In previous posts, we’ve learned how store photos and videos in folders on your hard drive, but now let’s start organizing them into virtual collections based on their content.
Collections are designed to group photos and videos for a specific purpose. Unlike folders, a single photo can be in multiple different collections without taking up extra space on your hard drive, and these grouped photos can come from any number of different folders on the hard drive.
Collections aren’t limited to containing photos and videos—they store your chosen sort order, and they can also remember your filtering (depending on a preference setting). Special types of collections also store the print/book/slideshow/web settings.
When would you use collections?
So when might you want to create a collection?
- You prefer photos grouped by topic or genre. Perhaps you regularly view all of the photos of your grandchildren, or you want to group the photos from your vacations.
- You’re gathering your best photos for your portfolio.
- You’re working on a creative photo project over a long period of time.
- You want to share a collection of photos with friends and family using Lightroom Web.
- You want to sync photos to your phone or tablet.
- You’re gathering photos for output – perhaps as prints, books, slideshows or web galleries.
What’s the downside?
Collections are virtual, so they don’t exist outside of Lightroom. This means they can’t be viewed in other software, and they’re not written to XMP metadata stored with the files, so they’re difficult to transfer if you move to alternative asset management software in the future. These aren’t major disadvantages in most cases, but they are worth being aware of.
For this reason, collections are best used as temporary groupings. Keywords remain the best choice for long-term storage, as they can be written back to the files in a standardized format which can be understood by any photographic software. (We’ll come back to keywords in a few week’s time, along with smart collections, but if you want a head start, see pages 140-150 and 190-192 in my Lightroom CC/6 book.)
But what if I have too many collections?
Eventually you’ll end up with a lot of collections and the list can become a little unwieldy. Like folders, you can organise them into a hierarchy of Collection Sets. It’s a little different to a folder hierarchy, because collections can only usually contain photos and videos, whereas collection sets can contain collections or other collection sets but not the photos or videos themselves, but it still allows a degree of organization.
That’s the theory of collections and collection sets… next week, we’ll put it into practice, learning how to create them.
I know there has to be an easy solution to this but I can’t find the answer anywhere. Does anyone know a simple way to create a symbol or keystroke to the color Purple so I can lablel a photo quickly and retrieve it as fast?
Thanks
Try this for shortcuts: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/any-shortcut/
And then for retrieving, you could create a filter preset.
Hello! I feel that Lightroom just keep saying “one more ………”. I waited two years before importing images into the catalog. I started with ancestor project with all photos first loaded from the individual relative personal photos. Scanned all of the images into each folder. Then broke the images down to individuals only to find out to organize those images to a chronological organization. Now I find that to do this process I have to put them into collections! I am going to have more redundant images that I think will need a directory next or a lot of bread crumbs. So could someone share with me if I am on the right path? Please…….
Robin, relax, there’s no right path. There are some that make life more complicated or less efficient, but that’s not the end of the world. If you’re in folders at the moment, that’s a great place to get started. You can always go back and change things as your workflow develops.
Hello
Excellent article. I wonder if you could help me.
The usual procedure is to import photos to lightroom classic, create a collection and synced it with lightroom cc. However, I started by subscribing to lightroom cc with 1TB storage so i imported all my photos to lightroom cc, created albums. Now that I added to my subscription lightroom classic and synced all my photos. Now i have a situation where I have collections in my lightroom Classic but not folders.
I tried to “locally save photos” in lightroom cc, then import them to lightroom classic, but the number of “all photos” are added to my photos i.e there is a duplication. I know the collection is virtual but this what happened.
How can I add the photos already in the cloud to my folders?
appreciate your help
Thank you
Medhat Michail
In Preferences dialog > Lightroom Sync tab, you can set a custom folder location for new photos to download directly into your chosen location. Ones that have already downloaded are probably showing in a Medhat’s iPhone (or similar) volume in the Folders panel, as if they’re on another hard drive. You can select those and drag them into a normal folder to move them into your normal folder structure.
If you are adding Keywords to a whole bunch of photos from all over your folders (either because you didn’t add them in the first place or because you want to add more Keywords), make a Collection of all the photos too which you want to add Keywords. Go to that Collection, select all photos in out, and type in Keywords to your heart’s content. You can probably delete this Collection when you’re done.
Well stated description of the pros/cons of collections.