2.3 Keyword Tagging

In the metadata portion of this course, we've focused so far on adding objects, such as flag statuses, star ratings, and color labels. That helps us mark our color images as keepers, or our best images, or any special purpose status. In this portion, I wanna focus on what may be the most powerful form of metadata, which are key words. Keywords help us bridge the gap between what the computer can determine about our image, such as the shutter speed and settings used to capture it, and what's actually important, such as what's in our images. We're gonna use keywords in order to add really important meanings to our images, that help us find them later. With keywords, our goal is to describe what is going on in the image. And we can use all of the same features in Light Room we've seen so far, such as filtering or searching based on those keywords. Let's get started with adding our first. If we select an image such as this one, and click the drop down arrow on the keywording panel. We see a number of different options open about how we're gonna add keywords. And just like with some of the other options we've looked so far in Lightroom, there's a number of different ways about how we can add our first keyword. The easiest way to do this is to simply click on the keywording box, and add our first keyword. I'm gonna do that by adding the keyword bride and groom. One I hit enter the image has had a keyword tag added to it. And we can see on the film strip that it now has this keyword icon on it. So you can see now that we've had this in the keywording panel. And that's really important because we're gonna be able to search for those key words later, and round up all of our images that have that key word attached. Now, if we pick another image, we now have that same key word that we just added added to the key words suggestions panel. So, to add it, all we have to do is click it now. And it'll be added to the image that we have selected. Lightroom will start learning key words to suggest and place them on this panel so that you can simply add them with a single click. Now the keyword sub panel is another option about how we can configure Lightroom to keep our most used keywords at hand. If I click the drop down in the Keyword sub panel, there's a number of different options built in by default. And for example, we'll go ahead and open the wedding photography option. You'll see here that this fills in a number of different keywords that we can add to an image by default. And if I click an image such as this one, I can add groom for example from that set. Now if we want to get into modifying those keyword sets that are built in, we can always click that drop-down and choose edit set. Think of keyword sets as basically our quick click options about how we can add keywords. If you know that there are nine keywords that you're going to be using frequently when tagging certain images, you can build a keyword set, and then always have them at close hand. Now, one of the things that can kind of overwhelm photographers is getting these keywords added quickly. When you're trying to build out your image collection and get the images keyworded, it's a little overwhelming at times to think about the massive number keywords that you need to add. So, let's look at a couple ways that you can add keywords really quickly. I'm gonna switch to grid view by pressing the letter G on my keyboard. And let's go ahead and look at a way that I can add a keyword to several different images at once. Now, these five images through here, they all have one thing in common, and that's that the bride is in them. So I'm gonna go ahead and click SHIFT and choose all of those images. You can see here that we have Those five images selected. Now, if we want to add another image we can hold command on our keyboard, control on Windows computer, and click another image to add it. So you can either selectively choose with command or control or you can shift-click to select an entire range. Now just as we added a keyword to a single image before. Now, I can add them to all of these images at once, by clicking in the keyword tag panel, and typing bride. And when I press Return, all images get those keywords. So, again, you'll have to worry about adding those keywords on a one by one basis, and can instead batch add them with some of these tools. Now, the keyword list panel, located directly below the keyword panel, is another place that we can find where our keywords are located. And the keyword list panel is gonna show us basically which keywords are in our Lightroom catalog. This is a really powerful panel that also helps us explore our keywords. For example, on images that are tagged bride and groom. I can simply click this arrow that's on the right side to filter to those images. And then press command Z to unfilter. Now what if I wanna add those keywords to other images? Well we can follow kinda a simple process to do that. I'm gonna command click, and pick all three of these images. And if I click the tick box to the left of bride and groom, it's gonna add those to any of the images we have selected. So basically, if your keywords are already being used somewhere in Lightroom, you can come to the keyword list panel and add them to other images. By selecting the ones you want to add and then pressing the check box. And you can always filter to images based on a keyword by pressing the arrow to the right. So, while keywords can sometimes overwhelm photographers, its always better to have some keywords attached to your images than none at all. It helps us keep our collection explorable by adding meaning that we can search for later. Keywords are maybe the most important feature of Lightroom for finding a special image at a moment's notice. But one thing I'll caution you about is really trying to be careful about the number of keywords that you'll want to use. You don't want redundancies in your keyword list, like dog, puppy, and canine, for example. Try to settle on single keywords that are going to be reuseable, and then stick to them. And simply keeping this keyword list panel open at all times helps you make sure that you don't wind up building conflicting key words.