This content was created by Joe Houghton. This content was uploaded by Joe Houghton. This is a YouTube tutorial video titled "Lightroom Bites 004 - Creating a smart collection" (created 2021-04-06T14:09:05+00:00) featuring Joe Houghton. It is an English, single-speaker instructional walkthrough showing how to create and use Smart Collections in Adobe Lightroom: setting match rules (searchable text and rating), examples using the keywords "Gannets" and "Glendalough," demonstrating how Lightroom auto-populates and updates the collection (including adding/removing keywords), and noting catalog behavior (he mentions a 633,000-image catalog).
Chapters
Hi, my name is Joe Houghton and this is Lightroom Bites number 4. In this short video, I'm going to show you how to set up a Smart Collection. This is a virtual folder in Lightroom where you set up rules, and based on those rules, Lightroom will add photos from anywhere in your catalogue to the collection if a photo is added which matches the rules that you've set up for the collection. So where are collections stored in Lightroom? In the Library module, we have the Folders section here, but if you scroll down past the folders— you can see I've got a lot of folders— and then we go down past all the different hard drives that I haven't got plugged in at the moment And then down here we have Collections. And to create a Smart Collection, we click on the plus sign and then take the second option, Create a Smart Collection, and we get this dialog box. So I'm going to ask Lightroom to collect together all the images that have got gannets in them. So for those of you that don't know what gannets are, gannets are a seabird, and we have some of these off the coast of Ireland. So I'm just going to call this Smart Collection Gannets. So match all of the following rules. You can say match all, any, or none of the following rules. Okay, so we'll say all. So I'm going to start with any searchable text. Down at the bottom. So that will include filename, keywords, folder name that the photos are in, any text associated with the image which contains the word— and I'll change it to Gannett that we're searching for— so contains Gannett. As far as I know, this is not case-specific, so capital G should be fine. And then plus. And the other thing that I'm going to do is I use a rating system in Lightroom. So basically, when I first import all my images, I cull them by rating anything that I'm likely to edit or do anything to with a 1 star. So basically, if I've got an edited image, it's going to have 1 or more stars. So I'm going to change the rule here, rating greater than or equal to 1 star. So that will eliminate from the collection any photos of gannets that I didn't consider to be good enough to even get a 1-star. Okay, so that will be my search. So I'm going to create now, and down at the bottom now, in alphabetical order, there we see gannets, and it's now reading through my catalogue. Now my catalogue has got 633,000 images in, so you can see that That didn't take very long to interrogate 633,000 images and return the 48 images that it has in the catalogue that match the word gannet. And there we are, got a number of images there of my gannet over Little Skellig. In fact, that looks like— oh no, there's a few more there. So here's some gannet images from a trip to the Salty Islands as well that I took. So you can see a very, very quick way of adding images into a Smart Collection. Now let me just show you what happens when you bring in new images. So let me come up to my folder here. Okay, now let's just imagine this one hasn't got a gannet in it. Okay, but let's just select this image here. Okay, now Nothing mentions gannets. It's got one star. I've put a one star on it there. Now, if I add the word gannet to this image now, and there we'll put it in there as no capital G. Okay, so now I've got gannet associated with that image. Let's go back to our Smart Collection and see whether our image has automatically been added to the Smart Collection. And if we go down here to Gannets, and we go to G for Grid, we see that that image has now appeared in our collection because it contains the word Gannet. If I want to take it out of the collection, yeah, I can click on it, and anyway, anything that I do now to break those rules will remove it from the collection. So if I go up here, and I double-click on the word Gannet there and remove that as a keyword and press Enter, it's immediately removed from the collection. So the collection is based on the rules that you set up, and it constantly scans the Lightroom catalogue to match the rules that you've set up. It's a really powerful way of keeping all your photos of a certain thing together. So here we are, I've got a photo, I've got a Smart Collection. You can see it's a Smart Collection because it's got that little cogwheel. Here's another Smart Collection of all the images that I've got tagged with Glendalough, which is a beautiful monastic site in County Wicklow in Ireland. And as you can see, I've got quite a number of shots from Glendalough going back over the years, all kinds of images of Glendalough. And anytime I go to Glendalough in the future, I if I, if I create any new images and put them in a folder with Glendalough in the title, or if I put Glendalough in the keyword, then those images, as long as they've got 1 star or more, will appear in my collection. And we're done.
