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Now that Lightroom is a fairly solid Digital Asset Management tool the value of metadata and keywording might be more apparent. Because you can import of your images into one Library, if you have added keywords and metadata to your images it is an easy task to search by specific keywords, ratings and other criteria to find the images you are looking for in a matter a minutes. I know for many of you it seemed like a waste of time to enter keywords and metadata, other than the standard copyright information, but I am hoping this article will change your mind if you haven’t already jumped on the bandwagon.

Adding Keywords and Metadata on Import

The easiest and fastest method I have found for entering metadata and keywords is to do so when you import images into Lightroom (See photo above). As you import each job or shoot, build a metadata template or just use your standard copyright metadata template if you’ll need to go in and write individual captions for groups of images. For a lot of my shoots I can enter everything save for the captions at this stage. To add keywords, just start typing in the keyword box on the import dialog. Lightroom is savvy enough to even suggest keywords once you start typing the first few letters of a word. 

Once you have your images imported into Lightroom, the Keywording dialog in the right hand panel of Lightroom even makes suggestions once you have a few keywords entered. It uses other images you already have keywords applied to and sees what you have entered in those images and suggests keywords that go with those you already have entered. So once you have a few keywords entered, as would be the case if you include a few on import, if you want to add some extra keywords the odds are good that the ones you want to use will be suggested in the Keyword Suggestions dialog.

And if those aren’t the keywords you want, and you don’t feel like typing you can also open the Keyword List drop down menu (just below the Keyword dialog in the right hand panel) and click next to the keywords you want to include. The keywords in this section are alphabetized so all it takes is a few flicks of the finger to scroll down to the keywords you want.

And if you really get into keywording, and tend to have the same keywords for a lot of your images, you can also build Keyword sets with nine keywords per set. To create a set just click on the Keyword set tab (as in the image above) in the Keyword dialog. Then click on “Edit Set…” and start typing in keywords once the dialog shows up (see image below). 

Once you have your keywords entered, click on thedrop down menu at the top of the dialog and scroll down to “Save Current settings as New Preset…” Click on that, type in a name and click on save and you have just set up a Keyword Set that you can reference at any time in the future.

This is a fast and effective way to enter very specific keywords that will come in handy down the road when you need to find an image fast. For portrait photographers, I would also recommend that you include the subjects name in both the caption and keywords so that in the future if that client calls and wants a few extra prints or needs anything all you have to do is type their name into the Library filter and every image of that person will show up. Pretty sweet!

Using Lightrom’s Library Filter

Now that we’ve talked about keywords and metadata a bit, let’s dig into the Library filter in Lightroom. To acess the Library Filter you can use the keyboard shortcut “\” (Backslash key) or go to View > Show Filter Bar and the Library Filter will drop down from the top of the Library Module.

In this example I first clicked on “All Photographs” in the left panel so the filter would search all the images in my library. I then clicked on the “Text” icon and typed in “rock climbing, utah, indian creek” which is a famous climbing area south of Moab, Utah. Because I have quite a few images in my library which are on three different hard drives it took Lightroom about 10 seconds to search everything before it came up with the images that matched that search. By clicking on the “Attribute” icon in the filter, I then asked it to only show my 3-star images. And finally by clicking on the “Metadata” icon I could even go in and choose only images shot by a certain camera or with a certain lens or even those with certain color labels. And not to be outdone, Lightroom also allows you to customize the metadata search fields. To change the search field just mouse over the name of that field and choose another metadata item to search for.

As you can see this is a very powerful feature that allows you to track down images in a minute or less. As computers get faster hopefully the process of searching through thousands and thousands of images will be a bit faster. It takes my Apple MacPro about five to ten seconds as I said to filter the nearly 109,000 images I have in my current catalog. But when clients contact me and ask me to make a submission, they are usually looking for very specific locations and types of sports so it is pretty easy to track down the best images I have, toss those into a new collection and then move to the Web module to create a web gallery which then gets uploaded to my website and sent to the client. Compared to the old days of pulling slides and packaging them up in a Fed Ex envelope, this is pretty stinking fast!

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If you are interested in developing a complete workflow of your own using Lightroom and perfecting your color management, I would recommend checking out my Lightroom Workflow e-book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographers Workflow. You can purchase that eBook for the low price of 24.95 on my website.

This e-book presents a complete workflow which includes my in-camera settings, how to determining the optimum white balance and exposure, color management, working with Lightroom and Photoshop, creating web galleries, Noise Ninja and much, much more. A sample table of contents is available for download on my website if you want to see exactly what is covered. The e-books is also up to date and covers the latest versions of Lightroom and Photoshop.