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Tagging multiple persons using a bit of red paint

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andersl

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Joined
Feb 23, 2008
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44
Location
Uppsala, Sweden
Lightroom Experience
Power User
I thought that I should share a technique that I have been using for the past couple of weeks, I don't know anything similar has been published before, or if there are other ways to accomplish something similar.

I'm in the process of tagging my 4'''' pictures, and I'm using smart collections. The big advantage with smart collections is that they can be defined so that only the pictures that remains to be tagged are part of the collection. For example, I've got a collection of "Untagged People".

One drawback, however, is that whenever I tag one person in a picture, it is removed from the smart collection (really smart, duh...)

So, in order to get around this I define my smart collections like:

Any of the following:
+ Label is red
+ All of the following:
+++ The picture does not have a Person tag.
+++ The picture is not tagged as "+Cat+, +Panorama+, +Nature+" etc. etc.

Side note: I do have a number of special Person:s, like "Nobody" and "Unknown" etc., so that I can distinguish between an unhanded photo and a photo that doesn't contain anybody. (Side note to the side note: It's a spooky feeling to filter out only the pictures containing "Nobody"...)

Whenever I want to tag more than one person in a picture I hit "6" (Set label red), tag the persons with whatever method I like, and finish by hitting "6" again toggling the label red off. At this point the picture is removed from the smart collection.

One drawback of this technique is that it hijacks the color labels, which might be inconvenient if you use them for other things. However, you can define a rule that retains the pictures based on other criteria, e.g. a special "KEEP IN SET" keyword.

Hope this will help somebody out there!
 

Nope, it taught me a few neat tricks (like how to create a smart collection that is the inverse of another collection, and how to change which collection the B key operates on).

However, I think that the method described in the article is much more clumsy than mine, for example:

* Most of my photos only require a single tag, when using my method adding a keyword will remove the photo immediately. When I like to add two or more keywords I can use the red label trick I described in the original post. (When tagging 4'''', a click per photo really makes a difference.)

* As a programmer I know that you should only store information in one location, if you store it in multiple then the information will, sooner or later, diverge. In this case, you have to tag photos his way, if you tag photos in, say, "last import", his collections will not be updated, mine will.

* If you already have half your collection keyworded, you have to find all the handled photos and add them to the "reviewed" collection. My method will work in an existing environment.

* I like my "Nobody" tag, it allows me to know that I really have inspected a photo. Simply leave it untagged could make me mistake it for uninspected photos.

* One thing I didn't mention was that I have more than one smart collection, one for Friends, one for Family, one for Lindy Hop, etc. The division is also keyword-based, allowing me to do a quick divide-and-conquer approach to sorting photos. It might be possible to do it as described in the article, but it would require quite a lot of tweaking.

* It hogs the "B" key, which I would like to have for Quick Collection.

Anyway, it was a good article, and I will surely read the other articles on the site.
 
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