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[Organize Your Photos with Lightroom]

[with Ben Willmore] [Ben Willmore] A lot of people use their brain

to keep track of where their images are, to remember what they've shot,

where they're stored, and really what they have. That's not the most effective way of working. If you use Lightroom, it won't matter how cluttered your hard drive is

or how bad your memory is, you can still find just about any image. Just spend a little bit of time organizing them. Let's take a look. And the first place we'll go to do that

is this area called Collections. I have a few that I've made here already. Let me show you how that's done

and how they work. A collection is like a playlist in a music program where if you drag an image on top of a collection, it simply remembers where that image was located so it can show it to you later. It doesn't actually move it on your hard drive. And so if I go over here to the Collections area, just to the right of the word "Collections" is a plus sign. And if I click on that, I can choose Create Collection. And I'm going to create a collection called Iceland. And now in that list, I should find a new collection with the name of Iceland. I could then take all of these images, maybe click on the first one,

hold shift and click on the last, and drag them on top of the collection called Iceland. And when I do, there's a number to the right side that tells me exactly how many images I dragged there. And if I ever want to see them again, I don't have to remember

where they're located on my hard drive. I could completely collapse down

that area called Folders and just concentrate on this area called Collections. I click on the collection, and I see all those images

that I've dragged into the collection. And I have this image which I think is a little odd

and doesn't remind me of Iceland. So I'm going to click on it,

and I'm just going to hit the Delete key. When I do, the image goes away. It didn't delete it off my hard drive. It just removed it from this collection. Just like removing a song from your playlist

in your music software. Doesn't delete it off your hard drive. It just says don't play it anymore. Same thing is true here. So what's really nice about collections is you can have the same photograph

in more than one collection. So if you look here, I have a collection called Sunsets, another one called Waterfalls, and so on. So I could take this picture, taken in Iceland, and drag it on top of Sunsets. Then I could look through the other images

that were shot in Iceland and do the same for any others

that were shot near sunset. I see a lot that were shot near lakes and rivers, so I could select those and any of these where I see water which is actually a majority of them and drag those on top of the one

called Lakes and Rivers. I could create a collection called Churches and put the churches in there, whatever it is that would help me

find these images again, however I'd like to organize them. Now you can further organization your collections by going to the right of the word Collections again and choose Create Collection Set. If you do that, then you're going to create what looks like a little shoebox

in your collection list. And a collection set is used to organize your collections. You can grab one collection

and drag it on top of a collection set, and then you're able to collapse and expand

that collection set to view its contents or to hide the contents. You can't actually drag a photo

on top of a collection set though. The only thing it can contain is another collection. So this is one way of organizing your images. Even if you have those collection sets collapsed down so you only have these general categories— for instance I've come in here

and made one called Family where I can keep track of pictures of my mom,

my dad, my wife, my brother, that type of thing. Or maybe the Holidays.

I want all the Christmases that have happened over the years. I'm going to put images in these collections. Well even if these are all collapsed down, right above that you can search your collections. So I can say I want to find all the Christmas. And I can very quickly get to that collection

without having to remember where it's stored in my collection list. So that's one method of organizing your images. Let's look at others. Let's say here I have, again, these images of Iceland. And some of them I want to print out

and others I don't. And I just want to mark the ones

that I want to print out and mark the others

that I might even think about deleting. Well, if I click on an image,

at the bottom of my screen is this horizontal bar when I'm in a Library. That bar you could show or hide. If you find it's not there when you get into Lightroom,

go to the View menu. It's called the Toolbar. You can Hide the Toolbar,

and you can also go back up here and Show it. Well in there, I'm going to find

these little flag icons. This one here will flag it as a pick where that might be an image I want to print. And let's say this image is one I might want to delete. I can flag that as a reject.

That's the black flag with an X. And I could do that to various images, flagging them or rejecting them. And then later on, if I want

to sort my images based on that I can go to the View menu. Over here is a choice called Sort,

and I can say, "Hey, put these in order based on their Pick status." If I choose Pick, now the ones that I flagged as a pick

are at the beginning, and the ones I flagged as a reject are at the end. Most people can organize their images

using just that, collections and these flags. Some people though decide they need more than that, and if that's the case for you,

here's another choice you have. You can click on an image,

and again at the bottom of your screen you could apply either a star rating

or a color. So maybe I decide this is my favorite image

so I'll make it five stars. And this one's not quite as good,

so maybe it's three stars. And this one is not very good at all,

so maybe it's one star. Then again you can go to your View menu, choose Sort, and now I can sort based on Rating, and my highest-rated images should appear first. And then it will sort accordingly. Or maybe there are hundreds of images in here,

and I don't want to see them all. I want to see only the images I've rated. Well, at the top of your screen

there's another bar. And that's another bar you could show or hide. If you go to the View menu, that's called the Filter Bar. And here I could Hide it or Show it. And in the Filter Bar, there's a choice called Attribute. If I choose Attribute here, I can say "Only show me images

that are rated one star or above or two stars or three and above." If you want to turn off that,

just click on whatever is currently chosen. So right now if I'm filtering down

to five star images or higher, just click the fifth star.

You'll turn it off. We also have our little flag status here, either the picks or the ones that were rejects. And so I could view only the picks

or only the rejects. And you can do the same thing for colors. If you no longer want to limit the images

that you're viewing, then you can choose none and then you're viewing every image that's there. And so the more you spend time in Lightroom

organizing your images, the faster you'll be able to locate things

and the less you're going to rely on your brain to remember things because can remember it all.