How to Use Smart Collections in Lightroom



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Lightroom is extremely useful for processing your digital photos, but it is equally powerful for helping to keep your photos organized. Most of us have thousands of photos on our hard drives, and it is very easy to allow them to get unorganized, which makes it very challenging to find photos when you are looking for them. Lightroom’s library module includes many useful functions that can help you to get your photos organized and maintain that organization going forward.

One of the ways Lightroom can help is through the use of collections. You can create collections and then assign photos to those collections, and you can even place one photo in multiple collections. How you use collections will depend on your own workflow, but one example would be a wedding photographer that creates a new collection for each wedding.

In addition to regular collections Lightroom also offers “smart collections”, which can be equally powerful, but first you have to understand how they work. Here are a few key differences between regular collections and smart collections:

  1. You cannot manually add a photo to a smart collection. A smart collection is based on certain rules or criteria. If a photo meets that criteria it will automatically be included in the smart collection.
  2. You also cannot manually remove a photo from a smart collection. It will remain in the smart collection unless it ceases to meet the criteria.
  3. You cannot manually arrange the order of photos in a smart collection. They can be arranged by your choice of capture time, added order, edit time, edit count, rating, pick, label text, label color, file name, file extension, file type, or aspect ratio.

Getting Started with Smart Collections

To find the smart collections, look at the left side of your screen under “Collections”.

To create a new smart collection, click on the + icon and then select “create smart collection”.

Then give your smart collection a name. You can use multiple rules to create your smart collection if you would like, and you can use the dropdown to determine whether the collection should include photos that meet any of the rules, all of the rules, or none of the rules.

Then choose the criteria that you want to use to create the rule. For this example I am going to create a smart collection that will include all photos taken with a particular camera. So I will select “camera info” and the “camera” and I’ll enter “Canon EOS 6D”.

Then I’ll click “create” and it will create the smart collection and automatically include all of the photos taken with that camera.

Of course, you would do this with any of the cameras that you use, and you could also do the same thing for lenses.

There are a ton of options for creating your smart collections. You could set the rules to includes photos by rating, label color, label text, filename, date, location, size, and much more. And you can also use multiple rules on the same smart collection. For example, with the smart collection I created I could have added a second rule that would require photos to be rated as five star. So if it was set to require all rules the smart collection would include photos taken with the Canon EOS 6D and are rated as five stars.

Depending on your workflow and your needs you can create smart collections that will be very useful for organizing and managing your photos.