Lightroom Tips

Tip – 3 Tips For Smart Collections

A while back, I created a video about Smart Collections. The other day, they really helped me out when I needed to find some photos quick, so I figured I’d resurrect that video as well as show you another use.

For starters, Smart Collections are collections (or you could call them albums which is what they really are) that automatically add your photos to them based on some sort of preset criteria. In the video mentioned above, whenever I use the HDR software, Photomatix, it appends the word “tonemapped” to the file name. So I created a Smart Collection called HDR and it automatically adds any image with the word tonemapped in it. That gives me a one-click way to find all of my HDR photos without me having to do any work to organize them.

Another use would be to add any PSD file. That way, any photos you work on in Photoshop automatically get added to the smart collection and it gives you an easy way to find them.

One more tip. If you look in your Collections panel you’ll see a Smart Collections folder. In there is one called “Recently Modified”. It automatically adds photos to it that were modified in the last two days. It also automatically removes them when they fall out of that “2 day” category. Pretty cool huh? And if you double click on the smart collection you can change 2 days to however many days you want. OK, that’s it for the smart collection love-fest. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday for the Photoshop CS5 love-fest 🙂

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