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Five Uses for Smart Collections in Lightroom

I use the Smart Collections feature in Lightroom a lot. Having groups of images up to date and easily accessible is really important to me.

Here are my top five uses for Smart Collections:

1. Keeping track of and exporting my latest shoots

I set up a smart collection to show the images I have captured today using the simple rules below:

The Capture date can be as wide as you like. The last 3 days, the last week or whatever you need.
I am only interested in DNG files so I add a rule to make sure I don’t include any other file-types.

A useful trick, if you use laptop away from the office, is to export the last shoot as a new Lightroom catalogue. You can then import the new catalogue, along with all edits, keywords and the folder structure into your main Lightroom catalogue back at base.

2. Auto updating a Web Gallery

If you load your best images to the web then having as smart collection is very useful.
The Web Module will allow access to all of your Smart Collections. You can then edit away in the knowledge that your chosen web collection will always contain your latest additions and edits.

3. Grayscale images

Use the rule ‘ Treatment is Grayscale’ to select images in your catalogue which have been converted to grayscale. Again you can narrow the filter down as much as you need using further rules.

4. Checking Picks globally

I like to check that my picks are correct. It is really easy to press the P key and add in picks that you do not really want.
Having a Smart Collection to show the global picks allows me to quickly scan the catalogue and remove the rouge picks that have crept in.

5. Missing Web Gallery Captions

I like to caption the images that I put onto the Web. Before Smart Collections I had to manually check that I had included a caption and then switch to the Web module and check again.

Having a Smart collection that shows the images in a collection without captions great. Notice here that you can include a rule which operates on one of Lightrooms existing collections.

So here I would create a collection to be used for the web and then target my smart collection at it.

I hope this helps...

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