In this tutorial we'll talk about finding your photos. You can follow along with your own photos or if you like you can download the sample files for this tutorial from the Adobe page for this tutorial. If you do download the sample files add them to Lightroom CC. Navigate to the files and in the Import Preview window you can make an album for just those photos. In this lesson we'll talk about one of the most useful and frankly the most amazing things that Lightroom CC can help you with and that is finding your photos based on what's in them, their content, even if you haven't taken the time to keyword tag those photos. Now the first thing I’d do when I'm going to search for photos is select the source that I want to search. If you like you could select an album to search and you can see when I have this album selected up here in the Search box Lightroom CC tells me that it's going to be searching that source. But normally when I'm looking for particular photos I want to search all my photos. So, I'll go over to the column on the left and I'll select All Photos and then I'll come back to the Search box and I'm going to type in a search query, the thing that I want to find. Let's say that I'm looking for photos of food, I'll type food and press Enter or Return on the keyboard and in just a moment Lightroom CC returns the photos it found in my library that it thinks contain images of food. And as you can see it's done a pretty good job, even recognizing these raw salad ingredients as food. Now that I have these results I could make an album of just these photos, I could share these photos, I could edit these photos, anything that you can normally do with your photos in Lightroom CC. This just gets you started with the photos that you want. To cancel a search, click the X here in the Search box and that brings back all the photos in the source. Let's go ahead and do another search through these photos. This time I'm going to search for photos that have water in them. And this is an interesting result, you can see that Lightroom CC returned this photo where there's a really faint waterfall in the background and this photo where there's rain and this photo that was shot in a bathroom. Now granted this result isn't perfect, there is one photo over here that doesn't seem to contain water, but search was able to find many of my photos that do contain water. Now keep in mind that this kind of search only works when you're online. And that's because it's not done locally on your computer, it's done in Adobe's Cloud where Lightroom CC stores your photos and where Sensei, Adobe's machine learning and artificial intelligence engine, can analyze your photos and auto tag them based on their content. This auto tagging and search in Lightroom CC on the desktop, mobile devices, and web can save you time and effort that you might otherwise put into keyword tagging and organizing your photos manually and it can help you find just the photos you're looking for in your Lightroom CC library.

 

You can use flags and star ratings to make it easier to find the photos you like best or to hide the photos that you're not fond of. When you're reviewing your photos, and adding flags or stars I suggest you do that in Detail view so you get the best view of your photos. I'll click the Detail view icon here to switch to Detail view. Now I like to use a simple system of flags and stars as I review my photos. So, here's what I do, you can use your own system. I rely mostly on flags and there are three kinds of flags. You can either add a Pick Flag to the photos that you like by clicking this icon or pressing Z on the keyboard or if there's a photo you really don't like you can add a Reject Flag by clicking this icon or pressing X on the keyboard. But for most of my photos I'll just leave them unflagged those that I kind of like but that I think aren't great. You also have Stars here and you can add between 1 and 5 stars to any photo. I like to keep this simple. So, I only add 5 stars and I only use the 5-star rating when there's a photo that I think is really great. So, with that simple system here's how I move through the photos. I either will use the filmstrip to click on a photo or you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you press the right arrow key that will take you to the next photo, the left arrow key will take you back to the last photo. So, here for example is a photo I like. I'll either come down here and click the Pick Flag icon or I'm more likely to just press the keyboard shortcut Z. And then I'll press the right arrow key to move to the next photo. Here's another one I like. I'll press Z. And that adds a Pick Flag there too. I'll press the arrow key. Now here's one that I'm not fond of. So, this time I can either click this flag or I'm more likely to just press X on the keyboard. I'll press the right arrow key and notice that the last photo the one to which I added the Reject Flag now has a gray overlay on it in the filmstrip. Now let's say that I changed my mind and I really didn't mean to reject that photo, I'll press the left arrow key to go back to that photo and then to remove that flag I'll press the keyboard shortcut U for Unflag and I'll just continue to move through the rest of the photos either not adding a Flag, pressing Z to add a Pick Flag or pressing X to add a Reject Flag. Now here's a photo that I really like, so I'm not only going to add a Pick Flag by pressing Z, I'm also going to give it a 5-star rating. And to do that you can either click on the number of stars that you want to add, or you can use the keyboard shortcuts 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 for the number of stars that you want to add. So, I'll just press the number key 5 on my keyboard and that adds 5 stars to this photo. If you want to quickly see the star and flag ratings of your photos you can go back to the Square Grid view. And here under each photo you can see the flag status and the star status. Stay tuned for the next movie in which I'll show you how you can use the filters up here to quickly find photos by their flag status and their star status.

 

In addition to its search features Lightroom CC has filters that you can use to find photos you're looking for. In this lesson I'll show you how to use those filters. To set up for this lesson if you haven't already added some star ratings and some pick flags to some of your photos as we did in the preceding lesson go ahead and do that now. Now typically when you use filters you're searching your entire photo library. So, I'll go over and I'll click All Photos. Then I'll move over to the right of the Search bar and I'll click the Filter icon and that drops down this bar of filters. You can use these filters to view just photos with particular pick flags. So, if I want to see just the photos to which I've added a pick flag I'll come to this icon and I'll click. To view all my photos again I'll come over to the right and I'll click Reset. Now let's say I want to see just the photos to which I haven't added any flag. Then I'll click the second flag icon and there are my unflagged photos. Again, I'll Reset and now let's see what happens if I click this flag to show only the photos that may have a reject flag. I don't happen to have any photos that match that and so this is the view you'll see in that case. I'm going to go and Reset again, and I want to show you that these flags are cumulative. So, if I click the first flag to see only the photos that have a pick flag on them and I leave that filter active and also click the next flag that adds to the mix all my photos that have no flags. So now we're looking at all photos that either have a pick flag or that have no flags. And if I want to narrow this down further by looking at photos that also have 5 Stars I can come over here and click the fifth star. I'm going to Reset that again to show you that there are more filters here. Here's a filter you can use to view just photos or just videos and if you've happened to add Keywords to your photos you can filter by those here. You can also filter by the Camera that you use to shoot a photo and you can filter by Location if any of your photos were shot with the GPS enabled camera. So, I can pick one of these options and that shows me just the photo shot in the District of Columbia. I'll click Reset again to see all the photos in this source. And finally, you can use both search and filters together. So, let's say that I search for all photos that contain mountains and then I want to narrow that down to just photos of mountains to which I've added a pick flag. And there are the results. So, I think you can see how powerful these filters can be when you're searching for a particular photo.