Today’s Question: As a follow on to today’s question would you consider a collection [in Lightroom Classic] useful for gathering common subjects from across folders? Occasionally I wish to go back over time and “collect” all my photos of birds or cetaceans or street scenes, etc., in cases where I previously applied a relevant keyword. Or is there a better way?
Tim’s Quick Answer: This is an example of where a smart collection in Lightroom Classic can be helpful, such as to create a smart collection that contains all photos with a specific keyword (perhaps in addition to a minimum star rating).
More Detail: While you could certainly create a “normal” collection in Lightroom Classic and add all photos of a particular subject to that collection, if you’ve assigned keywords to the images, it is much faster and easier to create a smart collection instead.
To get started, click the plus icon (+) to the right of the Collections heading on the left panel in the Library module and choose “Create Smart Collection” from the popup menu. Enter a meaningful name in the Name field and then configure the criteria for the smart collection.
In this case I would start by clicking the first popup in the large rules area of the Create Smart Collection dialog and choose Other Metadata > Keywords. You can choose “contains” from the second popup and then enter the applicable keyword in the textbox to the right. If you want to add additional criteria, you can click the plus button to the right of the first rule and configure that new rule below. For example, you might choose “Rating” from the first popup, then choose “is greater than or equal to” from the second popup and select the minimum star rating you want to filter by to the right of the popups.
You can add as many rules as you’d like to define the images you want to have included in the smart collection. In most cases you’ll want to select “all” from the Match popup above the definition of rules, so that only photos matching all the rules will be included in the smart collection.
Click the Create button, and the new smart collection will be created. The collection will automatically include all images that match the criteria you defined. In addition, as you update metadata for photos, they will automatically be added to or removed from the smart collection depending on whether they currently match all the criteria you defined for the smart collection.
