From the course: Lightroom Classic Essential Training

Keywording photos - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Lightroom Classic Essential Training

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Keywording photos

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- [Instructor] Keywords when applied to your photos makes it much easier to search for and collect them later. Back in chapter two, we imported a bunch of photos and some of these got keywords added while we imported them, but others of them didn't. So let's go back and use the chapter two images to learn about adding additional keywords while working in the library module. We can select the chapter two photos by just clicking on the chapter two folder in the folders panel here, and that'll show us all the photos that are in the nested folders inside of chapter two. So we have 152 of them. The first way to add keywords is to use the keywording panel over here in the right panel group. I'll toggle that open. If an image already has keywords, it'll show up in this field here. And you can click in that field and type in keywords, or you can click in this almost hidden field just below and then type in your keyword here. So I'll type in landscape. I've used this keyword before, so Lightroom remembers it. So I can use my right arrow key to go to the end of the word, it autofills. I'll use a comma to separate it, and then type in desert, and it remembers that one as well. I'll hit my Enter key a couple times to apply those two keywords, and they get added to the field above as well as to the image. That's pretty slow and tedious to add keywords that way. If you open the keyword suggestions panel here, this could speed it up a little bit because Lightroom is offering suggestions based on your habit or practice of keywording. And this will change and grow over time as your catalog grows. So for example, I could click on travel and it'll add that keyword to the image as well. This is still a pretty slow and tedious process. There's a better and faster way to add keywords and it's called the painting method, like spray painting them. And this isn't very intuitive, but once you understand how it works, it'll really speed up the process. So let's take a look at that next. When I'm using the painting method to add keywords, I like to make my thumbnails in the grid small and fill up as much of the screen as possible. So the first thing I'm going to do is the Shift + Tab key to hide all of my panels around the sides. And now we have more images to look at at one time. I'd like to make these smaller so that I can see even more, and I'll use my minus key to do that. So the plus key will make it larger, the minus key will make them smaller. And the idea is to get as many of these on your screen as you can and still be able to tell what they are. Down in the toolbar here at the bottom, there's a thumbnail slider, so you could also use that to change their size. If you don't see the toolbar, remember that's the T key. So I press the T to hide the toolbar or press the T key again to bring it back. And then in the right hand corner of the toolbar is this disclosure triangle which shows you the tools that you can add. So thumbnail size is here. We're going to use the painter tool to add keywords and that looks like a spray paint can. I'll click off of this and show you it's this tool over here that looks like a spray paint can. If you don't see that, you can also get to it by going to Metadata, Enable Painting. So our cursor has become this spray paint can now and notice it's not sitting in the circle down here. What we're going to do is paint keywords. If you click here where it says Keywords, there's other metadata that you could use with this process too, but we're going to do keywords for this. In this field next to the eyedropper is where you type in the keyword that you want to apply. And I like to start really general. So I'm going to use a keyword travel, because I know that all of the images in chapter two were travel images. And then all I have to do is just click and drag across the images to apply that keyword. If you take a really close look, some of these have a white frame around them. And those are the ones that already have the keyword applied, the keyword that we're working with, travel. So this way, we can see which ones don't have that keyword or need the keyword, they don't have the white frame on them yet. So you can see this is a really much faster way of applying keywords to a set of images, especially a large group of images like this. So after I go through and apply a general keyword, I'll get a little bit more specific. So let's add desert and landscape to the rest of the desert and landscape images. I'll hit the Enter key to add those keywords to my spray paint can and then I'll spray those two keywords into all the images from the desert. We could continue by going through and adding keywords like architecture to the architecture images that are shown here. These subject matter keywords like landscape, architecture or portraits are obviously useful, but also think about using more abstract keywords like texture or reflections, especially if you'll use these images for compositing work in Photoshop. I try to add as many keywords as I can right after I import a folder of images. If you get into the practice of this, you will thank yourself later. And when you're done keywording, you want to put the spray paint can back on the shelf, which is clicking down here in this circle right next to the word painter. And then we can do the Shift + Tab key to bring all of the panel groups back.

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