Sort things out

Use the tools in Lightroom’s Library module to organise your photos and make them easier to manage and find. George Cairns gets you started

Learn how to sort your images within Lightroom’s Library module

If you’ve imported thousands of photos into Lightroom, you may be daunted by the challenge of finding specific files. Fortunately, Lightroom is packed full of tools to help you locate the image you want.

In issue 45 we demonstrated how to add selected photos to Collections, so you could group images together in a similar way to putting prints into a photo album. We also demonstrated how to use the Smart Collections feature to display files according to specific metadata criteria.

Lightroom displays all of your images according to the date they were captured, so you could simply scroll back and rely on your memory of when particular images were taken, but as we’ll explain over the next few issues, there are much more efficient ways to organise and search for files.

We’ll start by examining quick and easy ways to sort your photos using ratings and flags, so you can begin the quality-control process by highlighting your favourites, while marking others for rejection. We’ll also show you how to filter the photos in the Grid view to display images that match specific criteria contained in each photo’s metadata. In the coming months we’ll move on to explore more advanced ways of organising photos, using tools such as keywords and geo-tagging.