How to Use Keywords in Lightroom

Video Transcript

"BRANDON SARKIS: My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to be showing you how to use Adobe's Lightroom software. And now, we're going to discuss "Keywords." Keywords or keyword tags are a really great way to organize all of your photos. It's a good way to sort through lots and lots and lots of photos. Let's go over here and close all this stuff up, and clean it up. And we're going on to keyword tags and pop that open. And you could see I've got a couple of different keyword tags that I use. Let's go with "Scene" for example. We'll click on that, and you'll see all of the photos I've tagged as "scenery photos." You can scroll through and interact with them just like you normally would. Here's my "sky photos," kinda more of the same and iPhoto originals. And what you can do is you can use this to sort out your photos. You could--actually, here at the bottom, let's go back--touch on this again for a second. This is the "Painter." This is how you tag them. So you would pick keywords and you would go and paint, you know, test, or whatever, you know, pictures of my dog, or someone's name, or something like that. Another good thing about these is you can actually use these keyword tags to find certain images. So we're going to click on this here, and we're going to click on our little search box, and I'm going to type, I'll type "hdr" and hit "Return" and there's no photos that it selected. No photos in the selected keyword tag to sort that. So we'll actually close this. We'll back up to our library. We'll open up all of our photographs. So you can see, there weren't any in that folder. So we're going to reopen our "Find" dialog. Click on that, and now, we'll type in "hdr." Hit "Return" and you'll see all the photos tagged "hdr" pop up, which is pretty nifty. So like I said, if you named--like here let's type in "iPhoto," so all my iPhotos pop up, or iPhoto pictures pop up. So if you have named these, like, after your dog, or after a friend, or mom, or dad, or birthday, or something, you could just type that in as long as they were tagged appropriately, and they would pop up even if they weren't in the same catalogs, which is a pretty handy feature, if you're trying to sort through a couple of thousands photographs at a time."