Lightroom Tips

Lightroom and the New Year

Happy New Year folks! I hope you all had a safe, happy, and fun holiday. Now its time to get back to work. Here’s a few things for you to consider doing (if you’re not already) when it comes to Lightroom for the new year.

1. Collections – Collections are like little photo albums. They’re a quick easy way for you to always be one click away from your favorite photos. I have a video that talks a little about smart collections here and Scott has a really great post where he talks more about his collection workflow.

2. Delete more photos – One way to help wrangle your Lightroom experience is to simply have less photos in your catalog. I’ve got over 10,000 images in my catalog from 2009. You know how many made it to my portfolio or were sent off to the people I was photographing? Less than 1000. That’s 9000 photos that really don’t serve much of a purpose. A smaller photo library makes it easier on everything – you, your storage devices, and your computer. For you, its less photos to deal with and backup. For your computer, it means a smaller faster catalog. Really try to become a good photo editor and edit down to only your best photos. I’m on my way. I took a couple hundred photos of the family over Christmas and New Years. Last night I sat down and delete a lot of them so now I’m down to about 35. I felt liberated 🙂
(kidding of course, but you know what I mean).

3. Print more – Make it a point to print more. And use the Print templates to make it easier. If you’re printing one photo on a page to hang on a wall then Lightroom has some good templates to start with. But if you’ve been on vacation and want to print more photos to a page, start getting creative with print templates to do it. Here’s a video I did a while back that may help but the point is to print more. Even if you just export a bunch of 4×6’s and send them to Costco.

4. Presets – If you’ve just started following this site then you’re missing a couple years worth of Lightroom presets. There’s a nifty little button on the right side called Presets that you can click and see all of them. Give ’em a try. They’ll really speed things up for you as well as give you some neat ideas for processing your photos.

5. Backup – Lightroom’s preferences have backup options in it. I’ve written about it many times here. I also have an online training course dedicated to backing up Lightroom and your photos. Whatever you do, make sure you start a backup strategy if you haven’t already. Trust me, you’ll sleep better knowing you have.

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