Folders Vs. Collections

[caption id="attachment_117376" align="alignleft" width="349"] (Fig. 1)To create Collections, click on the plus (+) sign next to the word Collections on the left panel of the Library module, then choose Create Collection, Create Smart Collection, or Create Collection Set. Collections are a way for Lightroom to organize your photos efficiently. You can create multiple instances of the same photos in Collections without the clumsy burden of Copy-Paste.[/caption]

In Lightroom, the way to go is to deal with your photos via Collections, not Folders. By using Collections, you take advantage of Lightroom’s efficiency the way the application was designed to be. Collections are a way to organize photos efficiently and find your pictures quickly when you need to search through thousands upon thousands of photographs. You also do not have to bloat your hard drive if you create several versions of a photograph.

Storage vs. Organization

In the physical world, storage and organization are one and the same: where you store is where you organize. If you have a cabinet with drawers, for example, you store your socks in the bottom drawer, your underwear in the next, your shirts in another, and so forth. That is also where you organize, where you store is where you organize.

We adapted this metaphor when we started to use computers. So we store files in folders, and where we store is where we organize. For example, if I have pictures that I shot in Leyte, I store them in a folder named Leyte. I shot pictures in Palawan and I put them also in another folder called Palawan; same thing I do with photos I shot in Thailand. So, I now have photographs stored in three folders: Leyte, Palawan, Thailand.

If I want a placeholder for pictures that show beaches, I create another folder called Beaches. For your own purposes, this could be a folder for flowers, insects, birds, cakes, or whatever you want to store specific photos in a certain placeholder. It just so happens that those Leyte and Palawan pictures were shot in beaches; so, I copy all pictures in those two folders and paste them into this new folder called Beaches. What did I just do? I used copy-and-paste in Folders and duplicated my photos – I just bloated my hard disk, using up disk space inefficiently.

This need not happen. There is a better way.

Collections in Lightroom

In Lightroom, after importing our photos, we organize our photos as Collections in the Library module. Here’s how to do it: Click the plus sign (+) next to the word Collections on the left panel (Fig. 1) then click Create Collection. This brings up a dialogue box to name your new Collection. I’ll name this collection Leyte and bring in those Leyte pictures into this collection in one of several ways: I can click-drag those photos from the Previous Import in the Catalog panel into the Leyte collection, or I can first put a plus sign (+) on the new Leyte collection by right-clicking on its name and choosing “Set as Target Collection.” I then select all my Leyte pictures and press the letter B on the keyboard. Either method will bring those Leyte pictures into the Leyte collection. I do the same for my Palawan and Thailand pictures.

Now, supposing I want a collection solely for pictures that show beaches, I simply create another collection named Beaches and bring in all those pictures in the Leyte and Palawan collections by the same methods previously outlined. The important thing that happens here is that I now have a Beaches collection containing those same pictures in Palawan and Leyte without duplicating them. I did not copy and paste. Lightroom simply referenced their locations and remembered these in the metadata. What was created was just a very small text file, a few KB in the Catalog, referencing the photos and remembering any changes in the metadata.

Collection Sets

Remember I had Leyte, Palawan, and Thailand collections there? These are my vacation pictures and so I can create a “Collection Set” named Vacations and drag the Leyte, Palawan, and Thailand collections inside this new Collection Set. The hierarchy in Collections (Fig. 2) will now show Leyte, Palawan, and Thailand collections as subsets under Vacations; Beaches will be outside this collection set and will be located independently in the hierarchy.

So, Collection Sets are a way to group similar Collections just like the way folders can exist inside a larger folder, but they are not folders. They are Collections that simply reference the location of photos and their metadata. A Collection Set therefore is, well, a set of Collections. And you can also nest Collection Sets inside Collection Sets so you can collapse these and not have a very long list of collections as you continue to use Lightroom through the years.

Smart Collections

Smart Collections are smart for a really good reason – they automatically collect photos with the same color coding, star rating, keyword, etc., together, and these are really useful. Lightroom comes pre-loaded with a few Smart Collections – Colored Red, Five Stars, Past Month, Recently Modified, Video Files, and Without Keywords – and you can use these immediately. Or, you can create your own Smart Collections by clicking that plus (+) sign again next to the word Collections and choosing “Create Smart Collections.” In the dialogue box that appears, enter your own criteria for your very own Smart Collection. Once created, photos that match your criteria will appear in that Smart Collection. This applies to past, present, and future photos that have those same parameters as long as this particular Smart Collection exists.

Virtual Copies

If, for example, we edited a photo in the Beaches collection knowing fully well that that same photo exists in the Palawan collection, the changes will be applied to both instances of the photo, in Beaches and in Palawan. That poses a problem. The way Lightroom handles this is via the Virtual Copy. Right-click on a photo and choose “Create Virtual Copy” in the menu that appears. This creates another instance of the same photo and it looks the same as the original. For all intents and purposes, this behaves pretty much like the original but it has branched out as another reference, another instance of the same photo. You will know the virtual copy by the folded lower left corner of its thumbnail. You can edit this virtual copy now without affecting the original in its own collection and the other instance of the same photo in the other collection. You can make several virtual copies; even make virtual copies of virtual copies, if you want multiple versions of the same image.

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Source: Google Alert - leyte