Lightroom Presets

Presets – Keyword Sets

Happy Wednesday everyone. I just got back from teaching at the Adobe/CDW event in Philadelphia and it went over great. It was nice to meet some of the blog readers there and many thanks to everyone who came up and said hi. Now on to the presets…

A new style of presetThis week marks a brand new style of preset – keyword sets. If you’ve never seen or heard of them before you’ll find these guys in the Library Module on the right hand side in the Keywording panel. Essentially keyword sets are lists of common keywords for common types of photography. If you expand the keyword set you’ll see there are some defaults that ship with Lightroom: Outdoor Photography, Portrait Photography, and Landscape Photography. Well I’ve started to create my own and thought I’d share them with you since I’ve really been trying to be good about keywording my photos often. And since these keyword sets are straight from my library you can guess the first batch of them are going to be ones that I use a lot lately. I’ve created one called “Children” and another called “Baseball”. This mainly comes from the fact that I love to take photos of my kids, other peoples kids, and also my kids playing sports 🙂 I realize that not all of you can use these but if they get you thinking about keywording more (and using keyword sets more) then I think that’s a good thing. Plus, I’ll start to add more as the weeks go on.

Installing the Keyword Sets
Installing keyword sets is a little different from installing regular presets in Lightroom. Mainly because there is no official “import” option for them. So here’s what you do.
1) First download and unzip the file that has the two keyword sets in it and place them on your desktop.
2) Navigate to the folder where keyword sets are stored.
Mac: (your computer name)/ Library / App Support / Adobe / Lightroom / Keyword Sets
PC: C > Docs/Settings > (your name) > Application Data (may be hidden) > Adobe > Lightroom > Keyword Sets
3) Drag the two keyword set template files into the “Keyword Sets” folder.
4) Restart Lightroom.

Using the Keyword SetsUsing the keyword sets is simple. Just select the set from the list. Then click on any keyword in the set to apply it to your selected photos. It makes the process of keywording a lot simpler, as you don’t have to type the keywords in anymore.

Well folks, that’s all she wrote. And by she, I mean me. Actually I have no idea what I mean so I’m going to stop now. It’s late 🙂 I hope you enjoy and make sure you let me know what you think of this new kind of preset. Also, share any thoughts you have for some other ideas for keyword sets. Until next time!

Click here to download Matt’s Children and Baseball Keyword Sets

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