Hi everybody, welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
Adorama TV.
I'm Mark Wallace and in
today's episode we're gonna dig into
Lightroom and explore collections and
collection sets.
Collections are a tool in Lightroom
classic that allows you to
organize and publish photos get them out
to your clients, and you can do these
very, very quickly and easily, it's a tool
that if you're not using, you're missing
out, so without further ado let's dive
right into Lightroom so I can show you
how it works.
Collections are very simple, I'm going to
show you first how to create collections,
but then stick around because I want to
show you why you want to create
collections, and why they're so powerful.
This catalog is a catalog of just images
that I've shot in Cambodia over the last
few years, so over several visits and
everything is all mixed up, I've got
temples that I shot at the very
beginning of this, I've got Angkor Wat
and some other temples, then at the
bottom here I have a bunch of model
photo shoots that I did for Adorama TV.
I need to sort all of this stuff out,
collections are the way to do that.
So the first thing we're going to do is
just create a standard collection, and so
what I'll do here is I'm going to go to
the very first photo of Soriyan, this is
a model that we shot for Adorama TV.
I have put links to these photo shoots in
the description of this video, so you can
get all that goodness, but here let's
create this first collection.
So I'm gonna click on the very first image of
Soriyan here, and then I'm going to
scroll down to the very last image of
our photo shoot, there we go, so actually
there's a little bit more here, so I'll
keep going, okay.
So there's the last image of Soriyan,
and so I'm just gonna hit shift and click,
so I've selected all of those,
I'm going to put these images
in a collection, it's just sort of like a
file folder, I'm just putting those in
there so I can quickly get to them later.
So to do that I'll go over here to
collections, there's this little +,
I'll click on that, and then I'll click
'Create Collection', the first thing I need
to do is name this, so
I'm going to name it Soriyan, so that
matches our model, we can also put this
inside of a collection set, we're going
to get to that here in a little bit, and
of course I want to include the selected
photos, the pictures that I just selected,
I want to include those too, I put those
into this collection, I have the option
of making virtual copies, I'm not going
to do that for this demo, but you might
want to do that for example,
maybe you want to have a collection of
images that you want to do some editing,
you want to crop those to square, or
vertical or maybe you want to create
them to be a black and white, or some
special process, and you want to leave
the originals alone, no problem, create a
collection, create some new virtual
copies, then you can edit away without
having any changes to the master files,
which is really cool, we're also going to
talk about what a target collection is
at the end of this demo, so now we're
gonna just create this collection, so
I'll click create, and now you can see
over here we have,- 'Collections',
'Smart Collections' and then 'Soriyan' in this
collection that we just created, and here
are all of our images which is really
cool, now one of the things you can do
with collections is, if you have some
images that you don't want, it's my
friend Matt Badly being funny in the
studio, I don't want him in this
collection, so I can select these folders
and hit delete, the delete button, and
they are just removed from the
collection, but they're still in the
catalog which is really cool.
So you can do all kinds of things in your
collections, it doesn't affect the
catalog at all, so the next thing we want
to do is create our second collection.
We're going to do this a little bit
differently, instead of selecting all of
our images and then creating the
collection, first I'm going to create the
collection, and then I'll drag and drop
the images inside of that, so this is
Kongka, she is another model that we shot,
so what I'm going to do here is, I'm
going to create a collection, I'm going
to name this Kongka, and I got to spell
that right, there we go, and I'm not going
to include the selected photos for this
one, so we've got our folder, basically
our collection, there's nothing in there.
See this 0, it says there's no images in
this collection, so all I have to do to
add these images to this collection is
I'll select an image, drag it over, there it is,
you can see I have one image now, the
nice thing about collections is, if you
accidentally drag the same image in
another time, it doesn't add another copy
of that, it knows that it's already in
there, it doesn't do anything so what I'm
going to do here is, I'm going to do what
I did before.
I'm just going to select all of my images,
of Kongka, got a bunch of
them here, we did a lot of photo shoots
so I'm going to the very bottom here.
There it is, okay we'll just select this
one right here, is the last one, all right
and then I'm going to drag and drop all
of those in, BAM, now you can see we have
537 images, awesome, okay, well there's
another way that we can create a
collection, we can create collections
that are smart, they automatically throw
images into a collection, so what we're
going to do is, I have another set of
images, so this is Nicki, Nicki we shot a
bunch of images of Nicki, when we were
shooting down in Cambodia, and all of
these images have the keyword Nikki Nikki,
and so what I can do is, I can have
Lightroom automatically look for images
with the keyword Nikki Nikki, and put
them in a catalogue to do that
or into a collection, sorry, so to do that I
can hit the +, and then say 'Create Smart
Collection', Smart Collections are awesome
because you can use all kinds of
different criteria, so I'm going to call
this Nikki Nikki, and then what we will
do is, I want to make sure that the other
metadata keywords contains the Nikki
Nikki, then I'll hit that, and then hit c
'Create', now look at this automatically we
have 271 images in this folder,
it just looked for every single image
that had the keyword Nikki Nikki, and it
throws it in here automatically.
Now here's something that you can do,
now let's say that I shoot with Nikki
again down the road, I can automatically
have those images added to the Smart
Collection, so let's pretend this image
is of Nikki, it's not but let's fake it,
all I have to do is add the keyword Nikki
Niki, there it is,
so I've added the keyword Nikki Nikki to
this image, if I go back here to this
smart collection, there it is, there is
that image, because it's looking for the
keyword, we can even do other things, I'm
going to remove this, because that is not
Nikki, we can do other things, so I don't
want all of the images of Nikki to be in
this collection, I just want all of the
images of Niki that I've selected to
show up in this collection so we can
edit this smart collection.
So I'll right click on there, click 'Edit Smart
Collection', and I'm going to add another
rule, so we have one rule that says if
the keyword contains Nikki Nikki, add it
automatically, I'm gonna hit this plus
I'm going to go and say, if the pick flag
is flagged, in other words if it has a
flag, only put those in, so it has to have
Nikki Nikki and it has to be flagged, all
of the following rules have to apply.
I'll save that now, look BAM,
only 34 files are there, so only the
files that are key worded Nikki Nikki, and
flags show up, so now in the future if I
want to see all my good shots of Nikki, I
just go to this, and bammo, I don't have
to go up here and click attributes, and
keywords, or any of those things this
Smart Folder knows how to do that, let's
talk about collection sets, if I want to
sort all of these things, so in the
future maybe I would have a bunch of
temples, I might have scenics, Imight
have a bunch of things, I want to
organize that stuff so these are all
images of models, so I can go in here and
create a collection set, and I'm going to
name that 'Models'.
I'll create that now,
if you look at this icon here,
it looks like one of those boxes you get at
an office supply store,
they put file folders in.
That's exactly what it is... so now I can
take this Kongka, and put that inside of
this collection set.
I can take my Nikki Nikki collection, stick
in there the Soriyan, put that in there,
so now I have a container for all of my
models.
I could create a collection set
or a container for scenic photos, and I
could break those down to temples and
city shots and street photos, however you
want to do it 'Collection sets', just
contain Collections, you can have
collections that you manually create, or
you can have collections that are smart,
and they automatically create themselves
based on criteria that you've set, these
things are really, really awesome, the
last thing I want to show you is how to
create a target collection.
So what I'm going to do here is,
I'm going to create one more collection,
and I'm going to name that temple
'Temples', I'm not going
to put it in a collection set, I just
want this to be a standalone collection,
and I'm going to say 'Set as target
collection', and I will create that now.
Notice that this has a + after it,
that little + used to be after the
quick collection, but now it's down here
at temple.
If you look at your Lightroom
catalog, you probably have a + after
the quick collection, because by default
the quick collection is the target
collection.
So what the heck is a 'target
collection', let me go back here to all of
my photographs, what I want to do is I
just want to be able to really quickly
throw things into my 'temples' collection
if you look closely at any photo in
Lightroom you'll see that there is a
little circle in the upper right hand
corner - that is for adding photos to a
target collection, whichever collection
you've set as the target collection, if
you click on that photo, or on that
circle it is automatically added to
whatever collection you've set as the
target, for instance 'the temples', that's
what I just said as my target collection,
or you can hit the shortcut key which is
B, so if I just hit B on any of that, it's
automatically added, so I can just go
through here, anything I want to add I
always hit B, okay, there's a temple,
there's a temple, I'm just hitting B as I
go through, here, that's cool,
and so as I'm sorting through these,
anything I see that I want to add,
I'll just hit the B shortcut key,
and it adds it in there, so now you can see
here are the eight images that I've
added to my target collection,
you can change the target
collection at any time, just by
right-clicking on a collection, and then
saying 'Set as target collection'.
By default, I almost always keep my 'quick
collection' as the target collection,
because that's exactly what it's for, for
quickly adding things so I can work with
them quickly, thus the name quick
collection,
Okay now that we know how to
create these different collections, and
collection sets, let's learn why they're
so powerful, and why you should use them.
All right, now we're looking at a more
realistic scenario, this is my catalog
for my travel photos, I've got almost
36,000 images here, so I use collections
to sort and organize all of these things
quite a bit.
One of the things that you'll see, if I
zip through here, some of these
collections have these little squiggly
next to it, so beasts it's got a little
squiggly next to it, homepage image,
Lincoln township, life in black-and-white,
Lightroom, mobile images,
These are the collections that I have
synched with Lightroom, so we have
Lightroom classic which is what I'm
showing you here, there's also Lightroom,
the new version, that is a web interface.
It also works on tablets and mobile
devices, so iPhones and Android devices,
so if you want to share all this image,
or all these images through your
collections, all you have to do is
right-click on a collection, and then say
sync with Lightroom, now what happens is
these images will now go to the cloud, if
I zip over here to a web browser, you'll
see this is Lightroom, the new web
version, and here are all those
collections that I shared, so Langa
Township, Life in black and white,
Reflections, the Beast's I showed you, now
the nice thing about this is now you can
take these, there's a little person here
with a + next to it, I can click on
that, and I can share these collections.
So I can share this album either with a
person or a group of people, or the world,
so I can click enable sharing, and that
is how I can let people see the
stuff that I've worked so hard on.
The other thing that this does is,
it allows me to work with the
Creative Cloud, so if I zip up here to
Creative Cloud, you'll notice that I have
Lightroom web, which
is what I'm showing you now,
and there's also Adobe portfolio for
building a personalized website, so here
is Adobe portfolio, and you'll probably
notice there's my reflections, and the
Beasts and Studio and Langa Township,
all of those collections that I shared,
are in my portfolio.
To add those all you have to do is click
Add page and then click Lightroom
album, so the stuff that
you've shared from Lightroom classic to
Lightroom, through those collections will
show up here.
So here are all those albums I just
showed you, so there's reflections,
and scenic, and studio, all that stuff
shows up, so I can just choose
whatever I want, and I can bring that
into my website, and then if we go over,
here's the finished project, so MarkWallace.com
You'll find my photography,
and then if I exhibit here, here is the
reflections, if I click on that, here are
all the images that I shared.
If I sip back over here to Lightroom
classic and I go down to reflections,
so here we go, reflections,
there they are, here are all
those images, you'll see the little
squiggly, I shared those with Lightroom,
and it's all synced, and so whatever I do
here, I can sync and then publish over
here on my website.
It's a very easy and extremely powerful
tool in Lightroom classic,
that's all there is to it.
Collections are awesome, very powerful
and very easy to use, well if you like
this video please click on the subscribe
button so you don't miss a single episode.
We're publishing new videos on
Adorama TV almost every single day,
follow me on Instagram,
so you can get sort of
behind the scenes views of what I'm
doing in my photography and travels
around the world, thanks again for
joining me,
and I will see you again next time.