More Sorting in Adobe Photoshop Lightrooom – Digital Photography Tip of the Week

Last week I talked about rating images in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and in the past also talked about using keywords. Both features can be used together to help find images within your collection.

Lightroom still has more though.  Two other methods for sorting your images are use of color labels and of flags.  With color labels, you have five colors you can assign to an image, red, yellow, blue green and purple. Just as with ratings, you can color images and find images that have been labeled with a color.  Why use color labels when you can use labels? You can pick any combination of color labels while ratings are used in consecutive order, either up or down.  And of course, everyone has their own way of doing things.  If you make a lot of photographs, sorting them 1-5 just may not be sufficient for your workflow.

Finally, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom also has a feature called flags. Flags have three states: picked, rejected and unflagged.  Again, different people have different ways of using software. For me, this is a great tools when I need to reduce the number if images I have shot in a given project such as a wedding. In Library, I view all of my images and select only the best one.  I apply a flag of picked to these images.  Now, when I sort by flag, I only see the images I will be working on, none of the rejects or unflagged images.

That is four different methods of categorizing and finding images with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and there are still others.  You can create collections of images, find based on your equipment such as all images shot with a certain lens or a certain camera. There is also a free form text find for searching metadata and keywords.  It is up to you to decide with how much granularity you want to organize your images.

Until next time, happy shooting.

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