Hey guys! This is Janine from Pangolin Photo Safaris, and today I want to speak to you
about keywording your photographs in Lightroom.
Why it is such a massive advantage, and how you can do it without wasting too much time on it.
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All right. Let's get started. Keywords on Lightroom is a love-hate relationship many people have.
A lot of people have heard about it, but don't take the time to use them. Others make use of
them frequently ,or infrequently. But let me tell you something...keywording is a secret weapon
everybody should make use of, because it is a fantastic way of organizing your photographs.
The problem many people have is to initially structure your photograph. You can see here
in my Lightroom, I have gone chronological...but obviously I can't always remember which month,
day, or year, I have done certain events. So, you need further assistance...and if you put it into further
folder structures, you can do it via trips, events, occasions, family members or themes. At the end
it never quite fits together. Let me give you an example, I used to have folder structures for every
single animal. I would have elephants, kudus and crocodiles. So I have all my elephants together,
but then I would travel into a different country...and I would also like to now have a
Namibia folder...but there I shot elephants, but they are now not in my elephant folder?
So you couldn't cross-reference. So this is now the beauty with keywords. With keywording
you can suddenly cross-reference your images. If you have a look here at my Lightroom screen....
I chose an area where I have a sequence of shots, which in nature photography is often the case,
as animals are moving fast and you usually trigger more than once...and if you go into your
grid view down here, then you'll have a library filter coming up. If you cannot see the section,
you can go up. Go up to your view and you can tick 'show your filter bar'. That will make it much easier
for you. So, if you have your filter bar visible, you will see you can filter via text. In my 2017
year, if you now look for two or three specific themes at the same time, I could
now say 'hippo charging' and it would show all my charging hippo pictures...or, I could say 'birds fishing',
it will show me all my birds that are potentially busy fishing in my year 2017.
I can also search for the same thing all throughout my entire library and I will
get quite a lot of results. All of which are birds that are fishing. I will save a tremendous amount
of time. When exactly? For instance, if you look for specific prints. You want to redecorate your house
and it's supposed to have a specific theme. Black and white or baby animals, or if you look to make
a picture album. If you want to participate in competitions. All these sort of things. You would
have to go through your entire photo library to find suitable photographs, which can take days,
if not weeks...sometimes. With Lightroom keywording, if you keyword from the start,
you can enter keywords such as locations, editing techniques, light situations,
behavior, portraits...and you'll find, for instance, that nature competitions are often structured the
same way. You have the same categories, such as mammal portraits, mammal behavior, bird portraits, bird behavior...
and if you go and check out my keywording - down here - you will find that I have things like
mammal portraits, or mammal behavior in there. If I have a photograph that I find very intriguing
with respect to the behavior, or particularly good. and I find it's competition worthy, I give it
a label for a potential category that can it can fit in. That way, once a competition comes up,
i don't have to search for it forever. If I go into my bird behavior
...that's what I want to see, not just behavior...and those are all images that I find sort of
interesting when it comes to the behavior of the specific bird, such as the Jacana breeding
behavior, or the Pied Kingfisher fishing, or the Allen's gallinule trying to steal the lily flower.
So that way you can really shorten your time. Make it so much faster to look for your images.
Now you say, okay I can see that, but I still don't have enough time in order to keyword.
Let me convince you, it doesn't take that long. I am currently busy keywording in retrospective, and
let me tell you, that takes a tremendous amount of time. So, don't do the same mistake by having to
keyword 40 000 images within your library. The way i would suggest you do it...every time you import
your images, and every time you have time to go through your images for the first time. Immediately
keyword them. As I said earlier usually you have sequences. If your sync settings are correct,
you can grab them all together by pressing shift, and keyword them all together...at once!
Botswana, charging, Chobe, hippo, sunset, and wildlife. Both in the matrix version, as well as in the full view.
As long as you have auto sync pressed, it will keyword all of them that have been highlighted.
You'll see high key has a little star, because not every single image will have the keyword high key
on there. Only the ones that are black and white. I have keyworded as I edited it afterwards.
By taking this whole lump, I have immediately keyworded four rows of my images here. So now, I
can go through them one by one, to decide which ones I want to keep. Once you're done,
you continue onwards and you do the next stack. In that way, you add maybe 10 minutes...
maybe maximum 15 minutes, to your overall process of going through your images (once).
But! Now you have them keyworded, which is amazing. So, if you are a very slow typer,
and this is quite difficult...you will see that once you have a set of keywords set up. If I
would now want to add silhouettes for instance, I just have to type the first three letters
and silhouette comes up, as a suggestion by my Lightroom, as I have used it so many times.
You can press enter or return...and that way you would add the keyword 'silhouette'. So even a slow typer
has no excuse. Once you've set up a decent load of keyword lists, it makes it much quicker. You even
have keyword suggestions down here...of keywords you use particularly often, however my keyword list
is so big that my little keyword suggestion set is not big enough. You can have a custom keyword set
that you always add - for outdoor, for portrait, for wedding photography...again, I found
wildlife photography too versatile, and the light conditions too versatile to use my custom sets.
To give you one last example...mostly, I work in the Chobe. In this instance I have been on holiday to Cuba.
So, if you have a look here in my matrix section, I can go through this this as all 'street photography
in Cuba'. I would grab the first picture. I would scroll through...all the way to my last image,
which is down here. Press shift, and press them all together. Now you can keyword them all together as one....
Cuba, street photography, holiday...whatever comes to mind that's relevant for you, that
you could look for, you do that. After you're done with that, you will now go through them one by one...
and while I was in Cuba, I was doing a lot of panning shots.
So now, as I go through them one by one, you see some of them have been deleted. You can grab
all of these panning shots that iI have done together. Some of them are quite funky...
and you see I have keyworded them previously - in one go - Cuba, holiday, people, street photography. But now
I want to add something, and I want to add panning. Boom! All these now have one extra keyword.
It took me a split second, and I have one more keyword to find them by. Very, very cool. Very easy going...
and if you do it every single time, and you're disciplined,
you're gonna give up 10 to 15 minutes of your day, rather than giving up hours of searching
in retrospective...once you're looking for your images again. Give it a try let me know how you
do it, and how it works for you in the comments section down below? Very often you just have to
get your inner self to do it, and then it's a really cool way of getting organized.
Bye-bye!