Pixiq

Right now, I'm in the busiest time of the year. The Galway Arts Festival is on, and it's full tilt with parades, theatre shows, concerts, art and much more. From a photographic point of view, it's manic. At the end of the fortnight I've to deliver images for a music article, so I'd like to make my own work easier. Rather than have to manually sort images into a collection to make final selects, I'm going to rely on Smart Collections to do the heavy lifting. 

Here's the Smart Collection I've set up. To create a Smart Collection, use either the Library>New Smart Collection command, or click on the + in Collections and choose Create Smart Collection from the flyout menu. To ensure I get images that fit all the criteria, I make sure 'Match' is set to 'All' rather than 'Any'. To set the criteria, click on the first dropdown menu. Here it's Keywords, and I add the appropriate keyword. Clicking the + at the end allows me to add more criteria.

By way of explanation, I've used specific terms when importing to help with this Smart Collection. First up, I add the Keyword 'GAF' to each imported set from festival related events. This helps me to narrow down to all images from every Galway Arts Festival. Next I chosen to show only images with a Pick flag. Obviously I have to go through the images making picks for this to work properly. Finally, I only need images from this year, so I choose Capture Date in the range from the start of 2011, to the end. A selection choice of 'In the year' would be better if it existed, but this will suffice. I could also tighten it to just July, but this makes it easy to repurpose the collection for another year. 

If I wanted to get even tighter, I could include more keywords on import. For example I could enter an even genre keyword, like Comedy, Music, Theatre etc, and add them as Smart Collection criteria. 

At the end of the festival, I can simply go to my Smart Collection, refine my selection and send off to the editor. 

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