I've gotten a lot of questions about different features in Lightroom and how I use Lightroom in my workflow. Im going to be doing a series on Lightroom answering these questions.
The first part of the series is going to be on Organization. Organization is key for every photographer. You need to be able to find your photos in the future. The main way that I organize my photos is by synchronizing all of them into Lightroom.
Before you synchronize your photos into Lightroom you need to come up with a file naming and folder hierarchy system. For my folders they always start with two digit year, two digit month, and two digit day. So for June 20, 2018 it would start "180620." The second part is what the event was. If it was a sports event Ill put the two teams. Modeling Ill put the name of the client.
For file naming I start the exact same way with year, month day. This is followed by "-N-EP388-." This is a Navy file naming thing so you don't have to put this. The important part is the last part and that is the sequence number. The first photo I take in a day will start with a sequence number of "001" and that will increase for all the photo. So the first photo I take today will be:
"180620-N-EP388-001"
The important thing to remember is do not reset the sequence number throughout the day. If you do multiple events, just keep the sequence number increasing. This will keep you from having duplicate file names.
The next part is the Map feature. I geotag all my photos so I can find locations I've shot at previously. When you geotag the photos it will add a marker on the map. Whatever folder you have selected in the library view will populate the markers in the map. You can select multiple folders in the Library view if you want to look at multiple folders on the map.
The third part is face detection. I use face detection to identify the subjects in all the photos. The name that you enter into the face detection box will be added to the keywords field. Going along with face detection is using keywords. Using keywords for your photos makes it very easy to search and find your photos at a later date.
The search feature in Lightroom is also pretty powerful. At the top of the Library view you have three choices to search. You can search by name, attribute, or metadata. Using the name search you can search the keyword field and all the photos with that keyword will show up. This works for regular keywords you enter as well as any names you enter using face detection.
The attribute search allows you to search the selected folder(s) by star rating or color class. If you want to just see photos with a particular star rating you can select that rating and only those photos will show up.
The last search feature is metadata. The metadata allows you to search through your photos using filters like camera, lens, shutter speed, focal length, aperture, ISO, etc. This is helpful if you're looking for photos taken with a particular set of settings or taken with a particular camera/ lens.
You can check out the video I made below. If you have any comments or suggestions for future videos let me know.