Organizing photos with the Library module

There are many ways we can organize photos in Lightroom. Before we start learning how to organize photos, let’s take a closer look at the Library module.

In the left panel dock, we have a preview of the selected image in the Navigator panel. The Catalog panel gives us information about the active catalog, and the Folders panel shows us where the photos in the catalog are located on the computer. The Collections panel allows us to make new collections as well as view any existing collections, and the Publish Services panel gives us a way to easily publish any edited photos to either our computer’s hard drive or to popular photo hosting services.

The right-hand panel dock contains the Histogram and Quick Develop panels, allowing us to perform basic image adjustments while still in the Library module. Additionally, it contains the Keywording and Keyword List panels, allowing us to create and manage keywords for the images in the library. Finally, the Metadata panel allows us to view and edit the metadata associated with our images.

Hovering over an image gives us basic information about the image, such as the file name, the date it was created, and the pixel dimensions of the image. We can make Lightroom display this information on an image’s thumbnail by turning on Expanded Cell View. Let's do this so we can see the file names for the photos along with the photos themselves.

With Expanded Cell View turned on, we now see more information about the files, as shown in the following thumbnail:

Now let's start exploring ways we can organize the contents of the catalog.

Creating a collection

Collections are one way we can organize photos in a catalog. One way to think of a collection is as a virtual box or folder to keep images in without changing their location on your hard drive. We can create as many collections as we need to organize photos in whatever way we need.

Let’s start by creating a collection that contains all the nature photos.

Lightroom will create the collection, and the thumbnail list will change and only display the images in the collection. Additionally, we’ll now see a collection named Nature Photos in the Collections panel:

Once a collection is created, it’s easy to add new photographs to the collection. First, we’ll have to go back to viewing all the images in the catalog — once we do that, we can add more images to the collection by pressing and dragging them to the collection we want to add them to. We’ll want to deselect any selected images before we do that, though.

We now have three photographs in the Nature Photos collection.

We’re not limited to just organizing images using collections, though. Let's explore another tool we can use for organization: keywords.

Using keywords to organize and filter photos

Keywords can also be used to organize photos. We can use keywords to help us describe what a photo's contents are, which can be helpful when we want to filter our library and only view photos that have specific content or keywords assigned.

Assigning keywords to a photo

While Lightroom gives us some premade sets of keywords to work with, we can also add our own keywords to help organize our photographs. Think of assigning keywords to images like you would when tagging a blog post or adding hashtags to a social media post - keywords help indicate the the subject of a photo or provide a quick description. For example, we might assign the keyword “landscape” to RedSunset_modified.jpg.

If we’re working with images that someone else previously added keywords to, we’ll see these keywords in the Keywording panel - for example, if we click on the image of the woman at the computer, fig1-7.jpg, we’ll see that the keywords “ch01”, “ron”, and “textbook” were added to this photo before we added it to our catalog. These keywords are saved as part of the photo’s metadata - we’ll learn more about metadata in a little bit.

Let’s practice adding some keywords to the photo WoodpileSnow_Crop.jpg. When adding multiple keywords at once, we’ll make sure to put a comma between them so Lightroom doesn’t treat multiple words as one single keyword.

Filtering photos using the Keyword List panel

The Keyword List panel shows a list of all of the keywords applied to images in the catalog, whether we added them ourselves or someone else added them. We can use this list to filter the photos in the catalog and show only photos that have been assigned a specific keyword.

Let’s see how this works by viewing all photos that have the keyword “textbook”. We’ll need to collapse the Keywording panel first, to give ourselves a little more room to see the Keyword List panel.

The Library view changes slightly, and in addition to only seeing the four images with the keyword “textbook” assigned to them, we also see the Metadata filtering options at the top of the screen:

We’ll learn some more about metadata in the next section. Before we do that, let’s remove the filter we’ve applied to the catalog so we can view all the images we’re working with again.

Viewing and editing metadata

Each photo in our catalog has additional information about the photo embedded in the file itself - this information is referred to as metadata. A photograph’s metadata can tell us a lot about an image, including when and where the photo was taken, what camera was used to take the photograph, the lens type and focal length, and even whether or not the camera’s flash was used when taking the photo. We’ve already worked with one aspect of an image’s metadata when we added keywords to an image.

Let’s view the metadata for one of the images in the catalog, fig1-7.jpg. The metadata will display in the Metadata panel in the right panel dock. We’ll also switch from the default metadata set to the EXIF and IPTC set, as it will display much more information about the photograph.

We now see the metadata associated with this photograph, and can see that the photo was taken with a Nikon D4 camera on August 22nd, 2012 by Mark Mosrie.

We can also modify the metadata for an image, if desired. While not all metadata fields are editable, we can easily make changes to fields like the image’s title, caption, creator, and creator’s contact information. We can also remove the GPS information from an image, if it was captured when the photograph was taken.

Let’s practice this by editing the metadata for the photo cat4.jpg. We’ll switch to viewing the default metadata set to make this task a little easier, then add the image’s title, caption, creator, and remove the GPS metadata.

The metadata for cat4.jpg has now been updated, and if someone else were to look at the image's metadata on their own computer, they'd see the updates we made today.

Now that we know how to organize photos and edit their metadata, let’s learn how to edit photos in Lightroom.

Next section: Editing photos using the Develop module