3.1 Metadata: What Can It Do for Us?

The more you shoot, the more images you'll have in your library. You can't just depend on scrolling through Adobe Lightroom to find the images that you need. That's why we use metadata, the text hidden away inside of our image files or Lightroom catalog to help us make sense of our image collection. I have a saying that if it takes you more than a couple minutes to find the images that you're looking for, you probably aren't making full use of metadata. I like to divide metadata into two key types. There's camera added metadata that includes things like the capture time of our images the lens or camera used, and user added metadata which includes things like the keywords we attached to an image, the star ratings or even a color label we can give an image in Adobe Lightroom. Both of these are truly essential for marking our images so that we can find them later. In the next section of the course I'll show you all about how to add metadata to your images and more importantly, how to filter for it. Filtering is all about giving Lightroom a list of rules based on metadata and showing the images that match. It's really easy to get started with this and it's the best way to make sense of our ever growing image collections. Stay tuned.