Build your Collections

Make searching for photos easier with the help of Collections in Lightroom

Digital cameras enable you to generate thousands of photos in a short time. That means having a lot to search through when you want to find a specific one. Lightroom keeps links to your images in its Catalog, which has the option to display all the photos it contains. To narrow things down, click the Previous Import label to see your most recent additions.

In a future issue we’ll look in detail at the ways Lightroom’s Library module enables you to organise your images. However, we’ll pre-empt that by introducing you to a quick and effective way to sort your photos.

In analogue days we’d gather our favourite prints into albums so that we could browse through the images. Albums tended to be arranged according to themes (such as a wedding or a holiday). This model of storing and accessing images can be applied to the photographs in the Lightroom Library module, courtesy of the Collection panel.

We’ll show you quick ways to gather photos into Collections, so that you can display a small Collection in the Grid view instead of having to scroll through thousands of thumbnails in the main Catalog. We’ll also reveal how to get Lightroom to automatically create Collections according to specific metadata criteria, using the Smart Collections tab.