Finding Your Photos with Lightroom’s Filters



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Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

This article is a part of our series Photo Editing in Lightroom 101. Throughout the series we’ll cover the details of Lightroom’s library and develop modules and how you can use Lightroom to improve your own photos. As new articles are published they will be added to this page. If you don’t want to miss future articles in the series, please subscribe to our RSS feed or our email newsletter.

In previous articles we looked at how you can add keywords to your photos and how you can use flags, star ratings, and color labels to organize your photos. Now we’ll take a look at how you can use this info to find the photos that you are looking for.

If you’re working with a very large catalog of thousands of photos it is not always easy to find the specific photos that you want. But if you’ve set up collections and organized your photos with the tools mentioned above, finding them becomes a pretty simple process.

To start with, Lightroom can only search one catalog at a time. If you’re using a single catalog approach this is no problem. But if you’re using multiple catalogs you’ll need to make sure that you’re in the right catalog to find the specific photos that you want.

When you’re in the library module you’ll see the filter bar at the top.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

If you don’t see this bar, go to View > Show Filter Bar.

You can use the filters to find photos that match certain criteria. You can use the “text” option to find photos by keyword or file name (among other options). You can use “attribute” to find photos based on flags, star ratings, or color labels (or any combination). And you can use “metadata” to find photo based on things like date, camera, or lens.

Let’s start by using text. First, click on the word “text” and it will open up the options.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

You can leave it set to “any searchable field”, or you can use the dropdown to select “keyword” or one of the other options. The second dropdown is also important because it will determine how the filter works. If you have it set to “contains all” then it will only show photos that match all of the text that you enter. You also have other options like “contains”, “doesn’t contain”, “starts with”, and “ends with”. And then you have the search field where you enter the words or phrases that you want to use for the filter.

Next, we will use the attribute filter. To do this, click on the word “attribute” at the top. Now, it’s important to understand that you can combine multiple filters. In this case I still have the text filter showing, so whatever I do with the attribute filter will be applied in addition to the text filter. If you want to remove the text filter, click on “text” again. In the screenshot below you can see that both the text and attribute filters are active, indicated by the red arrows. If you want to turn off the text filter, click on “text” where the blue arrow is pointing.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

In the screenshot below you can see that the text filter options are no longer there because I clicked “text” to remove that filer.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

If you want to filter photos based on the flag you can click on either the pick or reject flag icons, and it will filter the photos appropriately. With the star ratings you can click on a star and it will show all the photos with at least that star rating. For example, I have rated one of my sample images as a 4 star. If I click on the 2 star icon the filter will show all photos with a 2 star rating or higher.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

Now, if I want it to show me only the photos that are rated exactly as two star, I can click on the little icon before the first star rating and it will open up some options.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

And if I select “rating is equal to” it will change the filer, and I now see no results because I don’t have any photos rated as 2 stars in this collection.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

If I want to undo that filter I can just click on the active icons again. To filter by color you simply click on one of the color icons.

You can also combine multiple filters. So if you want to search for photos with at least a 3 star rating and a red color label, you simply use both filters at the same time. And you can also combine this with the text filter that we used earlier.

The next type of filter is metadata. When you click metadata it will open options that look like the screenshot below.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

Here you can drill down to a particular date, by camera, or by lens. In the case of this sample collection all 3 of my sample photos were taken on the same day with the same camera and lens, so there are not many options. But if you’re filtering a larger catalog or collection you can use this to find photos that were taken with a specific lens, camera, on by date range.

And if you want to remove all of the filters, simply click on “none”.

Finding Your Photos with Lightroom's Filters

That covers the process of finding your photos using the organizational tools of Lightroom. In the next article we’ll talk about how you can use the quick develop options in the library module.

If you don’t want to miss the other articles in this Photo Editing in Lightroom 101 series, please subscribe to our RSS feed or our email newsletter. As new articles are published they will be added to the series page, which will serve as an index for the entire series.