiving structure that works. Serious photographers need to address this task, as well as establish a workflow routine.

Just to review (see FAQ for more), after a shoot I import the fresh images into year-month-day folders in Lightroom, followed by several editing (discarding) pass-throughs. I then keyword, re-name, and archive. The orderly entry sets the stage for efficient use of the database in which collections are key. In the old film days or early digital days, we did painstaking searches through folders, creating evermore folders with copies or derivatives of files that bloated hard drives. Those days are (or should be) gone. Collections are virtual assemblages of images. With collections, an image can be efficiently pulled from any available folder—to multiple collections if that's your need—without physically moving or copying that image.

collections

In Lightroom 2 Library, hit the +sign on the Collections
header, then click Create Collections Set. I typed
"Eastside_Audubon", Set "none", then hit Create.

Our monthly meetings, being predictable, can make image selection fast. My goal each month is to show a dozen or so of my recent, and best, bird imagery. Let's pick apart that sentence. The words translate well into the logic of an image search. Recent, best and bird filter by metadata (capture date), attribute (star-rating) and keyword (bird).

collection set

Hit the +sign again on the Collections
header. This time click Create Smart Collections

One way to collect images would be to use Lightroom's filtering and Quick Collection. Because this is going to be a repetitive task, though, it makes sense to pursue a more permanent solution. By using Lightroom 2 Smart Collections, I’ve created a best-birds collection that shifts each month according to my filter criteria. So before heading to the meeting, I click on this collection, select a dozen or so photos, and then export them to a flash drive. I’m ready for the meeting in minutes.

Smart collections

Create Smart Collections pop-up. I named it Monthly_Bird_Photos, placed in
Eastside_Audubon Set. The Capture Date, Rating and Keyword criteria are listed.
 

To set this up yourself, open Lightroom 2 and scroll down the left panel to the Collections heading. The first thing to do is create a Collection Set. Think of this as a container, a virtual folder, in which to put related Collections—in this case collections related to the bird photo meetings. Hit the +sign, choose Collection Set. In my case, I type in Eastside_Audubon, the name of our club. Hit Create and the Set appears in the Collections column. Click on this new Set, and then hit the + sign in the Collection header and choose Smart Collections from the pop-up menu. A new pop-up with the heading Create Smart Collections appears. For name, I chose Monthly_Bird_Photos. The Set should read (for me) “Eastside_Audubon” by default because I clicked on that set beforehand. I left Match to all.


target collections

To make collecting images for the specific meeting easy, create a month
folder (2009_04), then right-click on it, and in the pop-up click Set as Target
Collection.This ability to choose the Target is immensely handy.
 

I changed the first criterion, Rating, to Capture Date; “is” to “is in the last”; leave “1” the same; and change “days” to “months”. So now I’ve matched my first criterion: “Capture Date is in the last 1 months”. I hit the plus sign at the end of the line to add another. This one is for the default—Rating—and I chose “is equal to or greater than” and click on the second dot (for two stars). For the third criterion, I hit the +sign again, and change Rating to Keywords from the pop-up. “Contains” shows up by default, just what I want, and I type “bird” and “mammal” in the box. I add “mammal” because I sometimes show mammals as well as birds at the meeting, and I don’t want to miss that opportunity. I now have a Smart Collection contained in the set Eastside_Audubon called Monthly_Bird_Photos. Inside it are virtual copies of images that roll with the month, and from which I can quickly choose photos for each meeting.

smart collections

From Monthly_Bird_Photos, use "drag-and-drop", the "B" key, or the tiny, upper-right circle
to bring images into the Target Collection (2009_04 +)
 

To choose the images, I first click on the Eastside_Audubon Set, and the again choose the +sign from the Collections header. I choose Create Collection and enter 2009_04 for the Name (for the April, ‘09 meeting). The new Collection should appear within the Eastside_Audubon Set. To make collection easy, I click on this new 2009_04 collection, then right click to bring up a pop-up menu. I choose Set as Target Collection. A + sign appears after the Collection name. I then move to the Monthly_Bird_Photo Collection to select my photos. From here I can “drag-and-drop”. But even easier, I select a photo or group of photos, and just hit either the “B” key or click on the little circle thingy in the top right of each photo. Either one will put the photos I select into the new collection (because I've changed the Target from the default Quick Collection). When done I go into my new collection, review the images, and perhaps use the crop tool in Develop to make ratios 4:3 to match the projector or to improve a composition. I then Export the collection, using a preset I named "flash" that I created to make medium-quality, 1024x768-sized jpgs. It also puts them in the folder on the flash drive, ready to take to the meeting.

Gary

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Also see FAQ for on-the-water advice.