Lightroom Classic Refresher Week 4.0 Smart Collections

Smart Collection in Lightroom Classic.

Smart Collections can be used for Automatic Organization.

  1. Choose Create Smart Collection from the left side panel pop-up menu from the + sign at the top of the Collections panel

2. You will get a panel that looks like this.

There is a pop-up menu where you Choose All. It looks like this.

3. There is a menu below that drops down where you can make choices of what keywords you want to list. I am going to use the keyword “snow”. I chose any searchable text, contains, snow

4. You can choose to add other search criteria by clicking on the plus sign at the end of the panel. I chose the world Sierra. You can add to narrow the search down by adding dates, locations, ratings (flags, stars, colors)

5. Name your Smart Collection and click on Create. I named it Sierra Snow and clicked on Create. The program will search your entire catalog based on this criteria and place the images in this “smart collection”.

6. There is now a smart collection named Sierra Snow in my Collection panel. Every time from this point forward that I add a keyword to an image with snow or sierra, the software will add the image to this smart collection. Please note that smart collections have a little flower icon as a visual cue.

You can make as many smart collections as you would like. This is different then a Target Collection where you can have only one at a time.

The next blog post I will talk about Target Collections and Quick Collections.