If you’ve worked your way through my 4-part tutorial (starting here) on how to turn your favorite pictures into business cards, and you’re still hungry for more, here’s a bonus tip on how you can speed things up even more.
Bonus Tip 1: Automating the Procedure
There’s a great way to automate the process even further by adding Smart Collections to the workflow.
If you have a large photo collection (and is there any Lightroom user who doesn’t?), that regularly gets updated with new pictures, you could ‘outsource’ the manual process of adding pictures to a collection by using Smart Collections. Say you want all your five star pictures to feature on your business cards. Or, if you’re a little pickier, you could keyword all your business-card worthy pictures with a keyword Business Card. You can create a smart collection by hitting the big ‘plus-’ sign in the Collections Panel and choosing ‘Create Smart Collection…’ You add rules to your collection by hitting the plus-icons inside the Smart Collection Dialog Box.
In that case, you could make a Smart Collection with the criterion set to Star Rating = 5 or Keyword Contains Business Card (as shown in the screenshot). You create a Smart Collection by tapping the +-key in the Collections Panel and choosing Create Smart Collection from the menu. You’ll be presented with a set of variables that you can turn into rules. The possibilities range from simple as in this case to highly complex rules you’d need a degree in logics to understand!