Keywording at Light Speed – Part I

Posted by Eric Leszkowicz on Jan 6, 2009 in Blog, Featured Articles, Keywords, Lightroom | 2 comments

Getting over your Keywording fears

Many reasons exist to choose Lightroom to develop RAW files and to manage an entire workflow.  The situation a commercial photographer would face is vastly different than the situation a wedding photographer would face.  One thing is for sure that most users would benefit from better keywording.

So why don’t photographers use keywords more?  Two reasons exist.  One is not understanding the value of keywords and the second is seeing keywording as a laborious, time consuming task.

Let’s save the value of keywords for another post and look at speeding up our keyword experience.  Lightroom, like most Adobe products, there is more than one way to skin a keyword. I am going to spend the next many posts talking keywords.  I plan to make several posts about how to add keywords to your images.

First up….Add on import.

When you open the import dialogue box up there are a host of options available to you.  One of which is the keyword box.

You have two ways to place keyword tags on the images:

• Begin typing an already existing keyword.  When you do, Lightroom will give you suggestions on which keyword to use.  Be careful.  Keywords are case sensitive.  So if you enter a keyword ‘Wedding’ it is different than the keyword ‘wedding.’
• Enter a keyword that does not exist.  When a keyword is entered this way it is added to the main list of keywords.

For the record, this is my least favorite way to enter keywords.  They are added to every picture that you import.

When to use:  Use this keywording method when you want to apply one keyword to all images.

Examples of use:  When I imported images from an old hard drive and I didn’t have time to sort the files, I placed them under a keyword “images to sort.”  I do the same when I import images from my cell phones.

More in the next post.

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