Today’s Question: I very much enjoyed your webinar presentation about folders and collections and learned many helpful tips. I was wondering if you could comment on the creation of collections for workflow purposes in Lightroom Classic. I’ve seen other photographers create collections for all photos from a trip, and another for favorites from a trip, and others beyond that. Do you recommend this sort of approach to using collections?
Tim’s Quick Answer: No, I don’t consider collections to generally be helpful as part of an image-review workflow in Lightroom Classic. That’s especially true if the collections are creating clutter that could be avoided with a different workflow approach.
More Detail: I have also seen photographers recommend creating collections for very broad purposes in an organizational workflow in Lightroom Classic, such as for grouping photos during the process of identifying favorites versus outtakes. In most cases I don’t recommend using collections for this type of purpose.
For example, in my view creating a collection that includes all photos from a folder is in most cases not helpful, because if you need to access all those photos you could just go to the folder. Furthermore, I don’t find it helpful to create a collection that includes all favorite photos from a collection, because you could simply filter the source folder based on star ratings, for example. Beyond the fact that this type of collection isn’t particularly helpful, they can cause a bit of unnecessary clutter in the Collections section.
I therefore recommend organizing photos in Lightroom Classic primarily using a folder structure and metadata attributes such as star ratings and keywords. In my view collections are best used for situations where you want to organize photos in ways that go beyond the folder structure. For example, you might want to create a collection featuring the images you want to include in a photo slideshow presentation, such as when you’ll share favorite images from a variety of different trips.
Another exception to some of what I’ve outlined above relates to synchronizing photos to the cloud. For example, if you wanted to review photos on a mobile device during your flight home from a trip, you might want to create a collection that includes all photos from a folder so you can synchronize that collection and review them from another device with ease.
