2020 has been a tough year for everyone. Not being able to travel to our favourite dive destinations and forced to stay at home has driven many of us to spend hours working on our pictures and organizing our catalogue, time for some Lightroom Housekeeping.
We are now in the middle of a second, but hopefully shorter lockdown. If you have not done it before, this is a good opportunity to sit in front of your computer and do some good old housekeeping.
Today I wish to offer you some useful tips to optimize your catalogue .
Personally, I use Adobe Lightroom, however, these tips can apply in one way or another to most editing software.
Lightroom housekeeping. Get rid of unwanted images
If like me, you tend to download every picture you take, is no surprise that very soon your hard drive gets very full. I regularly go through all my pictures and delete images that I do not consider to be worthy. During this process, you should have a ruthless approach.
In Lightroom, the most efficient way to do this is to use the flags, mark as rejected all the images you want to get rid off and afterwards you can delete them all with a single command.
Lightroom Housekeeping. Keywording
Keywording is one probably the least appealing part of any photo editing workflow. However, is without any doubt, one of the most important processes on any catalogue. Keywords are essential
Keywords will help you find a particular picture among the hundreds or even thousands of images in your catalogue.
Lightroom Housekeeping. Rating
Rating images allows you to filter your pics, select the ones you love, choose images to print or to share and so on.
Lightroom allows you to rate photos in a couple of ways, by stars and by colour tags. You can choose to rate your pics any way but it is essential you pick a method and stick to it. Failing to do that you will make a mess of your workflow.
By using a combination of colour tags and stars you will have a huge range of options to filter you images and in a future select exactly the image you are looking for.
If you follow these simple but effective tips your catalogue will soon be streamlined. Finding your best images will be incredibly easy. And this is particulary important when you need to make a selection of photos for a specific use such as entering Copetitions.
And speaking about competitions, I would like to finish this blog with a reminder to all my photo friends to use the last few days of lockdown to clean up your image catalogues. This time of the year many photo competitions such as Underwater Photographer of the Year are opening for entries so why try your luck, I certainly am.
