Learn to Organize Your Photos and Streamline Your Workflow in Adobe Lightroom Classic

1. Introduction: Hi, My name is Meredith. I'm a landscape photographer and outdoor educator based in Denver, Colorado. And in this course, I'll be teaching you how to use Adobe Lightroom to organize all of your photographs into a simple and efficient organization system. If you love taking photos, but I've ever felt overwhelmed or confused about how to organize and manage all of your photos, then this class is definitely for you. Light room is one of the most powerful tools you can use to organize and manage your photos. One that will significantly help you to streamline your editing workflow. We will start from the very beginning. If you are brand new to Light room, you will learn everything you need to know step-by-step, from opening your very first catalog to creating your first Lightroom presets and collections. Even if you've used Lightroom before, or maybe even if you've used it for awhile, you can still gain a lot from this course if you weren't quite familiar with everything that Lightroom can do for you, we will dive deep into how to organize your photos with ratings, color labels, keywords, and other useful information that will help you manage your library of photos. I will also walk you through the exact system and work that I use to impart my photos and move them through my editing stages using Lightroom smart collections. This class is for anyone who wants to learn Lightroom to simplify their photo organization and editing workflow so that you can save time when editing your photos and avoid the frustration of a messy, disorganized file management system. So if you are ready to get started, then I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson. 2. Create a Lightroom Catalog and basic file setup: Welcome to the class. You-all. I am so excited to have you here. In this first lesson, we're going to talk about the basic file management that I use, as well as open up our first Lightroom catalog. Now, I have a very specific way that I organize and manage all of my image files that I'm gonna be showing you throughout this course. It's a system that I use, not just to organize my files, but also to streamline my workflow so that when I go to edit images, I know where everything is and I don't get bogged down in confused with where my image files are throughout the image editing process because I use both Lightroom and Photoshop in order to edit my photos. In this course, we're gonna be learning about how to use Lightroom to organize our files. When I first started editing photos and I first started getting into photography and using Lightroom. All of my files were saved all over my hard drive. So I would make folders and files for different trips that I went on, different categories of photos that I had. And over time, they started to get really overwhelming because they started to lose where my photos were. And it also created all of these complications when using light room. If this is something that you do, don't worry, I'm going to show you how to transfer all of your photos into the system and workflow that I use later on in the course. And if you're new to Light room, I recommend that you follow along and set up your files exactly step-by-step as I show you through the course and later on down the line, if you'd like to make tweaks, then you can do that. This system I'm going to show you here, I found over the years based on trial and error to be the simplest and most effective way of organizing my photos and streamlining my workflow. And the reason I really tried to simplify things is because the more complicated things get, if your file organization is really out of control and really confusing, it can take away from the creative process. So the goal here is to maximize your creativity by just keeping things simple. So the first thing I want you to do if you're following along, is to create a folder on your computer for photo storage and organization. So here on my desktop, I have a folder which I've titled photo storage and organization. And I've just saved that here again, it's on my desktop. And inside of that folder, I want you to add these three folders. And you can pause the video right here so that you can create these three folders and meet me back here when you finish doing that. Later on, if you'd like to rename these folders, you can go ahead and do that, but for now, I want us to all be on the same page so that you can follow step-by-step how this process works. And you can also create these folders anywhere on your computer. I have them on my desktop just for demonstration purposes for this tutorial. But if you have a different place on your hard drive where you'd like to store and manage all of your photos. Then I recommend that you create these folders in that location. Once you have these folder setup on your computer, Let's go ahead and open Lightroom Classic. Just so you know, this is the most recent version of Lightroom as of February 2023. So this is Lightroom 12.2. If you need to go upgrade your version of Lightroom, you can go ahead and do that. But if you have an older version of Lightroom, all of this should be pretty similar, so you shouldn't have too much of an issue as we go through and set it up. So the first thing we're gonna do is create a Lightroom catalog. And if you've already opened and use Lightroom before, you probably already have a catalog and Lightroom will automatically open for you. But if this is the first time that you've use Lightroom, then you'll need to set up your first catalog. If you already have a catalog, I will show you in just a moment how to set up a new catalog. So you can create a new catalog and set it up in a way that follows what we'll be doing in this tutorial. So you can start over from scratch and set up your catalog in a way that follows this workflow that I have set up for you. If this is the first time you open Lightroom and you get this dialog box, then click, choose a different catalog and create a new catalog. Now, depending on where you've saved your photo storage and organization folder, I want you to navigate to that folder. So here again, I have this folder on my desktop, so I'll click on this. And I want you to save your Lightroom catalog in this folder that we've named Lightroom catalogs. And don't worry about this folder right here. You should have these three folders. So all raw files, exported, raw files and Lightroom catalogs. And I will show you what all of these folders mean throughout the course. But for now, just click on Lightroom catalogs and create a name for your catalog. So I'll just name mine. Light room. Catalog 2023. And click Create. Here at your Lightroom catalog will open. So we can see that this particular catalog is open because the name that we just saved it as is right here. Now, if you already have a catalog and you would like to create a new catalog so that you can replicate what we'll be doing throughout this course. What you'll need to do is to file and click New Catalog. You'll just follow the same steps that I showed you a few moments ago. I already have this catalog saved here in the Lightroom catalog folder. But to show you again, you'll wanna go into your photo storage and organization folder that you've already created and save your catalog in Lightroom catalogs. So we have our catalog that is currently open here that we just saved. So you can name it and then save it. And then you can navigate to that folder and open it up just by clicking on this light room icon here. At this point you might be wondering what exactly is a catalog and essentially what it is is a database that stores all of your photos and keeps track of all the changes that you make to your photos. So things like metadata and develop settings. So if you decide to edit your photos in Lightroom, all of those changes are going to be saved in your catalog. Even though you'll be able to view all your photos in Lightroom. Lightroom itself doesn't actually store the photos. It presents them to you in all of the information about that photo to you in a way that's really easy to understand and visualize, but it doesn't store the actual photo. The physical files are stored wherever you saved them on your hard drive in Lightroom dislocates where those photos are and presents them to use so that you can see them, manage them and edit them. And don't worry, if this doesn't make too much sense right now as we go through the course, this is going to start to make a lot more sense. Now, I personally don't use Lightroom to edit my photos. I use Adobe Photoshop and the editing software that shipped with Photoshop, which is called Adobe Camera Raw. And I find that using Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw to edit photos is a much more powerful way to edit photos, especially if you're a landscape photographer. And I'll discuss that more throughout this course and in future tutorials about photo editing. But I do use Lightroom as I'll show you throughout this course, to organize all of my photos. It really is one of the best tools in order to organize and streamline your workflow as you process your images. In the next lesson, I'm going to help you set up some basic settings in light room so that you have everything set up and ready to go for this course before we start importing and looking at some photos. So I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Overview of Lightroom: Welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to go over some of the general features of Lightroom. And we're also going to go through and set up some of our preferences and settings so that we're all on the same page throughout this course. And that your light room looks and operates just like the one I'm showing you on my screen here. And so there's no confusion in terms of things working differently on my system compared to yours. First, right out of the box, you'll see a series of panels and windows around Lightroom. You'll see the navigator, the folders and collections. On the left and on the right, you'll see additional windows including the histogram, as well as some other keyword and metadata windows and all of this we're going to cover throughout the course. So I'm not gonna go into too much detail about what all of these windows mean at the moment, because you will pick these up as I show you when we start to import images. And it'll make a lot more sense at that point then if I were to try to explain all of that to you right now, but I do want to go through and set up some preferences so that you can try to match your light room to mine. And so I can show you what I've found to really work for me in terms of the best settings for using Lightroom. So let's first come over here to this main menu bar, and we'll click on Lightroom Classic. And then we'll click on Preferences. First, let's come over to general. So make sure general is highlighted. And I'm just going to briefly touch on each of these preferences mean. As we go through this, feel free to pause the video and copy these settings to have them exactly like I have here. And then you can always come back and change them to your tastes and preferences later on down the line, if you'd like to change any of this up. The most important thing I want to mention here on the general preferences is this default catalog settings. So you can tell Lightroom what you want it to do every time you open Lightroom up. I have this set to load most recent catalog. I only use one catalog, and that's the catalog that I'm going to set up and show you throughout this course. What you'll see by the end of this course is what I use every time I go to organize my photos. I always have load most recent catalog on because that's the only one I'm ever really working from. If you click on this, you can change it. If you'd like to choose a different catalog, you can oscillate room to ask you which one When Lightroom opens, or you can choose a catalog in a different directory. And right now I only have one, which is the one that we set up in the previous video. For import options, I just have these three checked. This will give you the dialog box to import photos when you plug your memory card in. And again, this will make more sense in future lessons of this course. I check Ignore camera generated folder names when naming folders and show parent folder During Import Presets. I don't really use presets other than the one that I'm going to show you later in this course, which we will create together. I generally don't touch anything in presets. External editing, like I mentioned in the last lesson, I don't edit my photos in Lightroom, so I don't touch anything here either. If you do plan on editing your photos in Lightroom, you can come back and change these settings to your preferences, e.g. if you want to change the file format and color space, but Deb, things like that, you can come back here and change your external editing preferences if all of this looks unfamiliar to you, if you're unfamiliar with file formats, color spaces, things like that, don't even worry about it right now. You will learn about all of that when you learn how to edit photos, come over here to File Handling. I also don't touch any of this, so I wouldn't worry about it right now. Keep it as it is right out of the box from Lightroom interface. All of this has to do with how your Lightroom looks. I keep all of these settings on default, but this will allow you to change the colors and fonts in your Lightroom. And I'm not going to touch any of this right now. But if you wanted to change some of the colors, you could play around with that. I find the default colors seem to work just fine. If you come over here to performance, a lot of this will have to do with the type of computer that you have. So it might vary depending on your computer. I don't touch any of this and you can copy what I have here. But just to point out, I do always want to have this unchecked and I recommend that you do as well. I do not recommend using smart previews instead of originals. I recommend that you always edit the original file. Now, for the rest of these Lightroom's sink, display and network, I don't touch any of this. I have never had a need to in all the time that I've been using Lightroom. So we're just going to keep all of this as it is out of the box with Lightroom. And we will go ahead and close this up once you have your preferences set. Let's next go to view. Come down here to View Options. View options are going to start to make more sense once we have some images imported into our light room, which we're gonna do here pretty soon. But for now, you can copy the options that I have set here. So in grid view, I have all of this checked and I have this set to compact cells. For cell icons. You'll want to check flags but keep everything else unchecked. If you come down here to compact cell extras, click both top and bottom label. If you click on these, you'll see a ton of settings. And for these on the top, just put common photo settings on the top. And for the bottom label, put rating and label. And we won't be using expanded cell extras here. So you can keep all of this unchecked. You come over here to loop view. You can copy the settings I have here. These are just the base settings of Lightroom right out of the box. And if you've never touched these before, they probably are the same as I have here. But you can double-check here by just looking at these settings and seeing if they're the same as yours. Alright, let's click on Grid view once again, and we will close this out. The next setting I want you to look at is photo. You come up here and click Photo and the main menu and come down to auto advance. I want you to click auto advance so that there's a check mark next to it. And that means it's activated. If you come out of the menu here and click photo, you can double-check to make sure that auto advance is checked. Alright, so next we're going to look at Lightroom modules, and that is what you see right up here. So right here you can see two modules, library and develop. In light room actually has seven different modules. And each module offers a specialized set of tools and features that you can use for different phases of your editing and organizing workflow. If you right-click in the modules area, you'll see the entire list of modules pop up. So we've got library and develop which are already open as you can see checked. And you also have Map, Book, Slideshow, print, and web. So I only use two modules in light room. I only use the library module, which is where you can view all of your photos. And the develop module, which is where you can edit photos. And I use the develop module very minimally, as I'll show you later. I do not use any of these other modules, but if you wanted to add one of them, you could click on an unchecked one and it will appear in this module's bar. I'm just going to turn this off for now. If we come over here to the left, this is our nameplate. In your Lightroom. If you haven't customized it, it likely says Light room or something like that, but you can change it by right-clicking on it. And go to Edit identity plate. You come over here, you can click on the text. You can write whatever you want. Right here. I just have my name, but I could add something like that. And you can even change the font and the style and the size of the text. If you wanted to make that bigger, you could. Same thing for the appearance of the texts on your modules. So you can change that here, but I generally keep that the way it already is. I just customize the nameplate. The next thing I want to show you is how to hide and show all of the windows and panels all over light room. So e.g. this panel over here, we have several windows. We have the Navigator, which you can open by clicking on this arrow. So the arrow pointing to the right means it's closed. If you click on it, it will point down and open up this window. Once we have photos imported, we will see the photo appear here. And again, this will make more sense in the next lesson. And we can open and collapse all of these folders in just the same way. So same thing for over here. One thing I want to show you here is something called Solo Mode. If you right-click on the name of one of these windows, you'll see this option for solo mode and you can see that I already have it checked. So I'm going to uncheck it just to show you what happens when you are not in solo mode. If I open this window, I can open all of these windows at the same time. And it can actually get a little bit overwhelming and distracting to have all of these windows open. So what you can do to make it a little bit easier is to, again, right-click on the name of one of your windows and click on Solo Mode. And what that will do, it. It will only allow one window to open at a time. So every time you open a window, the one that's already open, we'll close up. The other thing you can do is you can hide and show the panels and toolbars that you see all over light room. So if you look at this little arrow right here, if you click on that, it will hide that panel again. If you click on it, once again, it will open that panel. That goes for the left and the right side. So we can do the same thing here. We can do that down here to hide what's called the film strip. And we can hide the bar up here. Now, if you right-click on one of these arrows, you see I have three options. I always have it set to manual, but you can set it to auto hide or auto hide and show. These auto modes will allow Lightroom to automatically hide the bars and panels. I like having total control of whether it's gonna be opened or closed. So I always have it set to manual. And you can do this for each one of these arrows. So if we right-click on this arrow, we get the same options. So you could click auto hide and show, but not a fan of that one. I'm going to keep it on manual. These are all things that are gonna be personal to you and what you prefer in your workspace. So what I've shown you so far is not necessarily the best way to do it, but it's the way that I prefer to do it. If you're new to Lightroom, I recommend that you just try it out this way. And as you start to learn the program, you can start to customize your workspace born more to what suits your own preferences. Alright, so in the next lesson, we're going to start to finally import some photos into Lightroom. And you're going to start to see how all of these panels around this side here start to populate with information about our photo. So I look forward to seeing you there in the next lesson. 4. Photo import process - part 1: Welcome back to the class you-all. In this lesson, you're going to learn how to start importing photos into your catalog. Now I'm going to walk you through this process step-by-step, and show you the exact settings that I use when I import my photos into my catalog. And these settings are going to become important later on down the road when we start creating collections and we start organizing our photos within our catalog. There are two ways that you can import photos into Lightroom. The first, if you come up to your main menu and click File, and then you can come down and click import photos and video. Now I'm not going to click this right now. And I'll show you the other way you can do this. The other way to import photos is to come down here and click Import. So I'll go ahead and click this here. And you'll see this import screen come up. The first place that we'll look at is the source window. And this is going to be the location or the folder that we want to import our files from, where we want to import our image files from. If you look down here, you can see two main folders. So first, I have my hard drive. So if I wanted to import photos that were on my hard drive, I could click here. But right now I actually have my memory card storing photos from my camera with the photos that I want to import. So when you come home from a photo shoot and you plug your memory card in using a card reader into your computer. You will see that card pop up in the source window. If I open this here, you can see that I have a specific file here just for demonstration purposes for this tutorial. So this is a location on my memory card where I have all of the files stored that I want to import. I'm going to click on this and you'll see Lightroom populate with all of the images that I want to import. So again, this area, this window is the location where the photos are that you want to import. So wherever those photos are, click on that folder and they should appear over here. Next, if we look at the top here, you'll see several options. You'll see copy as DNG. You'll see copy, move and add. Now notice, move and add our blacked out here. They aren't available to me right now. And that's because I'm using a memory card. If I wanted to import photos directly from my hard drive on my computer, then move into ad would be available. So these are not available when you have a memory card plugged in. And I will discuss these more in just a moment. For now, I want you to select Copy. This is the setting that I always use in order to import my image files, which are all over here in this folder. And just so you know, all of these image files are in the raw file format, which is the file format that I highly recommend that you shoot in if you are a landscape photographer or professional quality photos. Now what copy means is that when I import the photos, lightroom is going to copy the photos from this file. So all of these photos, it's going to copy them into a new folder or a new destination. It's not going to change the photos or move them or do anything other than make a copy of them and then put them in a new location, which a location that I will show you in just a moment. This ensures that we always have the original files in the original folder. So we always have the original files on our memory card. So even after we import our photos, all of those photos will still be in this location. Now, later on down the road, after we copy these into a new location, if we want to go back and delete them from our memory card. So say we want to clean off our memory card for a another photoshoot. We can go do that with the peace of mind that these photos are already saved in a different location. In other words, we already have backups of these photos. So we're going to select Copy. I don't select copy as DNG. But what this option means is it has to do with the DNG file format. Dng is a raw image format that was built for editing photos. Unless you specifically want or need a DNG file. Don't use this setting copy as DNG. You can learn more about DNG and then decide if you want to convert your files. But it's not necessary unless you're using a version of Lightroom that doesn't support your camera and you need to use the Adobe DNG converters so Lightroom can work with your file. Just something to keep in mind, but that's likely not something that you need to worry about. If we want to come over here to move. This, like I said, is an option that's only available if you're transferring photos from your hard drive. If I came over here to my hard drive. If I select the folder for this tutorial where I have another set of these photos saved. So this these are the same photos. They're just duplicates stored on my hard drive. You can see that these options are now available. And what moved means is, if I were to import these photos, it would physically move the photos from this location to the new location, as we'll talk about in a little bit, our new destination. So once I'm move them upon import, they would leave this folder. I don t think this is ever a good idea to do because I always want to keep backups in the original folder until I'm absolutely sure that they've been transferred to the new destination. And that's why copy is so important. We come over here to add, this is another setting that I don't use an I don't recommend. But what it does is it keeps the files and their current location. So in this location over here, and it lets light room know that they exist so that they can be edited. But it doesn't actually move the photos. If you're new to Light room, what that means can be a little bit confusing at this point. So don't worry about ad for now. Just remember that copy is really the best setting to use. So I'll close this back up and come back to the photos from my memory card that I would like to import. We have copies set below this. I want to have all photos selected. Later on when we do additional photo imports. I'll just select new photos. So all of the photos I have here are all knew. If I had say, previously imported this photo, then it wouldn't appear here if I had this set to new photos. So for now I'm just going to click all photos right now, for this first import, I only want to import one photo. So what I'll do is uncheck all photos. When a photo is not checked for import, it's going to be darkened with this vignette. So if you want to select photos individually for import, you can check these little boxes here. I want to uncheck these because I only want one photo imported. This photo right here. Alright, so let's come over here next to this right sidebar to File Handling, right here. In build previews, I always have this set to standard, but you can choose from different build previews. And this is how you're going to preview your images in Lightroom. Now, one-to-one is the highest quality preview. If you plan on editing in Lightroom, I recommend that you use this option. Again, I don't edit in Lightroom, so I don't use this option. And you can also come back later and build one-to-one previews of your images. So if you don't select one-to-one right now and you end up needing it, just know that you can change that later. Minimal is another option you can use which will make the import process when light room starts to import photos, as you'll see here in a moment, go much quicker. And it also doesn't take up as much room on your computer. So this is a good option if you aren't planning on editing your photos in Lightroom for awhile and you don't need as high quality of a preview. But for now, let's just set this to standard. You can keep build smart previews unchecked. I do not check this option. I do check don't import suspected duplicates. So if you've already imported a photo into light room, lightroom will be able to tell if you've already imported that photo or not. If you've already imported it, it won't appear here with all of the photos ready for import. And this just prevents you from having duplicate copies of an image and avoids things getting cluttered and disorganized. Right here, you can make a second copy to a different destination than the one that we'll be using down here. So we'll decide on where we want these photos imported. And if you want an additional destination, you can select that right here. But I do not select this, and I do not select Add To Collection. 5. Photo import process - part 2: Let's come down here next to file renaming. I always rename my files using a technique that I'll show you here in just a moment. In the reason for that is to prevent my file names from being accidentally duplicated. Your camera will automatically name your files for you and you can run into problems when your camera names of photo and name that's already been used before. So let's say you go out on a shoot, you import photos, then you delete your memory card and go out and use that same card on another shoot. Depending on your camera, in the settings you have, the camera could potentially mean your photos with the same names that it used in the previous shoot. So in order to avoid duplicate names when they're imported into Lightroom, I want to make sure that each photo has a unique name. And here's how I do that. If you come over here to template and click on that, you can come down here and click Edit. In which you'll do here is remove all of this, will create a Naming template like this. So to start, I'm going to type my name. So you can type your name here. Create a space and a dash. Next, we'll come down here to additional and select this right here. First I will select this option, so month, day, and year. So select this option at the top here. We'll come back down to the same box and select it once again. This time we will select our will do the same thing. Click on that box. This time we will select minute. One more time, we will select that box and select second. You can see how this template is populating right here. So what's going to happen when Lightroom reads each photo? It's going to write your name, but then it's going to insert all of this information like a template. So each photo has this information attached to it in the form of what's called metadata. We'll get into metadata a little bit more later on in this course. But basically, it's information that your camera attaches to the photo file. So when you go ahead and take a photo, depending on your camera settings, the cameras should attach the month, date, year, as well as the time details to that photo file. So Lightroom will pull that information and just plug it in into this template. So each photo will have a unique name based on all of the information related to the date and the time that you took the photo. Since you generally don't shoot more than one photo per second, at least not as a landscape photographer. I don't think I've ever taken more than one photo in a second. Each photo will have a unique name using this technique, using this specific template. Now once you've created this template, Let's create a preset. So this will be a way to save this setting so that you can use it for every important that you do in Lightroom. And it will make the process much quicker in the future. If you click this box, come down to save current settings as new preset. I'm just going to call this raw file import. Now, I've already created this preset, so it's not going to allow me to name this preset with the same name. But you can click Create once you've created this preset, and it should be saved in your presets here, so you should find it somewhere in list of presets. So raw file import and click Done. Now you can see over here the template is the raw file import preset that we created. And this is how all of our files are going to be renamed when we import them into Lightroom. If you come down here, we can see some additional settings that will be applied when we import our photos. So first we have Develop Settings. If you're familiar with Lightroom presets, this is where you can add them. So a preset will be applied it to the images when you import them. If you're new to presets, they're essentially just files that allow light room to apply specific development settings to an image. When you start editing and processing photos, changing things like saturation, exposure, contrast. You can save all of those as a preset and then apply them directly onto a photo. And again, if that's a new concept to you, don't worry about that right now. It will make more sense later on in this course. For now, we're just going to keep our Develop Settings at none. Next, we'll look at metadata. Metadata is just information that's been embedded into the image file. And we'll adjust that here. So we'll click on this box and come down to edit Presets. I have a metadata preset that is called raw file import, just like the previous one. And I'm going to walk you through all of the settings here on this preset that I would like you to make when you're creating your metadata preset. The most important thing I want you to do is click on the rating, the one-star here on this rating. Right there, I just remove the star. But you can see here there's up to five stars. I want you to just select one star. Everything else here can be kept blank. If you'd like to, you can add your copyright information. I just have copyright my name. And this is just so if someone gets a hold of your photo, they know who made the photo and who to contact. You can even add more information here that someone could potentially see in the metadata if they wanted to contact you. I don't feel any of this out. The copyright is sufficient for me. Feel free to fill any of this out based on your preferences and what you want to add to the photo. I tried to keep it simple and I don't feel any of this out other than the copyright information and the star rating here. So make sure that one star is selected. And once you've created this, click on this preset box and again select, Save Current Settings as new preset. I name all of my Import Presets as raw file import. And you can see again, I already have that preset saved, so I'm going to click Cancel, but you can click Create and then I will click Done. Next we have keywords, and I usually don't add keywords, but you might want to add them as part of your organization system. Now, keywords are part of the metadata and they're just descriptive words that you can use to search for your photos in Lightroom. For this photo, I have selected here if I wanted to write some descriptive keywords that might help me later on if I'm searching for this photo, I could write something like Colorado, where the photo was taken, comma space. I could use a keyword like fall, which was the time of year that this photo was taken. I could write yellow flowers since that's what I see in the image. Or maybe something like late since there's a lake in the image. And again, these are just descriptive words that can help me search for this photo later on in Lightroom. When you're adding these keywords, just remember to separate them by a comma and a space. Alright, so I'm actually going to come up back to metadata, and it looks like I didn't set this preset here. So if it still says none, check this box and select RAW file import. So we want to make sure that that preset is that we created is set here for the metadata. Great, so we've got our keywords. Now, it's time to choose destination for our photos. The destination is going to be the file on your computer where you want these photos right here, or in this case, this one photo where you want your photos to be imported to. In the first part of this course, you created those three folders in your photo storage and organization folder. So if you remember, I had that folder on my desktop right here, I can go to my desktop and look for that folder which is right here. That may be in a different location, which you'll have to locate on your computer. So find that directory where you have that folder. And you'll see the three folders that you created at the beginning of the course. And I want you to select all raw files. This is the folder where I import every single one of my photographs. So rather than keeping them in separate folders all over my computer, I keep all of my raw original files in a single folder and then I organize them in light room. Every time I do an import of images in Lightroom, all of those images, all of those raw files are gonna go into this all raw files folder. This is what's going to happen when you import your photos. The photos on your memory card or wherever you have them on your hard drive or other external drive, the photos that you have selected from your memory card. So in this case, I just have the one photos selected is going to be copied into new file with all of these import settings is going to be placed in this destination folder right here. All of our original photos are going to stay in our original folder. So if they're on a memory card, They will stay on your memory card. A duplicate with all of the import settings will just appear right here. So you don't have to worry about deleting or losing any of the photos on your memory card. You can ensure that all of the photos were imported before you erase them on your memory card. Alright, so once you have your destination folder set, the last step of the process is to click Import. You will see now that this photo has been imported into Lightroom. It is currently in our library. At this point, we could go and check to make sure that this file was copied from our memory card and placed into the all raw files folder. If we go back into the folder that we created at the beginning of the course. This raw files folder was the folder that we just imported that photo into. That was the destination folder on our import. So if I click on this, you can see that that file is indeed in the old raw files folder. As we continue to import our photos, this folder will start to fill with all of our raw files. And this is where you want to keep all of your original files so you always know where they are and you never lose track of them. So that is the entire photo import process. We will go through this process once again. So the more you see this process, the more it will start to sink in. But first, in the next lesson, we're going to learn how to make a Lightroom preset. So the next time we import photos into Lightroom will be able to apply that preset. So that's it for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. 6. How to create a Lightroom preset for imported photos: In this lesson, you're going to learn how to create a Lightroom preset. And we're going to use this preset when we go to import the rest of our photos and change some specific development settings that we want to have applied on all of our photos every time they're imported into Lightroom. We have here the single photo that we imported in the last lesson. If we come over here to our modules, you can see that we're in the Library module. And that is where all of our files are going to be shown when we import them. So all of your photos that are imported are going to appear here. In order to create a preset, we will go over to the Develop module. And this is the module where you can edit and develop your photos. So e.g. this is where we can change things like the exposure of the photo and things like vibrance and saturation. All of these settings you can learn in a light room or an Adobe Camera Raw editing course. So I'm not going to cover all of this here, but I am going to show you the specific settings that I typically change in order to make a Import Preset. So again, these are all the settings that I want to be applied on all of the photos that I import into Lightroom. First, if you come down here to profile, you'll see a variety of profile options. If you click on this, I don't want to select any of these. I would rather select if you click Browse, I would like to select Adobe neutral. And the reason for this is I want light room to show the photo, the raw photo in its original form. So this is the profile that does the least amount of change to your image when it's imported into Lightroom. You can see e.g. if I select Adobe Landscape, it makes the colors more vivid and I really don't want Lightroom to do any processing for me at this point, I want to have the most neutral view of my raw photo without any processing done so that I can have complete control over the image processing. These other ones here like Adobe Standard, have a little bit more processing than Adobe neutral. You can see that one is just a little bit more dull, but this is the closest to the original raw file that you can get. And that's what I want. So I'm going to select Adobe neutral and close this up. Now next makes sure that white balance is as shot. I'm going to keep all of these settings at zero where they are right now. I don't want to change any of this because I will change these later in the editing process when I go to edit my photos in Adobe Camera Raw. Let's close this up. Now. You may or may not want to add detail. So if you come down to detail, right into the box Light room probably has this set to 25. And if it's not, you can change it to 25. You might want to bump it up just a little bit. Depending on your preferences. Sometimes I like to have a sharp bend just a little bit more. And this is the amount of sharpening that I will want applied to every photo. And if I want to increase the sharpening later on in the photo editing process, then I can do that. But for now I just want to bump up the sharpening just a little bit. We can close detail here and come down to calibration. First. If you look at process, you want to have this set to the most current version, it likely is already if you've updated Lightroom, but go ahead and double-check to make sure that it's set to the latest version. We can close calibration and finally, opened up Lens Corrections. Lens corrections are an important one and it's something that I want to have applied to every single photo that's imported into my light room so that I don't have to go back and do this later every time I edit a photo. And again, that's the reason we're doing this because it'll simplify the process. If you can apply all these settings to each photo as you import them, then you don't have to go back and do it for each photo when you start to edit them. Lens corrections will remove distortions that are caused by your lenses. So there's two main types of lens distortion that can occur in an image. So you have chromatic aberration, then you have something called barreling that can occur around the margins of your photo. And barreling is more obvious with wide angle lenses. But let's first come up to remove chromatic aberration. And I'm going to check this. What it does is it removes these nasty little lines that can occur in an image. If I zoom in here, I don't really see any chromatic aberration that's really obvious in this image. But in some photos, especially when you're using lower-quality lenses, you can see these kinda ugly, different colored lines that can occur. Chromatic aberrations are just distortions that occur when light passes through a lens. And the physics of how that all happens is really beyond the scope of this course, but you can look into how that works and maybe do a Google search on chromatic aberration and learn a little bit more about what that is. Even if your photo doesn't have any Chromatic Aberration, it won't do anything to the photo. If you do check it. It's good to always just check this so that you have some insurance in case there's even just a little bit of chromatic aberration in the photo that you might have missed in Lightroom will remove that. You come down here to enable profile corrections. What this will do is it will read the metadata on your file and it will know what type of lens that you use to shoot the photo and then it will correct for it distortions like barreling that can occur around the edges of the photo. If I check this here, you can see what I mean. You can see how the photo slightly shifted. If I toggle this on and off. This one isn't really dramatic in how much distortion that there was. But you can see when I check it, Lightroom knows the make and model of the lens that I use. And thus because that was stored in the metadata when the photo wrote it onto the file when I took the photo. So it's always good to check both of these so that you remove the most amount of lens distortions that can occur in an image and Lightroom will account for the exact lens that you used and be able to plug that into an algorithm in, accurately removed that distortion. Alright, so those are all of the developed settings that I want to change for this preset. I didn't change much. And feel free if you'd like to add additional changes to your preset. Say, if you want to add things like maybe more saturation or texture to an image, I prefer to leave that for when I'm actually ready to edit the photo. But once you get all of your development settings set, now we can create our preset. If you come over here to the left panel, you'll see a list of all of the presets in Lightroom. These already come pre-packaged with Lightroom. But we're going to create our own based on all the settings we've set over here. You'll click this plus button and click Create Preset. Go ahead and name your preset. I'm going to use the same name that I use for all of my Import Presets. So raw File Import. Next, you want to make sure that you check only the boxes of the settings that you changed. We didn't change any of these over here, so we'll keep all of these unchecked. I did not change any color grading, so I'll uncheck that. I did change some of the sharpening, so I will keep that selected. Lens corrections will stay selected and we will keep process version and calibration chat. We will also check treatment and profiles since we change the profile and then click Create. Next we will go back to our library. And now we will import the rest of our photos this time with our preset. So we will go through the import process again this time we're briefly since we've been through it before, come down to import, import the photos. We will select our photos on the memory card. You can see the original photo is grayed out here. You don t have the option to check it. And that is because we have don't import suspected duplicates. Lightroom knows that we already have this photo in our library. We can also check this right here just to show all of the new photos so we don't even have to see that old photo because it's not going to be imported again. This time we're going to keep all of our photos jet. And let's look back over here just to go through this briefly, we're going to keep all of these settings the same checking to make sure that we have our raw file imports set for our file renaming and for our metadata. Now, I'm not gonna put any keywords into this import this time. And now we can use our Lightroom preset that we just created on our imports. So in developed settings right here, click this box. You go to User Presets. We can see that raw file import that we created right here. I have two of them here because I already had one previously that I currently use for all of my imports. This is the second one that was created in this tutorial. So I will click on that. Let's check on our destination. So we check to make sure that all raw files is selected. So all of these files are gonna go into are all raw files folder. Now, this time, before we click Import, come down here to this import preset, click on None right here. And click on Save Current Settings as new preset. I'm going to name this raw file import tutorial. Again, I like to keep the name consistent for all of the raw file Import Presets. And I will click Create. Now if you come down to the bottom here for Import Presets, you will see that that preset that we just created appears down here. So what this means is that every time we go to import our photos, all of these settings that we've set are going to be implemented on that import. So we don't have to go through every single time and change all of this. We can simply select that raw file import. And now every time we import our photos, as long as this is selected down here, we don't have to touch or worry about any of this. I'd like to mention here that even though for the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to be compiling all of our photos into this all raw files folder. Usually I have this folder on an external hard drive. I don't keep it on my computer hard drive. These raw file folders tend to get pretty large because these raw file sizes are so large. But for the purposes of this tutorial, all of these files are gonna go on my hard drive in the raw files folder. And then we will click Import. You can see all of these photos are starting to import with that preset being applied to the photos as they are loaded into the library. Alright, so it might take a few minutes to get all of your images into your Lightroom library. But once they're all loaded, you can go and double-check to make sure that they were all copied into your all raw files folder by going back to that folder and clicking on all raw files. And now you can see that all of those files are in that folder, keeping in mind again, that they still exist on the memory card. These are just duplicates or copies that are in the new directory, the new location. But these have all of the import settings applied, all of the new metadata and develop settings and things like that. We can even see if we go to the list view, that the names of the files have changed, the names are all now according to the template that we created. So we have my name or would be your name in the template. We have the date than the hour, minute, and second. Great. So now that you have all of your photos imported into Lightroom. Next we're going to discuss what all of these windows and sidebars mean in more detail so that you can start to understand and navigate light room a little bit better. So I will see you in the next lesson. 7. Windows, view modes, and toolbars: Welcome back. In this lesson, now that we've imported all of our photo files, we're going to cover what these windows toolbars and view modes are in light room so that you have a better understanding of how to view and manage your photos. First, on the left-hand panel, we have the Navigator. Whatever photo that you have selected will appear in the navigator here, you can choose different settings here of how you would like to view your photos so you can set it to fit the screen. You can click this button to zoom in at 100%. And you can move this box around here to select the part of the photo that you want to see zoomed in. Can click again to zoom out. And then right here, you can choose the percentage that you'd like to zoom in. So we will exit this zoomed in mode by clicking 100% again. You come down here to folders. This is going to show the folders where the photos that you're going to be viewing are stored. So remember that Lightroom doesn't actually store the photos. The photos that you're viewing here are stored in the directory or the folder on your hard drive. If you remember, all of the photos here that we imported were imported into the all raw files folder. So that is the folder that we're going to be viewing here in the folders window. Here we have collections. And later on in this course, we're gonna do an entire lesson on collections and go into a lot of depth of how to use collections. But for now, this is where you're going to organize your photos. So don't worry too much for now about collections, but you will fully understand how to use this soon. If we come over here to the right. Now we can actually see the histogram of the photo that's selected. We can also see some of the other information associated with the photo, like the ISO it was taken, the focal length, the aperture, and the shutter speed. Quick develop right here is just showing the preset that we have on the photo. If you remember, when we imported all of our photos in the last lesson, we applied this raw file import preset. If you click on this, you can see all of the other presets that Lightroom has available. You don't need to change any of this. We will keep it on our raw file import key wording. If we open this up, this is where all of the keywords associated with the image are going to be stored. Now when we imported all of our photos, we didn't add any keywords. The only photo that we added keywords to was the very first photo that we imported. So if we click on this photo, now you can see the keywords that we typed in on the import. So we have four keywords here. And you could, if you click on this, you could add more keywords. And I'll show you in just a moment how you can use these keywords to search for this photo. I tried to keep it simple though, and I don't really use keywords. I organize all my photos using collections, which we're going to learn about in a future lesson. Feel free to add these keywords in, but don't let it get too confusing for you. And also for that reason, I don't use any of these keywords, suggestions or keywords sets. Same goes for keyword list. You can see all of the keywords that we've used so far. We've only added these keywords onto our photos. So this just keeps track of the overall keywords in your library. Again, I don't really use this either. Metadata. You open this up, you can see all of the metadata associated with the file, at least the only metadata that we have actually added to the file when we imported it. If you come up here to this box, up here, you can click on one of these options and see different views of metadata associated with the image. I like to keep it simple and keep it on the default. But that's just nice to know that that's there. And comments is something that I do not use because I don't use some of these windows. What you can do if you don't want to use them either is right-click on them and just check the ones that you don't want. If I check comments, it will disappear. Same for keyword list. And we can keep these three here for now. Again, the less clutter that you have in your workspace, the better. Now the next thing I want to show you is how to change the size of these thumbnails. If you want to change how big or small the squares are, what you can do is you can come down to thumbnails, or you see this slider. And you can slide this up to make them larger. And you can slide it down to make it smaller. So I typically keep it about right here. And a keyboard shortcut you can use, instead of using this slider, is you can use the plus button to make your photos larger. And the minus button on your keyboard to make them smaller. Now the next thing I want to show you are the different view modes in light room. These are really just the different ways to view your photos. If you come down here, you'll see several options. Right now we are in what's called grid view. So whenever you want to be in this view mode that you're looking at right here. You can either click this icon right here, or you can press the letter G. The next view mode that you have is loop view, which will allow you to view a single photo. If you click Loop, you can see the photo that we have selected takes up the entire screen. And a shortcut to zoom in at 100% IN and OUT is to simply press the space bar. So if you click the space bar, you will zoom in 100%. And you can move around your photo and just press the space bar to fit the photo back into the screen. Now the next view mode that you have is comparison mode. If you click this right here, the X and the Y, you will see the photo we were just looking at and the adjacent photo. If we go back to grid view right here, you can click here or press G. It will show the adjacent photo. But if you'd like to compare two photos of your choosing, you can select one photo, hold down Command, and select a second photo. So now you have two photos selected. That's Command on a Mac or Control on a PC, and then click comparison. So now the two photos that you selected, you can compare against each other. You can write here, zoom in and out of the photo that's selected. If you press this little lock button, they will zoom at the same amount and you can zoom them together at the same time. Let's go back to grid mode. This time, let's select multiple photos. So hold down command on a Mac or Control on a PC. And select at least three or four photos that you want to view all at the same time. Now once you do that, you can click on the fourth view mode, which is survey view. Now you can see all of those photos on the same screen. If you want to remove them, you can press the X there. But this is a great way to view multiple photos at the same time. Alright, let's go back to our grid view. And just so you know, this is people view, which is something that I don't use as a landscape photographer. You can look into that further if you're interested, but we won't be covering that here. Alright, so back in grid view. Next we're going to look at some of these toolbars. If you come up here, this is your filter bar. We will be discussing this more later in the course when we start to put together collections. But this bar is just a way to filter your photos so that you can sort through them more efficiently. We will cover what all of these mean in the following lesson. But for now what I want to show you is how you can search for your keywords. If you go to Text right here, you can search right here for your keywords. If you remember this photo, this was the only one that we added keywords to on Import. And we want are the keywords we added was Colorado. So if I type in Colorado, you can see that this image appeared. It was filtered out from the rest of the photos that didn't have any keyword metadata associated with them. If we click this x and remove this filter than all of our photos, show back up. If you do want to use keywords to search for your photos, this would be the way to do it. Click on Text and use this search bar to search for those keywords. Finally, down at the bottom here, we have what's called the film strip. This is going to show all of your photos in series. Whatever photo you select down here corresponds to what's being selected in the grid. This is just another way to view and sort through your photos. Alright, so that's a general overview of Windows view modes and toolbars. In the next lesson, you're gonna learn about other types of metadata we can add to a photo in the form of ratings, flags, and color labels, which is what we have right here as attributes of the photo that we can filter through in the filter toolbar. So that's it for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. 8. Ratings, flags, and color labels: Welcome back to the class you-all. In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to use ratings, flags and color labels, which are a type of descriptive information or additional metadata that you can add to your photos in order to more effectively and efficiently organize them. And we'll be discussing in the next lesson how to organize your photos using ratings flags and color labels in the collections area over here. And ratings are really the most important information that I add to my photos in my workflow, which allows me to track where my photos are in the editing process. And I'm going to teach you how this all comes together in the next lesson. Let's talk about ratings first and what ratings are just stars that you can rate your photos with on a scale of one to five. So you can rate your photo with one star, two stars all the way to five-stars. And typically one-star is the photo that you like the least. And 5-stars is the photo that you like the most. And then you can rape your photos accordingly based on your least to most favorite photographs. If you remember from when we imported our photos into Lightroom, we set the metadata and our import process to add a single star to every photo that we imported. So if you look at the bottom of each of the photos in Lightroom library, we can see one star, which means that all of these photos have been rated with one star. Now it's actually quite simple to change the rating of your photos. So to change the number of stars that are on your photo, one way you can do it is select the photo that you'd like to set the rating for and come up to your main menu to photo. If you come down this main menu, you can see this set rating option. And you can see here that one star is checked. If you'd like to change the star rating, you can choose from one all the way to five, or you can choose none. And you can see these numbers on the side here. These are just the keyboard shortcuts. So these are going to be really, really useful, especially in the next lesson when you start to rate your photos, you can quickly decide what you want to rate the photo and just press one through five on your keyboard. Let's just change this one to five stars right now. And you can see that the rating has changed down here. The other thing we can do is right-click on the photo and come over to set rating. Once again, we're essentially doing the exact same thing that we did from the main menu. And you can change that star rating here. You can see how that changed to three stars. Again, the easiest way to do this is to just use your keyboard numbers. So I'm going to change this back to one-star just by pressing the number one. And you'll see that every time you change the star rating, the selector or the photo that's highlighted will shift to the next photo. The reason it does this is because we have our settings set to auto advance, which means that when we change the rating of one photo, it will immediately move us to the next photo. If I press two here, the next photo selected is the adjacent photo. And it will keep moving down the line as we change our ratings. This is gonna be really helpful when you start to move through your photos quickly and pick out which ones you want to edit. But we'll dive deeper into how that works, how this system I have setup works. In the next lesson, I'm going to change these back to one stars because we're going to keep one-star as our default. And that will again make much more sense in the next lesson. The next thing you can do to organize your photos is to flag them. So you can add two different types of flags to your photo. One flag is a black flag, and that means that the photo has been rejected. These are photos that you don't like or don't want to keep. At least that's how I use the black flag. A flag built into Lightroom that you can use to really weed out the photos that you don't want. So let me show you how that works. We can change the flag status the same way we did the rating. If you come up here to photo, come down here to set flag. Right now, all of our photos are unflagging. If we want to access the Black Flag, which means rejected, we can click rejected. And now you can see there's a little black flag up here and that's just indicating that this photo has been rejected. It's still going to stay in your photo library and it's not going to be deleted. But if you do decide you actually want to delete the photo, I will show you how to do that towards the end of this course. The other type of flag you can add is a white flag. That flag means that the photo has been picked. So if we come over and select another photo, so let's say this one, we can come back to photo down the menu and set flag to flagged. And notice here that there are a few keyboard shortcuts. So x is four rejected. If you want the black flag to reject the photo, you can press X on your keyboard. If you'd like to flag it, press P, and you can remember that by P, meaning picked. So let's flag this one. You can see a little white flag here. And to be honest with you, I actually never use the white flag in the file organization system that I'm going to show you. It just doesn't really have a place, but it's just something that is nice to know in case you want to select a photo that may be stands out for some reason that you want to indicate as picked or important. So we can start adding flags to our photos by selecting a photo and pressing X if we want to reject it. And let's say the next one, I want to pick this one, flag it, so I'll press P. It's really up to you, your personal preference of whether or not you want to use these flags. Again, I personally don't find the flags helpful other than the rejected flag. And I use the rejected flag to pick out photos that I don't want to keep and ones that I want to delete later. But other than that, I don't really use flags. If you want to remove a flag from your photo, all you have to do is press the letter U. You can just press U if you want to remove a flag from any photo. Just like that. The other thing you can do, just like I showed you before, is go back to photo, set flag, and click on flagged. Again, like star ratings, you can also select a photo, right-click on it, and then set the flag that way as well. Alright, so the third type of metadata that you can add to your photo, our color labels. In color labels really work the same way that ratings and flags work. And you can add color labels in really the exact same way that we've added ratings and flags to our photos. So if we want to add a color label, you can select a photo and come up to photo in the main menu. If you come down the menu bar, as we saw before, we already did flags, ratings, and right below it is colored labels. And you'll see on this sub menu here, we have red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. These colors can really mean whatever you want them to mean. E.g. you can label a photo, read if say that's the predominant color in the photo. Or maybe it categorizes the photo in some way that works best for you. So maybe red means that the photo is a picture of a canyon, or maybe it's even a specific location. Red can really mean whatever you want it to be. So if we select red, you can see now that this photo has been highlighted in red because we've labeled it as read. For this next photo, we can change the color. Let's click blue. And it works in the same way. So you can use all five colors to organize and label photos as you see fit. And again, it's really up to you to decide what each color means. One thing you can even do is change the names of the color labels. If you come up here to metadata, you can select color label set. Then click Edit. Now here in this window we can change what the colors mean. So instead of this being red, we can have red stand for Canyon, and maybe yellow for wildlife, green for forest, blue for ocean, and purple for wild flowers. Now when you add a color label to a photo, if you right-click on a photo and add the color label. So again, you can add it through the photo menu bar at the top here, or just right-click on the photo Set Color Label. And now we've changed with those color names are. So if we want to name this one Canyon and we know that corresponds to red. Now we've linked the name canyon with the color red. And remember, you can use the keyboard shortcuts. So 678.9 to change the colors. So if I use 8.9, we can change the colors that way as well. Now once you've decided how you want to rate your photos, and also the color labels that you want to give them and whether or not you want to pick or reject them. A really helpful tool you can use is this filter bar up here. If you want to sort through your photos by these labels, you can come over to attribute. Using all of these options here, you can tell Lightroom which photos you would like to filter for based on the ratings, the flags, and the color labels. Let's start with flags here. If we click on the white flag, you'll see that only the photos that are picked with a white flag appear. Click on the white flag and we go back to the unfiltered state. Same thing for the black flag. We only had one that was rejected. And so that will appear here with the black flags. And if we want to select all of the photos that are unflagging, it will select all of those photos or filter for them that we haven't rejected or pit. We will click on that again so that everything is unfiltered. Now the same thing for the ratings. If we click one-star, all of our photos are going to show up. But let's say we rate this one as five. The next one is a five, and that one as a five. So we have these three rated as a five. Now if we come back up here and click five-stars, can see that all of the photos have been filtered to only show the photos that are rated as five-stars. So pretty simple. If you might have guessed, the same thing works for it, the colors. So you can filter through the color labels that you've set for your photos. So if I click on Read, it will show the photo that we have labeled with a color label with red. And we can see that color label is outlining the photo right there. So these are just some ways that you can label your photos so you can easily sort through them. I personally don't use color labels. I find it to be a little bit too messy and I prefer to keep my system as simple as possible. So the only labels that I use are the star ratings. And later, as I'll show you in the next lesson, you can use your collections over here to organize all of your photos based on this rating. We will dive into that next, and I will see you in the next lesson. 9. Using collections to organize your workflow - part 1: Hey, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to organize your files within Lightroom in an efficient workflow. And this is the system that we've been building towards throughout this course. And this is where you're really going to learn how to organize your files in what I believe is the most efficient and streamlined way. And the way we're gonna do this is by using collections. So this window right over here that we've saved for last now, collections or where you group your photos together and organize them within your catalog. Again, like we've discussed previously, these photos, when they're put into collections to group, they're not going to be actually stored in Lightroom. Lightroom is going to be collecting them in organizing them, while keeping all of the original files in the original directories. So all of our files are going to stay in are all raw files folder. But we're going to be able to group them and organize them however we like without moving the files around on our computer. All you're doing with the collection is just telling Lightroom that you want those photos linked in some way and viewable together in a collection, this will start to make more sense as we create these collections. So the first thing we're gonna do here is delete this smart collection and I will show you what this is in just a moment. But we're going to start from scratch. So I'm going to right-click and delete this smart collection which you might already have on your Lightroom as well. So you can go ahead and delete that. In light room allows you to create three different types of collections. You can create regular collections, you can create smart collections and collections sets and we'll go through all of these and which ones I recommend using. First before we move on, what I've done to my photos here and I recommend you do as well, is I have changed all of the photo ratings back to one star, and I have removed all of the flags and color labels. This is so we don't get confused as we start to make collections. To create a collection, come over to collections and click the plus button here. And we're first going to create a regular collection. So we'll select Create Collection. Will name this collection something descriptive that describes the type of grouping that we want to create for our photos. Here I'm going to create a group for the location or the state that the photo was taken in. I'm going to start with Colorado for the first collection. And you can uncheck, include selected photos and de-select set target collection as well. And then click Create. So now you can see on our collections panel we have a Colorado collection. In order to start adding photos to your collection, you can start to work through your library of photos here and select a photo that you would like to go into this collection. So in this case, I want to select photos that were taken in Colorado. So I'll select a photo and then click and drag that photo into this collection. And you can see now that the number one just appeared, which means that there is one photo in this collection. I'm going to drag these first four photos, which were all taken in Colorado into this collection. And if we click on the collection, we can see now that all four of those photos are within this Colorado collection. Again, if you notice, the number of total photos in are all raw files, folder does not change. They're going to stay in that folder. We're just organizing them here in a collection. So let's click back on are all raw files. And I'll just add a few more Colorado photos to this collection. Let's go ahead and add an additional collection here. So we'll create another collection and I'm going to call this Utah, so we can add some photos that were taken in Utah. So I've got this one. Remember we're dragging and dropping these photos. And I will create a third collection and call that Wyoming. So let's add some Yellowstone photos. Okay, great, so you can name your collections whatever you'd like. And again, remember, these are just regular collections you'll need to drag and drop. Or alternatively, what you can do is choose a collection and right-click on that collection. You'll see here an option called set as a target collection. If you select that, you'll see a little plus up here. And what that means is that you can more easily add photos using the keyboard shortcut, which is the letter B, UV, come back up to all raw files. If I click on this photo, which we haven't add, this was taken in Colorado, and I press the letter B, it will be added to our Colorado collection. Now one thing you can also do in order to organize these collections is to put them in what's called a collection set, which is just like a collection for collections if that makes any sense. And I'll show you right here. So I will name this collection set locations. And now you can drag and drop these regular collections inside of your collection set. You can see here that we have a collection set that we can collapse and expand when we want to see the locations inside. And again, if you want to change the target collection, you can right-click on whichever one you'd like to be the target and click Set as target. We could do the same thing for, let's say, seasons of the year. We could create spring. And I will uncheck this because we don't want spring to be inside the collection set called locations. We want it to be it's own. One more, just quickly called Summer. We could create all four of the seasons. And then we can create a collection set where we can drag and drop our seasons. There we go. Now we have two collections sets and we can use these same way. So e.g. this one was taken in fall, so we can add a fall check inside collection set seasons. So we want fall to go in the seasons collection set. Click Create. We'll click on are all raw files there just to access all of our files here. And then you can click on the photo that was taken in fall and simply drag and drop these photos. This was taken in Utah, this one in Colorado, but all in this season of fall. So if we come over here and click on fall, we have two photos and our fall collection. But those photos also appear in our Colorado and Utah collection. So you can start to see how we can organize and so many different ways. And this can help you sort through and find photos more quickly. Now, I don't really use these regular collections in order to organize my photos. I find that it can get a little bit messy. For that reason, I use something called Smart Collections and I use, and I'll be showing you smart collections throughout the rest of this course. And the exact method I use to sort and organize photos through my workflow using smart collections. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm actually going to delete these collections sets because we're not going to be using these, but it's really good to know how to do this because you might want to integrate some of this into your workflow. 10. Using collections to organize your workflow - part 2: Alright, so next we're going to create a smart collection. We'll come back over to collections and press the plus button and click on create smart collection. Now what is smart collection is going to do? It works really in the same way as a regular collection. The only difference is that Lightroom is going to automatically add photos to your collection based on certain metadata filters. I'll show you here in just a moment. The first smart collection I'm going to create, I'm going to call a number one. All photos ready to process. I recommend that you start by using the names that I've used for this system. And then you can go back and change the names and modify this system to your needs. But I found this to be the simplest and really I think the most streamlined way to do this. Now once he named this collection, we're going to keep rating as rating right here. Don't change that. We're going to click one star. Then we'll select this box. And select is, we're telling Lightroom rating is one star. And really what that means is you're telling Lightroom that you only want photos in this collection that have one star. And we will click Create. Now you can see that we have this smart collection that automatically has all 31 of our photos. And the reason for that, as you might have guessed, is that all of our photos are already rated with one star. So they automatically went directly into this smart collection, which is why it's called a smart collection and not a regular collection. Now we're going to make five of these smart collections. And you can follow along with me and create these collections with me. Create another smart collection. The second one we'll call to know Rejected Photos. And our rating is two stars. And click create. Our third smart collection. We will name three. Maybe. Someday. Rating is three stars. Create smart collection. We will name this one for yes. Ready to edit. Rating is this time it will be four-stars. Create. Our last smart collection will be five in work. And our rating is five. And make sure that you have this set to match all of the following rules for each one of these smart collections. If it's not already set to all, are ready. We will create our fifth collection. You can see there are no photos in these additional collections we've created because we don't have any photos with a 234 or five-star rating, but we're gonna change that here in just a moment. Alright, so now we're really down to the core of how this system works. You've imported all your photos. They all have a one-star rating. They're all going to appear in this collection. All photos that are ready to process. Now, these are all of the photos that say you come home from a trip and you load all your photos into your computer, and you're ready to just go through all of these photos and decide which ones you like and which ones you don't like. And let me show you how this system works. We'll start with the very first photo. And if you remember, we can rate photos by changing their stars with numbers on the keyboard. So the number one is for one-star, two is for two stars all the way up to the number five for five-stars. So when we look at our first photo, we need to determine whether we want to reject it, whether we don't want the photo, whether we maybe want to edit the photo someday, maybe not now. And you're not say crazy in love with this photo, but you don't necessarily want to get rid of it. And then you'll have photos that you definitely want to edit. You can say, yeah, this one is a winner. I want this to go into the collection. All photos that I want to edit. So let's work through our photos on this one for rating system. This photo right here, I kinda like it, but it doesn't make me crazy. I'm going to read it as a three, so I'm going to press the number three. And that becomes a three-star rating. And you can check that by clicking on our three-star category. And we see that image appear here. Now back in our all photos, it disappeared from our All Photos Collection. So I keep these all at one star so that I know which photos I've looked at and which photos I haven't looked at yet in terms of rating them with regard to deciding if I want to edit them or not. So every time I make a decision about a photo, it will leave this all photos, smart collection. Alright, so this next photo, this is really just a memory. This is a photo of my dog and it's not necessarily one that I want to edit. So I know I don't want to edit it, but I also don't want to delete it. I'm going to put it in the know Rejected Photos. So I'm going to press number two. This one I do like so I'm going to press for this one maybe. So I will press three. This one is a yes. So for definitely a yes. So for this one is a maybe so three. This one, I'm going to rate as to not really in love with this one. So you can see how I'm going through each one of these photos, either giving them a yes or a no or a maybe. And I'm just going to start to go through these quickly here. And now all of the photos that I wanted to look at after coming home from my trip. I can look at this All Photos Collection and know that I've looked at all of the photos from the trip and I've made a decision on where I want them to be in the editing process. So I've selected the ones that I definitely want to edit, and these will stay here until I'm actually ready to edit them. Now, the beauty of this system is that I always have photos ready to edit. So sometimes I'm not really feeling super creative. That's when I'll go through my All Photos Collection. Typically, all have thousands and thousands of photos in this collection and I never really quite get through them. But you can sit down and start to sort through them whenever you maybe just don't feel like editing. Then when you do feel like you want to edit photos, you can sit down and go to your yes folder and always have something to edit. Always be inspired and have your best work ready and available to start editing. A lot of times I'll come back to this maybe someday collection and go through these photos, maybe months or even years later and change my mind about certain photos. Sometimes after I let them sit for awhile, I start to like them more and more and then I can add them to my yes, ready to edit collections. So say I actually changed my mind. I really like this one, so I'm going to press the number four and it's going to pop over to the yes Collection. Same say for this one and this one. I'm going to add it to the yes. And let's say maybe this one just still not in love with it. I'm going to press number two to send it to the no collection. Now, in the no collection, I don't necessarily want to delete these photos. These might not be photos I'm in love with. I really want to edit, but it could be things like a memory, say a picture of my dog or some cool wildlife that I saw that the photo maybe you didn't come out great, but I don't want to delete them. When I'm in the know collection. However, I might actually decide that there are photos that I want to delete. So in that case, what I'll do is I'll select the photo and I will reject it by clicking X. You can see, like we learned before, that this little black flag means that I definitely reject it. And in my system, I want this photo to be deleted so I can add this photo and this photo as well. So I have three photos that I want to delete. The other ones I don't want to delete. I just want to keep them maybe on my hard drive for storage, but they are definitely not going to be edited and I don't have to ever look at them to be edited ever again. And I'll show you how to delete these photos in the next lesson because you can't delete them from your hard drive, from a Lightroom collection. Now let's say you've worked through all of your photos and you're ready to edit them. You come down to, you're ready to edit collection and then just decide which photo you want to edit. So let's say we want to edit this photo. What I'll do is change this to a five-star rating. So I'm going to press the number five. And now it pops up in the work folder. This is how I know that this photo is in the process of being edited. Once I get through the process of editing this photo, getting it ready either to print or to put online when it's completely done. Then I will remove it from this collection and I will add it to a new collection that we will create right now. This is just a regular collection. This is not a smart collection that I'm going to call it complete. Again, you can name these whatever you'd like. This is the system that just works best for me. So let's say I edit this photo which you can do directly in light room. You go over to the Develop module, then that photo will appear here. I do not develop in Lightroom. So at this point, I would actually export this photo out of light room. And I will show you how to do that in a following lesson. But as of now, this photo is going to hang out here until it's completely processed. And then once it's processed, what I'm going to do is move it into the complete folder. Then in order to remove this photo from this collection, I will just press the number zero, which will remove all of the ratings from this photo. Now once I've completely edited that photo, I don't ever intend to touch it again unless I want to re-edit it. It now lives in this complete folder. When I'm ready to go edit another photo, I will go back to the folder and choose another photo that I'm ready to edit. So let's say this photo right here. I will press the number five to rate it as a five-star rating and put it in my work folder. At this point, I will export this photo into a different location so that I can edit this photo in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. And I have a very specific way I like to export my photos to ensure that they don't accidentally get deleted or changed in all raw files folder. I will show you how to do that in the next lesson. 11. Exporting files out of Lightroom: Welcome back you-all. We're going to pick up right where we left off in the previous lesson, talking about exporting our images out of light room when they're all ready to process and edit. One of my goals when using Lightroom is to ensure that all of my original raw files stay in a single folder where they can't be duplicated, they can't be changed, they can't be edited, and they can't be accidentally deleted. So for that reason, I like to export my photos completely out of light room into a different folder by making duplicates of the image that I'm ready to process. Then from that new folder where I can process them in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. Now there's two ways that you can export a photo here. The first thing I'm going to show you is the way in which I don't recommend you edit your photos and I'll show you why in just a moment. But just so you can catch a common mistake that could potentially cause you to alter the original file, or even worst-case scenario, delete it. If you right-click on the photo that you'd like to edit, you can export it by going down to edit in. Now, if you come over here to edit in Photoshop, what'll happen is the photo will open up in Photoshop and you'll be able to edit it that way. Now, I don't prefer to use this option because it's possible based on your computer settings and the settings of Photoshop and Lightroom that you can alter the original file. So the original file is still in this folder. I want to keep it untouched. I want to prevent any type of editing that could affect the original file. So this original file in my all raw files folder, and opening it up directly in Photoshop could potentially mess that up. The better way to do this is again, to right-click on the photo you want to export. And instead of going to edit in, come all the way down to Export, and then move over this sub menu and click on Export. And this dialogue box should pop up. You'll see a variety of options. The first, really the most important is the export location. And this is where you want the photo to be exported to on your computer hard drive or external hard drive wherever you'd like to move it. Or I should say copy it because we're not actually moving the photo from this folder to a new folder. We're just making a copy of it in a new folder, kinda like we did on our import. The folder that I would recommend that you choose is the one that you created at the beginning of the course. So if we go back to our photo storage and organization folder, which I have on my desktop here. If you remember from the beginning of the course, we created these three folders. We've already used these two folders. So this is where we start our Lightroom catalog. This is where we hold all of our raw files. Now we get to use this exported raw files. So this is the folder we're going to send all of our exported files into. So click on that folder and select, choose. You can ensure that that's the proper directory by looking here, keep put in subfolder, unchecked, and uncheck, add to catalog. Now for file naming, we do not want to rename the file. We already had a system in place for naming this file, so you can keep that as it is. This should be the unique name based on your name, the date, and the time. Don't worry about video. For file settings, keep the image format in the original format, so you want to keep the original. And for the rest of this, you don't have to check anything off. Keep all of these settings below unchecked. Now what we can do is create this export presets. So every time we export this photo right here, we don't have to change anything. We can use it as a preset in order to create that preset. Come over here to add. You can name it whatever you like. So I have mine as raw export. I'm just gonna do a dash for this tutorial. And I will click Create. And you could go ahead and click export, but I'm going to show you how to use this preset. So let's click cancel. So we'll go through the same process by right-clicking on this photo. We want to export down here to Export. And now you'll see at the bottom of this sub-menu a preset that you created, this raw export tutorial. That's what we just created a few moments ago. So I will click on this. And now you can see there at the file was exported into that folder. And we can check that by going into that folder on our computer. So our exported raw files folder, if you click on that. Now, this photo is inside of our exported raw files folder, and this is the metadata that goes with that image file. Now at this point, I am done using Lightroom. I don't use Lightroom for editing unless it's for minor things. I will open up this image in Adobe Camera Raw, and I can show you how to do that in future tutorials. But for now, that is the entire organizational process that I use with light room. If I go back into my all raw files folder, I can see that this image is in the original raw files folder. So all it did was make a new copy into the exported folder. So now I never have to worry about any of these files being touched. They'd been completely organized here in this system so I can track where I am in the editing process of the photos that I actually like. And then when I'm ready, I can export them into this folder right here, which is where all go when I want to open them in Adobe Camera Raw. And that way if I really mess this photo up, I can always delete it and know for sure that I have an original copy in my all raw files folder which I can re-export and re-edit. 12. How to delete photos from Lightroom: Hey there, welcome back. In this short lesson, I want to show you how to delete photos from light room after we've gone through this entire process. So you want to delete photos that you definitely never want to edit. So we'll select on this smart collection, which is our no Rejected Photos. And if you remember, in this collection, we rejected a few of these photos that I flagged for deletion. So the black flag I use to indicate photos that I definitely want to delete. Now in order to delete the photos, you can't delete them directly from a smart collection. You have to go into your folder, your all raw files folder, and then filter out the photos that you actually want to delete and delete them from here. So in order to select the ones that have been rejected will go back up to our filter toolbar. Select attribute, then select the black flag. So now we have all of the files that we know for sure we want to delete. The next thing I'll do is select all of these photos. So you will come up here to the main menu, select, Edit, and select all. Now we've selected all of these photos. Next thing you'll do is right-click anywhere on one of these photos. And then you will come down this menu to remove photos. Now I want to warn you when you do this, this will actually delete the photos from your disk. If you are 100% sure that you want to delete these photos for good and permanently from your hard drive, then what you'll do is you will select delete from disk. If you remove them from light room, they will be removed from light room from your catalog, but they will still be on your raw files folder. So if you select delete from disk, they will disappear from this folder completely. And now you can see we deleted those three files. The total file count went down 31-28. And that's all there is to it. In order to delete files from your computer that you're sure you never want to look at. Again, that really wraps up the entire organizational system that I use within Lightroom. Now, if you've got photos all over your hard drive, that art disorganized and you're wondering how to implement this system for your own use. In the following lesson, I'm going to show you how you can take all of your photos and transfer them to this type of system that you've learned throughout this course. So if that's something that you're interested in, then I will see you in the next lesson. 13. How to transfer your photos to my organization system: In this video, I'm going to walk you through how to take your old setup of photo organization and workflow and integrated into the setup I taught in the previous lessons throughout this course. If you're interested in implementing the system that I've shown you throughout this course. This lesson is going to show you how to take all of your old photos and transfer them into the system that I've shown you so far. Now it's very important if you want to do this, that you watch all of the lessons so far all the way to the end so that you have a really good understanding of the complete import process and how this entire system works before you start to use it for yourself. The first thing I want to talk about here is where I keep all of my files and their locations. And this is gonna be a little bit different than you've seen throughout the course. Now, we've talked about this photo storage and organization folder, which I keep on my desktop and we're going to continue to work off of this folder. If you haven't created this folder already, you can go ahead and do so right now. Again, you can keep this folder wherever you'd like on your computer. I have it on my desktop where it's the easiest for me to access, but you can place it anywhere on your hard drive. You'll also see a separate folder that I've created here on my desktop called the previous photo location. And what this is, is it's a folder that I'm going to use to simulate where you are currently keeping all of your photos. I do not want you to create this folder. This folder, it just represents where all of your photos are on your hard drive right now. This could include all of the sub folders that contain all of your different photos. So if you're categorizing your photos in different folders, e.g. by season and location and date. This folder right here is going to represent all of those folders on your computer. If I go into this folder now, I have a few other simulated folders. Just for this tutorial, just to use this as an example. All of these folders right here are just example folders filled with photos that just represent different sub folders that you might have filled with all of your different photos. If we go into this photo storage and organization folder that I've been using to demonstrate Lightroom to you throughout the course. You'll see that instead of the three folders that we've been using throughout the course, I only have two. We still have the exported raw files folder and the Lightroom catalogs folder. What we don't have here is the all raw files folder, and I'll show you where that is in just a moment. So this folder, storage and organization folder is still the same minus the all raw files folder. And if you haven't already, you can go ahead and create these two folders so that you can follow along with the system that I'm going to show you. These two folders that I have here on my desktop. I still use in the exact same way that you've seen throughout the course. I keep all of my exported raw files in here that I want to work on in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. And you learned how to export photos out of light room into this folder in the exporting lesson, in this folder is where I also keep my Lightroom catalogs. So if I click on this one, I have the Lightroom catalog that we created in the very first lesson. Now, let me show you where I keep my all raw files folder, and that is on an external hard drive. So again, these two are on my computer hard drive. We come down to my external hard drive right here. You can see that my raw files folder is located on my external hard drive. In this folder contains all of my photos, all of my raw files in virtually every photograph that I've ever taken. We come down here to my external hard drive. You can see that I have my raw files folder located on this external drive. And this is where every single photo that I've ever taken is located. You can see in here all of my raw files. I have close to 10,000 on this drive right now, and they're all located in this single file. And if you remember from previous lessons, even though all of my files are compiled into this single folder, they're all organized in my Lightroom catalog, so I never have to worry about where to find photos that I'm looking for when they're all combined in this one file, they're all organized in light room. Let's go back to the photo storage and organization folder on my desktop. You might be wondering why I keep my exported raw files that I want to work on my computer's hard drive rather than my external hard drive. And the reason for that is that when I'm editing photos, it's much faster and there's really little lag time when I'm using Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. When the photo I'm working on is located on my computer's hard drive rather than on an external hard drive. Even if you're using something like a solid-state drive, it's still not fast enough to transfer the data from the external hard drive onto your computer. When Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw are trying to pull that information from an external drive. It makes it much easier and faster it just to keep all of your files that you're working on, all of your raw exported files on your computer's hard drive, everything else however, so all of my raw files, all of my photos, I want to keep on an external hard drive. And that's not just to free up space on my computer's hard drive and to make my computer operate a little bit faster with, without all that memory taking up space, but it also allows me to more easily back up all of my files. I have systems to backup all of my files on external hard drives. And that's so I never have to worry about my photos ever getting deleted. I always have multiple backups of all of my photos. Alright, so let's talk about how to import all of your old photos. So if we go back to our desktop, how to transfer all of these photos. So your photos on your computer hard drive or maybe even if they're on an external hard drive, That's okay. I'll show you how to transfer all of your photos into the system that I've shown you throughout this course. And again, it's really important at this point that you've watched this entire course up to this point so that you can follow along and do this import process accurately as I've shown you so that you don't delete or do anything to your original files. Let's go ahead and open Lightroom back up. What you can see here is the Lightroom catalog that I typically work off of. So if you look over here, I have my all raw files open in the folders window. Instead of just the few photos that we've been using throughout this tutorial. This is my actual complete library of photos that is connected to my external hard drive. So you can see I have close to 10,000 photos on that hard drive. When you're ready to transfer your photos from the old locations that you have into the new all raw files folder. What you can do is come to import just like you would anytime you want to import photos into Lightroom. And the next thing you'll do is locate where you are storing all of your photos. So in this example, since I already have all of my photos imported into this system, we can come into this example folder that I've created for you, which represents all of your photo locations. So if I click on this and open this folder up, you can see that I have several folders filled with just random photos that I've used for this demonstration. And a lot of these photos will look familiar to you since we've been using them throughout the course. Now the key here is to locate where all of your file folders are. And it doesn't matter if they're on your computer hard drive or if they're on an external drive, all you need to do is click on the folder where they're located. And if you do have photos in subfolders, you can click on this button right here to include subfolders. So now you can click on the parent folder, say if you have a lot of different folders, organizing your photos and a lot of different ways. You click on the parent folder. Lightroom will be able to pull and recognize all of the photos within those sub-folders. If you have photos in different folders all over your computer, what you can do is open all of them up in the source window, and you can select multiple photos by holding Command on a Mac or Control on a PC and clicking the folders that you want to add. So you can see there that I added those two folders separately. And I did that by holding down command, since I'm using a Mac while selecting all of the folders that I want. And again, that's Command on a Mac and Control on a PC that will allow you to select multiple folders. But all of my photos are in this parent folder. So I'm just going to select that folder. If you have your photos on an external hard drive, just make sure that it's plugged in and you should see the name of your hard drive appear in the source. So if I open this up, you can see my all raw files folder is located on my external hard drive. If I wanted to select this, I can hold down command since I'm using a Mac and click on that all raw files folder. And now this folder and this folder are both going to appear over here, which means that they are being read by Lightroom and available to import. In this example, I do not want to import my all raw files. Remember that's a huge folder with close to 10,000 photos that I already have imported. So I'm going to de-select that. Next. You want to have all of your import settings set exactly like I've shown you throughout the previous lessons in this course. So starting up here, you want to have this set to copy. And you want this set to all photos, since you want all of the photos from here imported into your new destination. And you'll see that all of these except for the one of my dog, are grayed out because I've already imported them into light room. It looks like this is the only photo that hasn't been imported before. And this right here, if that's checked, that ensures that all of these photos that have already been imported will not be imported. Again, since you are doing this for the first time, all of your photos should look like this that are not greyed out and have the checkbox. Because I'm assuming that you've never done this before. If we come over here to our import settings, everything is the same as I showed you in the previous lessons. If you remember earlier in the course, we created this import setting, which is right down here. If you click down here, we created this raw file import tutorial. Now, this isn't the import that I personally use. This one was created for demonstration purposes for this course. The one I actually use is the raw file import, which is exactly like the one I showed you. The only difference is that the destination folder is different. So I'll click on this since this is the one that I actually use. And you can see over here that the destination folder is the all raw files folder on my external hard drive. If you look up here, you can see all of our raw file Import Presets are all set for our filenames, for our Develop Settings, metadata, everything we said in previous lessons, and that all should automatically appear when you select the preset down here that you created. So we have all of our import settings set. We have the appropriate destination folder. What's going to happen when we import our photos is all of the photos from your previous locations are going to be copied and a duplicate is going to be placed on your external hard drive, all raw files folder. If we go back to finder right here, and I look at my desk, this is the location that all of the new files are going to be placed. This folder is the exact same folder right here. So the final step in this process is to click Import. And I'm not gonna do this in this demonstration because I don't want to touch or modify my all raw files folder since I'm showing you the actual folder that I currently use. So I don't want anything to be touched or modified with this. So I'm going to click done and you will click Import. And now all of your photos should be imported into your new Lightroom catalog. And remember, if you want to start all of this over from scratch, you can come up here to File New Catalog and follow the same process that I've shown you throughout this lesson. And you will see down here, I have all of these smart collections that I showed you how to create smart collection lesson. It'll probably take a little bit of time depending on how many photos you have for Lightroom to import all of them into your new catalog. But once you do, you're ready to start sorting them into these five different smart collections. And this might take you some time again, if you have a lot of photos. So here e.g. I. Have close to 10,000 and I have removed all of the metadata just for the purposes of this course. But at this point, you can start to sort through your photos by rating them with a 23 or four. Rating them if you want to reject them. If maybe you want to edit them and a folder for yes, you want to edit them. If I start to move through these photos giving them different ratings here. You can see like we learned previously, that these smart collections will start to populate once you start rating them. And once I'm ready to edit a photo, I can click on this. Yes, ready to edit collection. And I'll see all of the photos that I do want to edit. And let's say I want to edit this photo. I will write it as a five by pressing the number five. Then I will come down to my work collection and export this photo, just like I showed you before. If we come here, we're ready to export. I'll right-click, come down to Export, and I will click on my raw export preset. This will send this file to the location that we've designated for our exported raw files. If you're a member in our photo storage and organization file, we have the exported raw files folder here. So this is where all of these exported photos, when I'm ready to edit them, they will be exported into this folder. Again, if this is confusing to you, go back through the previous lessons where I walk you through this step-by-step. And sometimes it takes a little bit of time to sink in, but if you do it multiple times, it really will start to click and make sense for you. Let's say now that I have finished editing this photo, then I will click and drag this photo into my complete smart collection. I will also remove it from this collection, the inward collection, because now I know for sure that I'm completely done working on it. At this point, I will press the number zero and it will remove it from this work smart collection. Now this photo doesn't have any star ratings, so it won't appear in any of these smart collections. So I know it's completely out of my workflow. I do like to keep it here in this complete collection just because I like to keep track of all the raw files that I've worked on and that's really just a personal preference of mine. So that is how you transfer all of your photos from the old locations, the folders that they used to be in, perhaps all over your computer's hard drive and external hard drives into the all raw files folder that compiles them into a single location. That's easy to manage, that's easy to backup and duplicate and can always be sorted through an organized in your Lightroom catalog, through all of these smart collections. That about wraps up the entire system and workflow that I have from start to finish. Importing photos that I have when I come back from a photoshoot, all the way to getting them ready to edit. I hope you've found all this information useful and can implement at least some of this into your workflow. And I really hope you learned a lot from this. And with that, we'll wrap things up in the next lesson. 14. Conclusion and next steps: Well, that's it for this course. I want to thank you so much for being here. I hope you got a lot out of this course. I hope you learned a lot. And if you did, I hope you join me in some of my other courses. They're all aimed at helping me become a better photographer, especially a better landscape photographer. If that's the type of photography that you're into. I'd also love for you to go check out my website. Ton of free guides, tutorials, online resources that will help you become a better photographer. I want to thank you so much again for being here and I hope you continue to learn and create and explore. And I also hope to see you back here again soon. So take care for now and I'll see you next time.