STEP ONE: This step is only for Classic users (cloud users skip this step). First, turn on Syncing if it’s not already turned on (click the cloud icon up in the top right corner of Lightroom Classic’s window), and then go to the Collections panel, to the collection you want your client to be able to choose images from and click the checkbox that appears to the left of it (as shown here). A “Sync” symbol (seen here) will appear, letting you know this album is being synced. By the way – you’ll only see this checkbox appear once syncing is turned on.

STEP TWO: Now, in your Web Browser (here, I’m using Safari), go to lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your Adobe user ID and password (the same user ID and password you use for your Lightroom photography bundle account). You’ll see the album you just chose to sync right in the collection of Albums on the left side. Click on it, and it will display the images inside (as seen here).

STEP THREE: Go to the bottom left corner of the window, right under your thumbnails, and click on the “Proofing” button (as shown here). It’s the fourth icon from the left.

NOTE: If you don’t see this proofing button, click on the little round icon for your Account up in the very top right corner of the screen, and from the pop-down menu that appears, click on “Technology Previews” and turn on the checkbox to “Enable Technology Previews.” Now that button will appear.

STEP FOUR: The first time you do this, it brings up an empty window, but up in the top right, it prompts you to turn on Proofing (as shown above in blue), so click where it shows you to.

STEP FIVE: A little pop-down window will appear with a custom link that leads just to this gallery of proofing images. Click on the clipboard icon to copy this link into memory (this is the link you’re going to email to text message your client so they can see this gallery too).

STEP SIX: When your client clicks this link it will take them a screen that looks the one above, with checkmarks below each image and the instruction (in blue) to click on the checkbox below any images they want to select.

STEP SEVEN: When they click one of those checkboxes, it highlights the checkmark in blue and puts a blue outline around the thumbnail (as seen above).

STEP EIGHT: If your client double-clicks on any image, they will see the image larger (as shown here), and they can leave you a comment in the comment field at the bottom (as shown here). When they hit the return key, it adds that comment to this photo, which you can see.

STEP NINE: OK, now back to you. To see which images your client chose, just refresh that Web page, and now only the images they selected will appear here. Any image they commented on will have a comment icon attached to the thumbnail – just double-click on it to see the comment and/or respond back to the client’s comments.

That is all there is to it (pretty slick, right?).

Have a great Monday, everybody.

-Scott

The post How To Let Your Client Proof Images in a Lightroom Collection appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

STEP ONE: Turn on Syncing. Click on the cloud icon up in the top right corner of Lightroom Classic’s window (click the “Start Syncing’ button as shown above).

STEP TWO: Click on a collection with the images you want to search (it has to be a collection – this doesn’t work with Folder). Once you turn Sync on (like you did in Step One), a checkbox appears to the left of your collections. Click on the checkbox next to the Collection you want to do a visual search through, and a sync icon appears (seen above).

STEP THREE: In your Web Browser, go to this address:

Lightroom.adobe.com

Once you’re there, log in with your Adobe ID (user name and password – the same on you use to log into Lightroom), and that synced collection will appear there. There’s a search field at the top; just type in what you want it to find (in this case I typed in “cars” and it found all the cars in that collection.

STEP FOUR: Here’s another example. In the search field, click the ‘x’ to clear the search, and type in something else. Here, I typed in “Sign,” and it displayed the images with a sign in them in two or three seconds. NOTE: I did not add any keywords to these images – it’s using AI to recognize what’s in the shot, and it displays just those that matches your search term.

OK, how did that relate to this guy’s problems?

He photographs animals in zoos, but sometimes, he doesn’t take the time to tag every animal with a keyword description. He was wondering if there’s a faster way to find and tag those photos with a keyword. Well, using this Visual Search, he could do it. Here’s how:

1. He puts all his animal photos in one collection (it’s just going to be a temporary collection, so don’t sweat it.
2. He syncs that collection.
3. He goes to lightroom.adobe.com, clicks on that collection, and searches for (let’s say) giraffes. It finds all the photos with giraffes in them.
4. Select all those giraffe photos; make a new collection called “Giraffes” (right there in Lightroom Web) with just those giraffes inside it. That new collection will sync back to Lightroom Classic automatically. Now, in Lightroom Classic, you can go to that Giraffe’s collection, select all, and in the Keywording panel, simply add the keyword ‘Giraffe” and now all your giraffe photos are keyworded with Giraffe. Boom. Done.

I hope you find that helpful.

OK, everybody, have a fantastic Super Bowl weekend! (just so you know, I’m going to have an insane amount of those little Nathan’s pigs in a blanket and a mountain of tater tots. But, I’m going to offset all those calories and fat by having them with a Diet Coke. Maybe two. Just sayin’).

Cheers,

-Scott

The post How Lightroom Classic Users can do a Visual Search (cooler than it sounds) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

This is a handy shortcut, but this is also a “heads up” because clicking on a photo in a collection and hitting delete simply removes the photo from that Lightroom Classic collection (the original photo is still on your computer or external hard drive, depending on where you store your original images). However, this shortcut actually:

1. Removes the image from your collection
2. Removes the image from Lightroom altogether
3. Removes the image from your computer (or external hard drive) and puts it straight in the trash
4. It doesn’t give you a “Are you sure you want to delete this forever?” warning first – it just deletes it immediately.

The shortcut is: Shift-Option-Command-Delete on Mac, or Shift-Alt-Ctrl-Backspace on a Windows PC.

So, it can be very handy, but it’s also very potent, so use this one with care.

I’m off to Swingin’ London, Baby Yeah!

I’m leaving Sunday for London, where I’ll be teaching a travel photography workshop for 12 awesome folks this coming week (along with my co-instructor Mimo Meidany), so I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll get done (never fear, Rob will carry on while I’m out swinging). I’m going a few days early because I’ll be recording a travel photography course for KelbyOne that I’m very excited about (more on that soon).

In the meantime, as soon as I get back, it’s time for the annual Photoshop World conference (more details here). TONS of Lightroom classes and Photoshop classes and fun. Then, it’s the new BILD Expo 2023 up in New York City at the Javtis Center, where I’ll be doing a keynote presentation called “Crush the Composition.” Details and tickets for that here. Then, I’ll be speaking at Rocky Nook’s Art and Craft of Photography online conference in November (tickets and info here). Lots of fun stuff going on.

Here’s wishing you a great, safe, fun weekend. See you all soon.

-Scott

P.S. We’ve been releasing some really fantastic online courses at KelbyOne, including a kick-butt one on composition from Mimo Meidany this week (we release a new online course every single week). You can buy any course individually, or join for just $19.95 a month and watch them all. Here’s the link with all the details.

The post How To “Super Delete” A Photo From a Lightroom Collection appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

I always think of Lightroom Classic’s Smart Collections feature as an assistant that works tirelessly behind the scenes to gather and sort photos for you based on your suggestions. Kind of like an intern without the attitude.

Anyway, here are five ideas for Smart Collections you can use to help bring a little extra organization to your Lightroom life:

Your Best Photos Of The Year

If you mark your best images with a 5-star rating (or a color label), you can have your smart assistant gather them up for you into a collection. Just create your smart collection to gather photos from 1/1/2022 to 12/31/2022 that have a 5-star rating (or whichever color label you apply to your best image), and it’ll gather them up for you, including any ones you mark that way until the end of the year.

A Collection of Nothing But All Your Panos

Have your Smart Collection gather up any photos with the word “Pano” added to the file name (Lightroom automatically adds the word ‘Pano’ to the end of your complied panoramas. Well, at least if you made your pano in Lightroom, it does).

A Collection of Images You Want To File For Copyright

This is a great way to make sure you don’t forget to submit your images each year for copyright protection. Set up a Smart Collection to gather any images that: (a) are from this year, (b) have the copyright status ‘unknown’ (so you haven’t marked them as copyrighted), and (c) are saved in whichever format you save your finals in (I only submit final images for copyright – and I save my finals as JPEGs, but you can choose whatever you use for designating a final – a star rating, a pick flag, label, etc.).

A Collection of Images With a Specific Keyword

For example, if you’re a wedding photographer and you’re looking for updated images to share on your website or on social, you could create a Smart Collection of all your 5-star images with the keyword “Bride” added to it (provided, of course, that you keyword your images).

Images Without GPS Info

If they don’t have GPS info, they’re not organized on Lighroom’s built-in world map, so if you create a Smart Collection that compiles every image without GPS data into a collection, then one Saturday morning when you’ve got nothing to do, you can add these to the map, even if your camera doesn’t have built-in GPS (here’s a quick video on how to do that).

That’s just a few – if you’ve got any good ones, please share them in the comments below.

Have a great Monday, ya’ll!

-Scott

The post Five Lightroom ‘Smart Collection’ Ideas appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

It’s hidden alright, and I had forgotten it was even a ‘thing’ (even though I had written about it in my Lightroom book), but it’s the hidden ability to create conditional situations when creating Smart Collections. Here’s how you reveal these features.

Above: here’s the standard ‘Create Smart Collection’ window with a few of its standard choices.

To access these extra ‘conditional’ features, hold the Option key (on Mac) or the Alt key (Windows) and the + sign at the far right (where you add a new collection criteria) changes to a pound sign (#) as seen above right.

Above: Now you have a few pop-up menu on the left where you can choose conditional actions when creating your Smart Collection. There ya have it. Pretty sweet little hidden feature.

Hope you found that helpful. I look forward to seeing a whole bunch of you tomorrow as I kick off the Travel Photography Conference.

-Scott

The post Lightroom’s Hidden Conditional Smart Collections Feature appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Well, there ya go.

Third time’s a charm

After my Monday B&W “debacle,” and then my Tuesday attempt to fix it, sure enough, one of my astute readers found an even easier way, saving a few more clicks. Hats off to “The Keeper of the Garden” who wrote:

“1. Select all photos (or those you want to assess in a B&W version) in your existing collection.
2. Create a New Collection, give it an appropriate name, and check the options to “include selected photos” and “make virtual copies”.

This way, there’s no need to delete anything from your first collection as the virtual copies were created together with the new collection, were included in that new collection, and LR Classic will automatically switch to that new collection.”

They were spot on (and thanks for sharing that with my readers). Here’s hoping that next week, I do a better job (but ya sure can’t count on that).

Stay healthy, vote early and vote often (kidding), and we’ll catch here next week for more mistakes and corrections. 🙂

Have a great weekend everybody!

-Scott

The post Before/After Intermediate Level Lightroom Tutorial appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

This one’s really easy — just right-click on the photo and from the pop-up menu choose “Go to Collection” (as shown here) and it will list all the collections that photo appears within (if any). If you want to jump to any one of those collections where it lives, just choose it (as shown above). That’s all there is to it.

Hope you found that helpful. Here’s to watch could very well be an awesome, awesome week – let’s make the most of it.

-Scott

The post Lightroom: How To Find Out Which Collections a Photo Is In appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Why Would You Do This?

It is fair to wonder why you need to bother with this at all, so let’s go through some of the benefits before getting into the details of how to set it up. The biggest benefit I find is simply having access to all of your photos on your mobile device. Granted, you don’t have to sync all of your photos, which is also one of the benefits to using Lightroom Classic with the Lightroom cloud versus just using the Lightroom cloud alone, because if you go all in on the Lightroom cloud alone, then you must upload your entire Lightroom library to the cloud.

Even if you don’t need this professionally, there are countless times when I have appreciated being able to pull up photos of friends and family to simply share with other friends and family. And since these photos do not count against any cloud storage at all, you can have many more photos than you store locally on your device alone. If you do use your photography professionally, then this is just one more way to have a living digital portfolio on all of your devices.

Another related benefit is being able to take advantage of sharing galleries/albums of your work via the web from Lightroom Classic. These can be used for getting feedback/responses from the people you share it with, but sometimes it is just really useful to be able to quickly share a collection of photos with anyone you wish.

Additionally, having access to your photo library from your mobile device makes it super easy for sharing to various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Once your photos are synced with the Lightroom cloud you can start using Lightroom on your mobile devices for flagging and rating your photos, as well as adding titles and captions, and even editing, and all of that gets synced back to Lightroom Classic. You basically are just extending aspects of the functionality of Lightroom Classic to your mobile apps.

How Do You Do This?

The first part of the equation is to enable syncing in your Lightroom Classic catalog. You can only sync one catalog at a time, and my advice is to only have a single master catalog anyway (though I know there are certain use cases where having multiple catalogs makes sense for some people), so open that catalog into Lightroom Classic and look for the cloud icon in the upper-right corner of the interface (note, this is a recent change in location from under the Identity Plate).

Then click the Start Syncing button to allow your Classic catalog to communicate with the cloud aspect of Lightroom, or in Adobe parlance, “other Lightroom clients” which means any of the Lightroom cloud apps (for iOS, Android, Win, Mac, and ChromeOS).

At this point I’m assuming that you have not yet installed the Lightroom app on any of your other devices. As such, enabling sync from Lightroom Classic doesn’t just start syncing your Lightroom Classic photos to the cloud, so nothing should be happening. You are in complete control of which photos get synced from Lightroom Classic, and we’ll get to that next.

From Lightroom Classic, regular collections are the vehicle for syncing photos to the other Lightroom clients via the cloud. You can opt to mark existing collections to sync, or create new collections expressly for this purpose (or both). Just check the box next to a collection that you want to sync, then add photos to it.

Only photos you place into synced collections will sync to the cloud. And here is the most important nugget of knowledge, photos synced from Lightroom Classic do not count against your Adobe cloud storage. Lightroom Classic can only sync smart preview versions of your original source photos, and those smart previews do not count against your storage quota. As long as you only sync from Lightroom Classic (meaning you do not import photos into any of the other Lightroom clients or use the built-in Lightroom camera on mobile), then you will never impact your 20GB of cloud storage, yet can still take advantage of all the features I mentioned previously. I think that is a really cool aspect of the Photography plan subscription, and can’t imagine anyone with a mobile device and Lightroom Classic on their computers not finding some usefulness in that workflow. I hope you do too.

Here are some related posts you might find helpful on this topic:

• Managing Adobe Cloud Storage for Classic Users
• Using Lr Desktop as a Window to Cloud Storage
• Controlling Auto Add in Lightroom Mobile

The post How to Use Lightroom Classic with the Cloud and 0GB of Storage appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Hope you found that helpful.

I’m taking the day off tomorrow to celebrate New Year’s (and to go to Orlando to watch the Alabama/Michigan bowl game with my son), so no bloggo tomorrow, but here’s wishing you and your family a safe, happy, prosperous New Year. 

Cheers,

-Scott

The post Lightroom in 60-Seconds: Add Any Collection to Your Favorites Menu (super helpful feature) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.