It’s no secret that I absolutely love using Adobe Lightroom for organizing and editing all of my digital photographs. And I am so thankfully to the guys at Creative Techs for offering their free courses on such products as Adobe Lightroom. Today I would like to share some of that knowledge.
I actually saw this question asked on a blog post yesterday and it served as my inspiration for Tuesday’s Digital Tutorial. How to Apply keywords to your photographs using Adobe Lightroom.
There is a fast and simple way to apply keywords to your photographs in Adobe Lightroom. All you need are some words and a can of spray paint.
Yes, you read me right. A can of spray paint.
Adobe wanted to be creative when it came to icons for functions within Adobe Lightroom so they decided to use a can of spray paint as their icon for doing certain batch operations in their software program.
I don’t know if this is true or not but it sounds good to me!
Back to key wording. Applying keywords to your images is useful if you ever need to find a particular image in your vast collection of photographs. When you have a failing memory and over 8,000 images this is especially nice.
Now you can only apply keywords to your images while you are in the Library Module of Adobe Lightroom. It also works best to have the images displayed in the Grid View versus the Loop View. Adjust the thumbnails to a viewing size you are comfortable with.
In the toolbar just above the photo bin at the bottom you will find the Spray Can icon. Click on it to bring up the toolbar. There is a drop down menu, if “keywords” is not selected, you will need to do so by selecting it from the drop down menu. Just to the right you will see a text box. Type in the keyword(s) you wish to apply to your images. To apply multiple keywords to the same images, use a comma to separate the words. As you hover your mouse over the images you will notice that the cursor will change to a spray can. Just click the mouse on the image and your keyword(s) will be applied to the image. Once you have completed applying the keyword(s), click “Done” button located in the far right of the Spray Can toolbar.
If you were to accidentally apply a keyword to an image by mistake, you will notice that an eraser will appear on the image as you hover over it. Like before, you will simply click the image and the keyword will be removed from the photograph. Remember to click the “Done” button once you are finished applying/removing keyword(s).
And that’s all there is to applying keywords to a batch of images. As always in Adobe Lightroom, there are more ways to perform the same process but this is one of the easiest.
I hope that this tutorial has been useful for you. For those of you that need more visual, I offer you this video version:
I would love to get your feedback on this tutorial? Was it easy to follow? How about the video? Did you experience any problems? Is there something else you would like me to cover in Adobe Lightroom for future tutorials?