Help a former Elements user now in Lightroom

bobrandklev

I'm happy to have made the upgrade from Elements to Lightroom for many reasons I can't mention here but I'm struggling with how I used keywords in Elements and how Lightroom handles keywords different and appears to use collections better?

In Elements I never used Collections as they never exported as a keyword they were just a way to organize a group of photos or albums. I was able to do the same with keywording

So I used keyword tagging in Elements extensively and had keywords organized by People, Places, Things, Other and then under those headings were sub groups and sometimes under those were the actual keywords.

In Elements it was very easy to drag and drop keywords on a group of photos and to add multiple keywords to a photo or groups of photos.

When I needed to find a group of photos I could start clicking keywords to find the exact photos I needed and I could right click on a keyword to exclude them. So I was building a Smart Collection just using keywords.

So I think my problme is my mind is all about using keywords rather than collections?

When I upgraded to Lightroom it did beautiful job of importing my keywords and structure but the ability to drag and drop isn't the same. I can search the keyword list and drag and drop but it looks easier to just type away in the box and it will find my keywords and LR automatically creates keyword sets.

Problem is if I don't capitalize the first letter like I have in the past I now have two keywords "derek" and "Derek"

So here's my questions:

Should keywords be a long list of no particular order words not to worry about capitalization and then use Collections to group my photos?

Should I not worry about the keywords being in order or groups/sub groups and just type away (watch for capitalization) and later use filters and collections to best find my photos?

Hopefully there are others out there who have gone through this!

Thanks,

Bob

digismile

Merry Christmas Bob.

Yes, you can't drag and drop your keywords in LR like you did in Elements. But LR has it's own methods to attach keywords that are, let's say, just different.

It has a feature called Painter that lets you use a little spray paint looking tool to add keywords to photos. Or instead of dragging your keywords, in LR you just click on the keywords. I find it faster than dragging and dropping. As well, LR will suggest other keywords based on your previous tagging, so it might make you think of something you would like to add.

The nested keywording is still useful if you want to search for something like "Family" which might have many keywords nested under Family, without having to search for each individual name. Conversely, you still have the option of looking just for "mom" or "Bob". So it depends on whether you actually use the hierarchy for searching.

As far as the caps/lower case issue, I have tried to standardize on lowercase except for proper names and titles. Cleaning it up later is fairly easy to do. If you have photos with two different keywords that you want to be just one, you simply need to select the photos with the "wrong" keyword(s), assign the new keywords, then just delete the keywords from the keyword list.

As for collections, you will find collections and smart collections very powerful for selecting images based on basically any metadata, not just keywords. For example, I made a normal (i.e. not smart) collection for a slide show that I put together for my brother's 25th wedding anniversary. The photos had a variety of keywords/ no keywords, etc. and I was able to put them easily into a "set", order the set, etc. without having to physically copy them into a folder, etc.

Just my quick thoughts,

Have a great day!

bobrandklev

Thanks for your feedback and summary it confirms a couple thoughts I had and you make a couple other good points. I think before I took a lot of time to clean up my keyword caps I wanted to make sure I was thinking in the right direction.

I think once I have my caps/duplicated keywords fixed I will then do as you say and click the prompted keywords or type them in to get additional suggestions. I can then find photos by filters or collections so it's likely I won't look at the keyword list that often, I'll just know it's there so spending a lot of time sorting it may be overkill?

I'll get started soon and move foward, thanks again for your guidance and ideas.