3.4 Group Images With Collections

Have you ever wanted to group images together in a totally custom way without moving them around on the computer itself? Well, in this lesson we'll do just that with collections, which are totally custom ways to group our images. You could also call collections albums. To create a new collection, let's find the Collections panel here on the left side of Lightroom. Let's create a new one by pressing the plus button and choosing Create Collection. All we need to do is give it a name such as TutsPlus, and then we can also choose to include the selected photos if we already have images selected here in the Library module. Let's go ahead and also choose Set as Target Collection for a quick speed trick I'll show you in here just a second. Once we click Create, it will go ahead and jump to the new collection we created and show us the image that's inside of it. Let's jump over to All Photographs again to add some more images to our collection. Now I can add images in a few ways. I could drag and drop an image here in the Library module into the collection to add it to that collection. And you'll see that happen there as I drag and drop another image and the count increased to two. But there's also an even better way to add images to a collection. Remember when we set this as our target collection? Well, now I can add an image to it just by pressing the letter B on our keyboard. When I do that, it adds it to the target collection and moves on to the next image. Basically we always have one collection in our catalog set as the target, and that keyboard shortcut will send images straight there. If we ever want to change which collection is the target collection, all we have to do is Ctrl-click on it and choose Set as Target Collection. This little plus icon that appears next to the collection name lets us know which collection is the target. So remember setting it as the target collection just enables that really handy keyboard shortcut of B, which automatically adds an image to a collection with just that keystroke. Let's enter one of these collections and look at an important feature. Let's say that we're using a collection to tell a story visually. One feature you might not know about is that we can drag and drop and reorder the images. Watch as I do just that, as I click and drag and move an image up in the sequence. This is great for when you're about to export or start a slideshow so that we can order the images just the way we want to show them. You could run an export for here and number them all sequentially so that they stay in order when you send them off to a client, for example. That's it. When you want to group images together any way that you want, a collection is the tool that you need. All you have to do is set it is a target collection and use the letter B on your keyboard to add images, or just drag and drop straight on to the collection here on the left side.