Here are some considerations to take into account when cataloguing with Lightroom.

Multiple Catalogs vs A Single Catalog

Should you create lots of catalogs for your images, or keep them all in one single catalog?

This question doesn’t have a right or wrong answer – you’ll need to consider your needs carefully. I personally use a single catalog for all my images, personal and professional. I do this for a number of reasons:

• A don’t like having to switch between catalogs to find images.
• A single image can be both personal and professional. For example, the gymnast shot uses a background image that I happened to take while on holiday in New York. By having all my images in a single catalog I can maintain an entire reference of material that I can call upon.
• I also use both my personal and professional images when considering shoot locations, so once again it’s useful to have all my images in one place.

There are also good reasons to maintain separate catalogs, such as:

• If you’re working in a team environment, it obviously makes sense to limit the catalog to images have been taken with the context of the organisation.
• If there’s no cross over between the type of photography that you do then it’ll probably be easier to maintain properly organised databases if they’re separated. For example, if you do weddings then it seems sensible to maintain a catalog specifically for this work.

Note however that I don’t subscribe to the idea of photo ‘buckets’, where each catalog can fit onto a CD or DVD – I think that the justification for this has vanished with today’s backup options.

Collections vs Keywords

When should you be using keywords in preference to collections? The choice isn’t necessarily cast in stone, however a well organised library will probably use both keywords and collections. Here are some of the main differences between the two:

• Keywords may be exported as XMP metadata when exporting a file.
• Keywords may be stored as XMP metadata in (or in a sidecar file of) the original file. If the database becomes corrupted, your keywords are still intact.
• Each keyword may have a list of synonyms that are exported with it.
• Keywords may be used as search criteria from the filter bar.
• There are many more ways of applying keywords to a file than there are of placing images in collections. They may be typed into the right-hand keyword pane, applied from the keyword templates, applied using the keyword stamper, or dragged and dropped from the right-hand panel. Keywording is rapid.
• Collections are essentially virtual folders and as such the images in a collection can be ordered.  This will be useful for a slideshow or web gallery. Also, the image flags (flagged, unflagged and rejected) and (optionally) the filter settings are local to each collection.
• Collections can be exported as a catalog, and reimported at a later date. This can be a very powerful feature in some workflows.

From the above it would seem that keywording offers many more advantages than the collections do, but they really serve very different purposes. Keywords are best used to describe images an collections should be used to organise images.

Be wary of the various tutorials on-line that show keywords being used in a hierarchical structure to organise photos. Something like this:

> People
    > Mike
    > Bob
    > Phil

An advantage of using keywords like this is that it would be easy to find photos of people using Lightroom’s filter bar. With collections, you’d need to find the “Bob” collection to locate all the photos of him, which may take more time (albeit only a little more if the collections are well organised).

However you’ll need to be very careful if the photos will ever be supplied to a third party, such as a stock agency or an end client. Given the example above, “Bob” is meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know who Bob is – it certainly should not be applied to a stock image. You could turn off the exportation of this particular keyword, but this would be a fairly painstaking and error prone approach to the problem.

In the above case I think it’s hard to fully appreciate whether to use keywords or collections, but consider instead a collection of images for an exhibition. The advantages of a collection here are more obvious – the ability to order, flag and filter these images is a powerful aid.

You’ll need to consider the fors and againsts for each method, and to use the tool in the way that’s best for you. I would however recommend the following approach:

1. Use collections to group photos that intrinsically belong together, creating sub-collections as needed. Examples include photos of friends and family, all black and white images, photos for a particular client, all photos submitted to a stock collection, all finished fine art prints, works in progress, exhibitions, etc.
2. Don’t create collections for information that’s already provided by the metadata. For example, the IPTC metadata already allows you to store the country, state and location in which a photos was taken, and is conveniently extracted by the metadata browser.
3. Use keywords to describe the image itself, as if you were giving it to a third party. For example, use “cat” but not “freddy”. Stock photographers and journalists will understand this approach well. Since the keywords are exported with the photo as part of the metadata, this makes the photos easy to find and index by those that’ll be using the photo at a later date.
4. Use lots of keywords. The richer your database, the easier it will be to find photos at a later date.
5. Use the hierarchical keywording to increase your efficiency, not to slow it down. For example, you may have a structure such as this:

   > Animal
       > Mammal
           > Cat
           > Dog
           > Fish
           > Shark

   Now when you type “cat”, the implied keywords “Mammal” and “Animal” will be exported automatically.

6. Make good use of synonyms. One obvious way to do this may be to add the plural form to each keyword.
7. Think to the future. If you’re not selling your work today then the choice of keywording or using collections may seem less important to you. If one day you decide to try selling your photos through a stock agency or to an art buyer then you’ll be glad to have correctly keyworded images.

9) Consider using David Rieck’s Controlled Vocabulary to help you keywords your images.

Worklists

I use Eric Scouten’s Worklist approach to keep track of which images still need sorting and keywording. I highly recommend reading his blog post on the subject.

My collection hierarchy

Here then is a screenshot that shows a part of my collection hierarchy:

The top level is divided into three main collections sets: the worklists, my personal work and my professional work. Each of these is further sub-divided, grouping my images into things like web site collections, resources, clients, stock, etc.

For the curious, Building Blocks contains photos that include imagery that may be useful when compositing images, and Scouting Resource contains images that may be useful when searching for shot locations.

The obvious solution, and one that many location photographers use, is to Geoencode the photos.

Luckily many cameras have integrated GPS nowadays, it’s become a cheap consumer level component that’s easy to include in even the smallest compact camera.  Unluckily, Canon have taken their standard approach of sucking the will to live from its DSLR users, refusing to take the GPS module from their tinsy-winsy compacts and put it in their high-end and very expensive digital SLRs¹.  The only option the offer is to buy a very expensive vertical grip that has a socket to plug in a commercial GPS logger. Utter madness.

So, today I decided to try automating this process using Jeffrey Friedl’s geoencoding plug-in for Lightroom (he always gets the best plugin ideas, the fiend), an iPhone, and the Trails application.

The process was a pleasure.  The Trails application has a surperb user interface – you start recording a new trail and stick the iPhone in your pocket.  The application ensures that the iPhone doesn’t turn off, and even shuts down the screen automatically.  At any moment you can stop and start recording on the same route, which is very useful if you’re driving around and shooting intermittently since it’ll really save on the battery life.

Once the scouting’s over recoving the tracklog it simple – Trails will email to you.  How cunning’s that?

To geoencode the photos they first need to be imported into Lightroom.  Once this is done the images should be selected, and then Jeffrey’s plug-in should be invoked.  The plug-in can then be used to open the tracklog file², and by correlating the time and date information from both the tracklog and the photos the GPS coordinates for each photo can be estimated with a high degree of accuracy³.

Easy peasy.

1. A built in intervalometer is another example – easy to include in software, but then they couldn’t sell a remote shutter for €100
2. For the plug-in to open the tracklog I had to remove the .xml suffix that Trails generated
3. the caveat here is that the camera and the iPhone should have their time and date synchronised

Having had a good look at his book, I felt that I just had to blog about it. This really is a great Lightroom book; not only is it comphensive, it’s extremely clear and easy to read. Nathaniel has obviously thought long and hard about his presentation, and the result is simply excellent – the best I’ve seen. And the final cheery on the cake is that Nathaniel has separated the chapters with some wonderful colour images to inspire you to get out there and shoot…

I’d highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn more about Lightroom. And no, I’m not just saying that because he gave me a free copy!