Importance of Lightroom Smart Folders
Lightroom is a very powerful tool for Managing and Organizing your images. It makes our Photography workflow much easier. Jonathan Snyder (our Lightroom instructor) wrote this article for you. Just take a look and see it by yourself!
How to set up Lightroom Smart Folder
Organizing and managing thousands of photos is something Lightroom really excels at. Another area that is often missed, is it’s strengths in using same filtering and management tools to pick which photos to export out.
Lightroom gives us Smart Folders, using any bit of our photos metadata we can set up filters to choose final photos.
In our Library Tab, near the bottom left is our Publish Services
Clicking the + symbol next to the name of Publish Services, we can go to our Publishing Manager.
From here we are presented a window very similar to our export options. Selecting hard-drive we can set a folder and all other typical export options.
In my case I have setup my export folder to be “C:\Photography\Portfolio”. I have also set all my other export options custom to what I want for my Portfolio. For Long Edge dimensions I do 1000 pixels long, and JPG at 100% quality.
Once that is created, you will see it appears as an option below our hard-drive, I can now right click on that, and select “Create Published Smart Folder”
In the window that pops up, we have a big blank space, this is where we add our filters to chose our image, you can see I have selected the drop down of Rating, and set it to 4 stars
Once I hit save, I will be presented with every single image in my library that I have rated 4 stars. Dead simple to do. In the Smart Folder options you may notice the little plus to the far right, hitting that allows you to add more and more filters, such as keyword, whether the image is black and white or not, and many many more. Experiment with the different options and find a combination that works for you. Keep in mind though, if you are not using Lightrooms management options of keywording, ratings, metadata and more, you really won’t be getting the full benefit of using the smart folders
Once you have your filter all setup, you can easily export all these images out of Lightroom and to the hard-drive folder you setup earlier, by pressing the publish button in the top right.
There are lots of powerful tools in Lightroom. Do you want to learn more about these hidden tools?
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Omnilargess Workshop Team