The Question of the Week (4): Why should I use Keywords and Keyword Sets?

This week’s question is about the use of Keyword Sets in Lightroom. This of course has to do with the broader topic of keywording in itself, so let me rant about that for some time before moving on to the actual topic at hand .

From the Lightroom Workshops I regularly host, I know that a lot of people don’t give the Library Module, and especially the Keywording Panels a lot of attention. Because, let’s face it, we all want to rush asap to the Develop Module and start shaping our pictures in a creative way, don’t we? And so a lot of people wind up using Lightroom only as an – albeit sophisticated – raw converter, which is just not doing this incredible piece of software, nor your own pictures for that matter, enough justice!

It is my firm belief that any time spent in the Library Module is time very well spent, especially when your Catalog starts growing. Library tasks such as arranging your folders in a logical way, flagging, rating and keywording your pictures may not seem of much use at the start of a Catalog (Does the phrase ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll just remember which folder that picture is in!’ sound familiar?), but when you have a Catalog filled with thousands of pictures, you will be very happy that you’ve gone through the trouble of properly, or at least basically, keywording everything.

The whole keywording process opens up a window of opportunities for later use. Let’s suppose you take pictures of your children, and you do so for a couple of years. After a while, there will be hundreds of pictures of your children on your harddrive and in your Catalog. Now say one of them is having his birthday and you want to make a special birthday card (for example by using the template we discussed a couple of blogposts ago). If you haven’t properly keyworded and rated the pictures, chances are you will not make any birthday card at all, because the process of going through all those pictures looking for the good ones of that specific kid is way too time-consuming. Instead, you will rush of to Walmart and buy a generic 99 ct birthday card. Doesn’t your kid deserve better?

Ouch, this is a bit cruel of me: measuring your parental skills by how much time you put into keywording in Lightroom But you get the picture, I’m sure.

If, in between changing diapers (which is actually a far better measure of parental skill) you make a habit of just, upon every import, quickly keywording your pictures with elementary information such as the names of the kids appearing in the pictures, and maybe even go through a quick rating process, giving the best pictures a five star rating or a ‘flagged’ status (there are as many rating procedures as there are Lightroom users), you would be able to filter the best pictures of that particular kid in no time. Couple that selection to the print template we made earlier and… voilà, a cool and personalised birthday card, in no time!

Lightroom, as always, is trying to help you as much as it can to speed up the keywording process so you can return to more exciting tasks such as developing pictures in the Develop Module or… changing yet another diaper!

One of those tools are Keyword Sets. You can store up to 9 frequently assigned keywords in one keyword set for later use. Lightroom comes with a couple of keyword sets, but you can easily create new ones. The advantages are twofold:

1. you save time by not having to manually keyword everything
2. you reduce the risk of misspelling keywords in between keywording sessions

I use keyword sets for a lot of things:

I have a keyword set ‘Family’ and a keyword set ‘In-laws’. Whenever there’s a party or a family gettogether, I keyword the pictures of that event by using my keyword sets. If you have a big family, you might even want to make two keyword sets (‘Family Core’ and ‘Family Extended’, for example): it might mean you will have to go through your photos two times (once for every keyword set) but that will still be quicker and more consistent than doing it manually!

I also have a keyword set ‘Intended use of pictures’: this consists of 9 possible ‘ends’ that I can use the specific pictures for. The keywords in this set are things as ‘Blogpost’ (I might use the picture in a blogpost) or ‘Lightroom Book’ (I might use the picture in an upcoming version of my Lightroom book) or ‘HDR’ (this picture has yet to be made into an HDR) or ‘Workshop’ (this picture is good for illustrating something about Lightroom in one of my workshops). Whenever I’m short of pictures to put online, I quickly search for ‘Blogpost’ in the Filter Panel and Lightroom immediately comes up with suggestions I have deemed interesting enough to put online at the time of keywording the pictures.

Now that I’m cycling through Bali, I also have a keyword set ‘Bali Places’. This is one I set up in advance with the places we’ll be visiting on this trip. At night, when I import the pictures, I only have to select the Keyword Set and go through the places. When a shot is taken in some small village in between places, I assign two keywords to it (the names of the two cities in between which the photograph was taken).

I will leave you with a final example of how Keyword Sets can be used in a highly demanding, professional environment. The example is taken from my ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’ book.

Say you are a sports photographer, and you are assigned to shoot anything from the Olympics Eighth Finals and up. Minutes after your pictures have been taken, they should already be on your editor’s desk, thousands of miles away.

One way of using Keyword Sets would be to make a keyword set for every Olympic Discipline you have to shoot. In the first eight fields, you carefully put the names of the participants on that Eighth Final. These are known some time in advance, so you can prepare this in advance. This leaves you with one place for… the discipline itself. Guess whose pictures will be the first to land on the desk of the editor? Yours, or the ones of your colleague that still has to keyword everything, maybe misspelling the name of the Ugandese sprinter in his rush to get the pictures out as quickly as possible.

Keywording. It’s important. I rest my case

P.S. Next episode: How to set up keyword sets…