People have inquired how I manage my photos after they hear that I can easily shoot an upward of 600 to 1000 shots in a single visit to a zoo or wild park. Even when you consider that on an average I delete a third to a half of the shots due to duplications (I shoot in continuous mode), focusing issues, bad cropping, animal walks behind a tree, shooting from the hip failures, wrong camera settings (this is the largest category), etc. It still leaves 300 to 700 pictures which can be daunting to those who may take only thirty pictures a year and still can’t find the shots they want a few years later.
So today I’m going to walk through my keywording process, and explain how it improves my life. I hope by time you are finished it will inspire you in how you can improve your current photo management.
Importing the Images
We’re all guilty of wanting to see our pictures right now. Digital photography has removed the need to wait even an hour to see our snapshots, and so we rush through the Lightroom import process. I’ll confess to doing this myself when I came back to photography a few years ago. However, if we apply a bit of constraint up front it will greatly improve our life down the road.
Ok, when you import your images from your camera or from the flash card you’ll see down at the bottom the “Information to Apply” section. The section we’re concern with is the Keywords box. In my example, you’ll notice I put in the keywords: 2009, August, Minnesota Zoo, and XXUntagged.
I can already hear people go “The date is already in the meta data why are you duplicating it?” My reasons are simple. The filtering tools in Lightroom provide a nice way of looking at a lot of the meta data, but it fails to let me see dates other than “by year”. Where by at least putting the month as a keyword you can easily look for any picture shot in August of 2009.
Other than the year and month there is the locations (in this case the Minnesota Zoo), and this strange keyword called “XXUntagged”. I do this because some shoot location may have additional keywords that needs to be added, but it doesn’t make sense to mark all images with those keywords (e.g. tagging each animal for latter retrieval).
I’m sure you have notice I don’t keyword the city (Apple Valley), state (Minnesota), etc. I’ll get into why I don’t later.
Additional Keyword Tagging
There are many ways of doing this. But because I’ve added the XXUntagged keyword it becomes easier to find all images that have not gone through this phase.
I would stress how important it is to do this step right away, but looking at my own backlog (2,000+) I can’t in good faith pretend to be on top of it. I do however recommend that you take pictures of plaques and signs while you shoot to remind you of what you were looking at (I have a few animal pictures with no keywords because I’m not sure what they are. The Zoo rotated those animals off display, and they are no longer listed on their website).
However, I’ll not dwell on this step. This boils down to reviewing each shot and adding a simple keyword or two that describes what is in the picture (e.g. Amur Leopard, Grizzly Bear, etc). They should be descriptive enough to describe the picture, but you don’t need to go overboard in keywording at this point.
I do have a recommendation to make life easier. If you mouse over a keyword in the Keyword List. You’ll see an arrow appear on the right side. If you click on that arrow you are now focused on all images with that keyword.
After doing that you can start marking each image with additional keywords, and when you are finished you can just remove the XXUntagged keyword. Since the image no longer is tagged with XXUntagged keyword it will vanish from the list, and you can go on. This works well if you have ten pictures of the same animal. You can select all of them, add the right keywords, and then remove the XXUntagged before moving on to the next set of pictures.
NOTE: THIS ONLY WORKS IF YOU ARE IN GRID MODE. If you are in Loope View it will only update the selected image. This can be annoying if you prefer to use Loope View and select multiple images from the bottom filter window.
Now that we have the simple basics out of the way. Lets dive into the meat…
Managing Hierarchy of Keywords
Next lets focus on why using a hierarchy are a good thing, and where they are used. If you look at the Keywords List section each keyword can be a keyword and a container for additional keywords. Below is a snapshot from my photo library as an example.
To create a keyword inside another you just right-click (two-finger-click or control-click on the Mac) on the keyword and select ‘Create Keyword Tag inside “[keyword]“…’ and it will bring up the typical Create Keyword Tag window that we all know. If you mistaken hit “Create Keyword Tag” you still have the ‘Put inside “[keyword]“‘ checkbox.
NOTE: Watch out for the “Add to selected photos” checkbox. This is good if you have the right images selected, but it can be a problem if you are pre-generating the hierarchy and you have a random image selected. It will be selected, or not, based on what you did last time.
The main reason I do this is to ensure every time I reuse the keyword “Minnesota Zoo” it will automatically gain the keywords: States, Minnesota, and Apple Valley. This is a great time saver, but in some cases it may require some thought as to how you want to setup your library. Thankfully those keywords are not bound to the keyword container they are created in. So if you place a keyword in the wrong place you can easily drag it to the new location.
This doesn’t have to be just for shoot locations, but one should do this for most keywords that have commonly associated additional words (e.g. Animals > Felines > Snow Leopard or Bugs > Spiders > Marbled Orbweaver). The other bonus this gives you is additional groups of keywords you can use to find an image without any extra work. Say you want a picture of a spider, but you are not sure the name of it. You can go to Bugs > Spiders and browse all the spiders until you find the one you want.
So now you have these hierarchies setup, and you are looking at the Keywording section and you still only see the basic keywords you set (e.g. 2009, August, Minnesota Zoo, onFlickr, Sparrow), and you want to see all the hierarchy words as well. You can do this by changing “Keyword Tags” from “Enter Keywords” to “Keywords & Containing Keywords”.
By doing this we now see a whole host of new keywords. Ones we didn’t enter, but they are there by association. This has allowed us to quickly apply keywords in a constant manor without spending a large amount of time doing it per-import or worse per-image.
In the above screen shot you’ll notice a “–Dates” keyword. I put all my years and months under one hierarchy, and I always wish it to be at the top. As as result I added — to the front to ensure that.
The other thing you’ll notice is “Flickr” and “onFlickr”. I have a hierarchy called Flickr > onFlickr and Flickr > queueFlickr. When I started posting pictures to My Flickr account I needed a way to quickly find what I may have posted. It also provides me with a way of quickly tagging images I may want to come back later and post. These are things that can be done via Collections, and it may be more useful if I used the Slideshow, Print, and Web modules more than I do.
With this stated I have a few collections in my library, but most the time when I use collections I use the Smart Collections aspect and set rules based on keywords.
This is of course one way of working. I’ve shifted how I’ve managed keywords multiple times before I’ve settled on this method, and I’m sure I’ll make more changes as Adobe releases newer versions of Lightroom, but my main hope was that this would spark ideas on how you can be more effective on managing your images. And if showing how I worked does that for one person then it has been worth writing.