Discovering The Power Of “Tags” in Lightroom

I’ve been consumed by Adobe’s Lightroom the past few days, and there’s good reason why.

You know how I posted awhile ago about the power of Picasa from Google? Well, this is similar to that.. except on steroids. It is by far the best, most comprehensive database driven photo manager I’ve ever used. I will warn anyone however, that it does have a bit of a learning curve.

If you are a photographer whom shoots in ‘RAW’ format, than Lightroom is a must.. the good news is, it’s also the only program you’ll likely ever need. I am a Photoshop junkie to say the least – but truth be told, I can see myself going in there very rarely when trying to turn around photos after a photo shoot now. That is, unless I have to do some crazy photo manipulation like a swapping smiles or stretch mark removal or something

I will post more on why I like it so much, but I wanted to mention  a few things which are making my life a lot easier.

Plugin Support

I was worried that if I switched over to Lightroom from Picasa, that I would lose the ability to upload easily to Picasa Web Albums. Not so, a simple web search pointed me in the direction of the Adobe Exchange in which I could download plugins for Lightroom which would do everything I wanted, and more! I’ve since downloaded plugins to export to Facebook, Flickr, and send via Gmail – all within Lightroom! Slick!!

Raw Editing

I used Adobe Camera Raw for most of my editing to the raw photos, however Lightroom has pretty much the exact same layout and features of Camera Raw – again, without having to open up Photoshop.

Database Driven

This I like, this means that every single change I make in Lightroom, is not permanent. I can go back and change settings later, and it remembers all of them. It also keeps track of all the keywords, collections, virtual copies, stacks, and all kinds of other things that I need to learn more about – but are extremely helpful in tracking large databases of photos. Personally I’m going through trying to do my best to tag old photos and such, and it’s doing a great job.

Smart Collections

This was something I really got excited about. If you’re familiar with smart playlists in iTunes, you’llk now the idea behind these. I can create a collection of photos from any data which is embedded in the photo, or anything I’ve added to it. So for example – I imported photos from around Christmas 2009, and then I tagged them appropriately. I simply used the keyword ‘Christmas’, along with tagging people in the photos (Can’t wait till Lightroom puts in Face Recognition!). Anyhow, to create a collection of Christmas photos for 2009, I simply created a smart collection and then created the criteria to be keywords of ‘Christmas, and then the date range to be from November 2009 to January 2010. This way, if I come across more photos from Christmas of this year, I can simply tag them with ‘Christmas’ and Lightroom will read the date from the EXIF data on the photo, and put them in my smart collection. Sweet!

Those are a few of my favorite features so far.. and I’m only using Library mode for the most part, can’t wait to dive into the other modules!