Transcripts
1. Keywording Your Images in Lightroom and Bridge - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Keywording Images in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both application share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today, we're looking at keywording and Lightroom and if you happen to be using Photoshop, then we'll have a look at keywording in Bridge, which is where you would apply your keywords to images if you were using Photoshop. We're going to look at why you might keyword, what sort you might want to use, and how you're going to apply them to your images. Then we're going to have a quick look at how you can find your images based on the keywords that you have added to them. Now if you're watching these videos using your browser, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started and we're going to be adding keywords to images. We're going to be using Adobe Bridge first, and then we'll have a look at the same process in Lightroom.
2. Pt 1 - Why Keyword your Images: Before we go into detail about how you actually add keywords to images in Bridge or Lightroom, let's talk about the concept of keywords in the first place. What are keywords, and what sort of keywords that you are going to use, and how many of them do you need? Well, keywords are like tags that you add to the images, and if you add tags to your images you can then search for them by those tags. If you for example, tag these images with the word cat, you could easily find them later on by just searching for the keyword cat, and that would turn up these images. You can use keywords in your own collection of photos to find the images that you most want to find, and you do that by assigning keywords that are relevant to you. Because if you're keywording for yourself, the only person that you need to consider is yourself, and how you would find those images. But if you're selling stock, it's very different. If you're selling images of stock, you need to keyword for other people. You need to think in terms of how other people might search for a particular image, and you'll need lots of keywords. Most stock sites will take 20-50 keywords for an image. You'll need heaps and heaps of keywords, because the more keywords and the wider you cast your net in terms of keywords, the more likely it is that somebody who's looking for an image like yours will actually be able to find that image. If you're keywording for yourself, your keywords are probably going to be very different to the keywords you're going to use if you're keywording for somebody else. If you're keywording for yourself, you need to also ask yourself is how often I'm going to look for images by keyword, so how many keywords do I actually even need to use? From a pragmatic point of view, personally I very seldom look for images by keywords, I don't use a lot of keywords. I have a few keywords because I find myself sometimes looking for the same image over and over again. As soon as I start looking for it a second time, I get a bit smart and I add a keyword to it to make it easier for me to find it later on. But I don't routinely keyword my images because I don't routinely need to find my images by keyword. But your circumstances might be very different. You might be the kind of person who wants to find your images at anytime and find them quickly and easily, and so keywords might make really good sense to you within your workflow. But you do need to ask yourself whether or not you're going to use the keywords that you're going to be applying to the image and if you're not, then don't spend a lot of time applying keywords to your images because you're wasting time. You could be out there shooting more images, or you could bee doing post-production, or any number of other things other than just sitting here keywording your images. So be realistic about the process because keywording can consume a lot of time.
3. Pt 2 - ACR Keywording Using Metadata: If you do most of your image editing in Adobe Camera Raw, then Bridge is the natural place for you to be keywording your images. It is possible to keyword in Photoshop, but it's extremely cumbersome to do so and it would also require that you actually opened your images in Photoshop to do that. If you're using Adobe Camera Raw, there's a chance that some of your images will never see Photoshop because you can do all your editing there. I'm here in Bridge and I'm in the Essentials workspace in Bridge, I've just enlarged my images here so we can see them a bit more clearly. I'm going to turn my preview panel off because I don't need that. But I am going to look at my metadata and my keywords panel. So we're going to metadata first, and I'm just going to click once on this image and this opens the metadata panel, and I'm looking at the IPTC Core section. You can see that this has the keyword cat. Any of these images that I click on, if they have a keyword, it's going to be in the keywords area. Now this one doesn't have a keyword, so I'm going to click in the keywords area and I'm going to type the word cat. You might think at this stage that the enter or return key will enter that keyword. Unfortunately, it doesn't, it just adds a new line. Instead, you're going to need to click the apply check-mark here. It's a little bit cumbersome and Bridge really is a little bit cumbersome in terms of keywording your images, so just be aware of that. Now, this image has the key word cat, but I'd like to add another keyword to it. The keyword I want to add is the cat's name. I'm just going to click in here and I'm going to add a comma and then the cat's name, and then click the apply check mark here. You can add multiple keywords to an image in the metadata panel and you just separate the keywords with a comma. Just be aware that the keyword Cat with a capital C and the keyword cat with a lowercase c are two different keywords. So Adobe Camera Raw, and so too does Lightroom, it makes a distinction between the uppercase and the lowercase c. Just be aware of that. If you want to be consistent with your keywords, you'll need to make sure that you always spell cat, for example, with a capital C. If you want to add keywords to a series of images at the one time, it is a little difficult in this view. I'm just going to select a range of images here. You'll see that the keywords are reported as multiple values. That means that there's a different set of keywords associated with each of these images. If we wanted to click to add keywords, you'll see that we can't actually see what keywords are already associated with the images. I'm going to type the keyword Fergus, and click the check mark. Now, let's look at these images. What happened is that we've lost the key word Cat in adding the keyword Fergus. You can see that the metadata panel is not a good place to try and add multiple keywords to multiple images all at the same time. It's an okay place to rid off the current keywords associated with an image and it's an okay place to add one or two extra keywords to an image. But it has some flaws. Firstly, it doesn't tell you how you've been spelling cat up until now, so you can't be sure that you're going to type it correctly. Secondly, when you have multiple images selected and if they have a series of inconsistent keywords associated with them, then you're only going to see this multiple values option. A better place to work on keywords in Bridge is in the keywords panel.
4. Pt 3 - ACD Using the Keyword panel: In the keywords panel, you can see the keywords that are associated with images in bridge. If you click on an image, any keyword in this list that is associated with this image has a check mark beside it. So It's very easy to say which has the keyword associated with it and if it doesn't, you can just click to associate that keyword. You can also select multiple images and then just click on the keyword cat and it'll be associated with all those images all at one time. It's a much easier process than the metadata process. If you have a series of images that don't all have the same keyword associated with them, it will show like this. This is telling me that some of these images have the word cat associated with them, but not all of them. So if I click the check mark now, all these images will have the word cat associated with them. You can see this is going to work a whole lot more differently and a whole lot more effectively than the metadata panel would. There is a small gotcha, however, with this panel and this is this other keywords area. Some of these images have this keyword Fergus associated with them, but it's toning up in the other keywords list. The problem with this is it's going to be stuck there and it won't be in the alphabetical area. Now, in some versions of Bridge, you can grab this and you can just drag it down into the empty area at the bottom of this panel and then it'll jump up into this area. Or you can drag it up to the very top of the panel and just let go. It'll just jump into again the correct place. But in this version of bridge, it's just not doing it. What I suggest you do is you find the images that have the keyword Fergus associated with them and you apply it a different way. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to do a find and I'm going to find these Fergus images. So I'll choose Edit and then Find. This is how you would find any images with any keyword at any time. I'm going to locate them inside this batch process folder, but I could select all my folders, so I could, for example, just go and look at everything in my user area. In this case I would choose keywords equals and let's make this Fergus. I'm basing my spelling and capitalization on this keyword because I want to find this exact match. I want to include all subfolders, but I don't want to include index files because it's much quicker this way. I just want to locate what's in here that has the keyword Fergus associated with it, I'll click "Find." All of these images have the keyword Fergus associated with them. So what I need to do is I need to select all of these images and I want to create a key word in this hierarchy up here. To do so, I'm going to click on one of the words in this hierarchy, and we would click here on the new keyword area and that lets me type in a new key word. I'm going to type in the keyword Fergus and I'm going to click the check mark. Now, all of these images now have this keyword Fergus in them, and it's in the hierarchy of all the other keywords. When I click on any of these images, you can see that it's showing up this Fergus keyword. What I'm going to do is go down here and I'm going to remove this keyword cause I don't want it any longer, it's just a duplication. That's how I get keywords out of the other keywords area. It is a real nuisance in Bridge when you see that happen, but that's the way that you can solve it if it doesn't work any other way in your version. Now, there's another thing to be aware of in Bridge, is that some of these keywords you inherited by just the process of opening Bridge. For example, these events keywords just come with Bridge, so do the people, whoever Matthew and Ryan happened to be, but they're going to be in your collection of keywords as well as mine and the places. Now, you can get rid of these by just right-clicking and choosing delete, because they may well be keywords that you don't even want to use, and certainly the people ones are something that I would delete as in the places, I would want to create those keywords myself. But be aware that what you're saying here is a keyword hierarchy and hierarchical keywords can be handy to use. In fact, in the case of our Fergus and our cat keywords, we could create that as a hierarchy. So what we could do is take the Fergus keyword and make it a sub-keyword of cat. I'm just going to drag it up here and drop it into here because Fergus is the name of this particular cat, not all cats are called Fergus, but all pictures of Fergus the cat are by definition, cat images. You can use hierarchies like this to make it easier to apply keywords to images. Just going back to this group of images, I'm just going to click on this image and I'm going to disable the keyword cat. I wanted to show you how you can use hierarchies like this to efficiently add keywords to images. So this is an image of Fergus, but Fergus is also a cat. I can add both keywords to this image if I hold the Shift key as I click on the lowest keyword in the hierarchy. So I'm just going to do that as soon as I click on Fergus, if I have the Shift key selected, everything else in that hierarchy is applied to the image. This image would be found if I looked for the keyword cat or if I looked for the keyword Fergus. You may find that hierarchies of keywords like this as an efficient way of managing keywords here in Bridge. Now, also inside bridge, when you see a keyword here, you can search from inside Bridge. For example, I appear to have some keywords here that are used in images and I'm not really familiar with them. So I'm going to click on the keyword Fresh, and I'm going to right-click and choose Find. You can see that fresh is now added as a keyword in the find box. Now, I'm going to look for equals. So if I'm looking for the exact use of the keyword, and I'm going to go back to my user area. So it's going to be locate it within my user area and all subfolders, and I'll click "Find." What Bridge's returning to me as a series of images that I downloaded from iStockphoto and from other stock photo sites that have the keyword fresh associated with them. So if I click on any of these images, you will see that the keyword fresh is selected for these images. This makes it easy for me to curate my list because I can easily search for images that are in my collection that Bridge knows about and has indexed, because I asked for index files only, that are using these keywords. If you're ever curious about where a key word is being used, you can search for it this way. Because these are stock images, you'll see that each of them has a lot of keywords associated with them. That's important when you're selling stock. It's important because then people like me can find those images very easily when they go looking for certain keywords.
5. Pt 4 - Keywording in Lightroom: We're now going to turn our attention to keywording in Lightroom. You're going to find the keywording tools in Lightroom in the library module and they're here in the keywording and keyword list area. I'm going to open up keywording and I'm going to click on this image. We're shown what keywords are associated already with this image, cat and Fergus and they're associated with this image too. But this image doesn't have any keywords associated with it so I'm going to start by typing the word cat and then Fergus. But as soon as I type the capital F and the E, you can see that Lightroom is offering to complete the word for me. The reason for this is that the keyword Fergus is a keyword that Lightroom knows about, so it's prompting me to just press Enter if I want to enter that word without having to type it. Then if that's all the keywords that I want to associate with this image at this stage, I can just press enter again. Keywording in Lightroom at this level is a little bit simpler still than it is two keyword these images in Adobe Camera raw. Now let's select all of these images because they're all images of a cat and they're all images of the cat Fergus. Let's look at the keyword tags area here. Well, we have a tag called animals because it is obviously an animal and cat and Fergus and they all have asterisks after them. What Lightroom is telling us here is that we have these keywords associated with some but not all of the images that are selected, the asterisks say some, but not all of these images have this particular keyword associated with them. Well, if we want to associate these three keywords with all of these images, all we do is we remove the asterisk, then we press Enter, now those three keywords are associated with every single one of these images. Lightroom makes it very easy for us to see what keywords might be associated with a group of images and if we want to, we can extend those keywords to all the selected images. Now let's go to a series of images that I shot recently in Guernsey. I have the first image in this collection selected, and you'll see that it already has the keywords building and Guernsey. Let's go to the next image in the collection and I'll start to type the word building. Well, as soon as I type the letter B, I get the option of adding the word building and then Guernsey. I'll press Enter, that's added these two keywords to this image. I'll click here on these two images. If I look here in the recent and keywords list, you'll see that Guernsey appears as one of the recent keywords so I can add it to this image by just clicking on the word, and so too does the word building. I can add both these keywords by just clicking on the word in the recent keywords list. You can see I didn't have to press Enter as soon as I clicked on the word it was added to those images. If I want to deselect it if I add something by mistake, then I just click on it to turn it off. When I turn it on, it's in lighter color, when I turn it off, it just goes back to being its regular color. These two keywords have now been applied to these two selected images. This is Guernsey and it's also a harbor image. Well, the keyword Harbor already appears in the recent keyword list so too does water, that's relevant to these images. Here's a building and it's in Guernsey. The recent and keyword list is very useful when you want to add keywords to images and when you're using similar keywords over and over again. But you can also make your own keyword list here, click the drop-down arrow and choose Edit set. For example, I could create a set called Guernsey and I want these keywords building, but I don't want animals. But while I was in Guernsey, I saw a lot of boats so I'm going to add the keyword boats. While I was there, I went and visited another island called Sark, and there was some horse-drawn carriages there and some cliffs and Guernsey itself is one of the Channel Islands. I saw quite a bit of the English Channel. Now once I've created those words, I can click the drop-down list here and choose save current settings as New Preset. I'm going to call this Guernsey and Sark, and click Create and then click Change. That has now opened this special keyword set that I've created called Guernsey and Sark, so I can select images like these and apply water, Guernsey, boats and perhaps even harbor if it was relevant to those images, to these images. You can create multiple keywords sets. You'll find that you have outdoor photography, portrait photography, and wedding photography, they come with Lightroom, but you can also create your own sets to make it easier for you to apply keywords to your images, just be aware that you can only have nine keywords in any keyword set. Now in addition to the keyword tags and the keyword sets, you also have your keyword list. There are a couple of" got you" with this. When you click on an image you will see in the keyword list, if it has any keywords associated with it, the check mark indicates that this image has the keyword boats associated with it and it also has Guernsey. But I have a keyword for beach, looking at this image and looking at this keyword list, I would like to apply the keyword beach to this image. I can just click the check mark to associate that keyword with this image. I can do that for multiple images too. I've got quite a few beach images here selected the dash tells me that the keyword beach is associated with some of these images but not all of them. If I'm happy to add that keyword to all of these images, I'll just click on it and it turns into a check mark. The "got you" with this keyword list is that you need to be very aware that the checkbox here is to add a keyword to an image. If you click here on this arrow, then you're going to see all the photos in your collection anywhere in Lightroom that have this keyword associated with them, so am just clicking on the keyword beach and I'll immediately be taken to all images that I have in my Lightroom collection that have the keyword beach associated with them. Now from beaches all over the world and this one's from Australia. The Guernsey images will be somewhere in this collection and probably going to be at the end because they're ordered in capture time, and I went to Guernsey more recently, there they are. The keyword list here can be used not only to add keywords to your images, but also to find images by their keyword. There are other ways to find your images are, and one of them is to use this bar here. Now if that bar isn't visible in your library module, press the backslash key and that will just display it. If you click on text and from this drop-down list select keywords, then you can go and search for keywords. I'm going to search for the keyword Guernsey and I also want to search for beach. Those are the only three images in my collection that have both the keyword Guernsey and the keyword beach associated with them. It's very easy to search for images by keyword and to narrow down your search to a very specific group of images. To go back to seeing all the images in the area that you are currently in Lightroom, just click the Custom filter and tone filters off. That's a basic introduction to adding keywords to images in Lightroom and quickly finding images that have keywords associated with them.
6. Project and Wrap Up: Your project for this class is to tell me in the class project area whether you think that keywords would be of value to you. Do you need to add keywords to your images because you intend selling your images for stock? Or do you need to add keywords to your images to make them easier for you to find? Or perhaps you're the person who doesn't really need keywords at all and you might have just a small subset of keywords that you think that you might want to add to your images. Just let me know in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've enjoyed the introduction to the concept of key wording images, and how you can go about adding those keywords to your images in both Bridge and the Lightroom. As you are watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
