What are Collections, Collection Sets, and Smart Collections in Lightroom Classic?

Why Collections, Collection Sets, and Smart Collections are Helpful to Photographers

Collections, Collections Sets, and Smart Collections are the reasons I use Lightroom Classic over the mobile Lightroom – wish they would rename one to make it less confusing. In this lesson, I explain what each of these collections are and some of the reasons I use them.

I Want Your Feedback

After making this video and watching it I think it might be a bit confusing. If you think I should break up the single video into 3 separate videos focusing on Collections, Collections Sets, and Smart Collections individually please leave a comment below.

Quick Video Summary

Summary

In this video, I explain the concepts of collections, smart collections, and collection sets in Lightroom Classic. Emphasizing the importance of organizing images for various projects, such as books and presentations, and demonstrates how to create and manage these collections effectively.

The discussion includes practical tips on using keywords and ratings to streamline the workflow and enhance image management.

Takeaways

• Smart collections automatically organize images based on set criteria.
• Collections are like folders that hold reference images without moving the actual files.
• Collection sets can be used to group related collections together.
• Using keywords is essential for efficient image sorting and retrieval.
• Todd prefers to start with smart collections upon importing images.
• Images can be sorted by ratings, keywords, and other metadata.
• Organizing images by project type helps in managing workflow effectively.
• Creating a structured naming system for collections aids in quick access.
• Todd demonstrates how to create collections for specific themes like flowers or barns.
• Efficient image management can significantly enhance productivity in photography.

Chapter Time Frames

00:00 Understanding Collections in Lightroom Classic
02:38 Diving into Smart Collections
05:27 Creating and Managing Collection Sets
08:11 Utilizing Keywords for Smart Collections
10:47 Organizing Images for Projects
13:20 Advanced Collection Strategies
15:46 Final Thoughts on Image Organization

Transcript (Computer generated)

Alright, in this video, I want to go over what smart collections, collections, and collection sets are in Lightroom Classic.

Now, these may or may not be very important to you, but I want to show you how I use them. They’re very important to me because I like to break up my photos into different sets. If I’m going to use them for a new book, or I’m going to put them in a blog post, or I’m going to create a new gallery, or you know, just something like that. So I will show you what each of these will do, and then you can justify whether you want to create them or not.

Now I’m going to start them. Generally, you would start out with collections, which are the basic collections. And again, the nice thing about collections is you can put as many images as you want into a collection or into different collections. And it does not add to your space. We’re not actually moving the picture files into the collections. We’re actually it’s related as a database. Just a link. It’s not even really a link. It’s just a reference image.

from the original. So I could put any picture I want to, like say this picture right here, this foundation, I could put this into a folder that says, or not a folder, into a collection that says old barns, stone foundations. I could put it into a date. I could put it into a month, a year. I could put it in a location. So that’s what we’re going to show you. But I’m going to start off with the highest, which is smart collections. And the reason I like smart collections is because it automatically puts ANYOF

your images or your reference images into a smart collection automatically and it’s done by keywords or date or time and we’ll go over all that but the reason I want to start with those which again is the highest tier is because I start these right off automatically whenever I import my images into Lightroom Classic I always have it set up with a preset and we’ll explain this in another video with one star

(02:08.573)

The reason I do that is that I want all my images to go into a collection that I can now go through. I know where all my images are are my reference images. So when I say images here in collections or smart collections, or collection sets, it’s the reference image. But I’m to put a visual representation, if you will, of that file into these smart collections, and I like them all in one place so that can go through them and sort them whether I want to keep them, whether I don’t want to keep them, whether I want to edit them, or whether I just want to maybe save them for later to edit. So I want to start right off with a smart collection, and I’ll show you how these work. So this is a smart collection right here. There are some automatic ones that they give us. So as soon as you do Lightroom,

They get one that’s colored red. That’s just an example. Five stars in the past month. You can see I’ve added 200 and 200 and some photos into Lightroom Classic in this catalog in the last month. How many have I recently modified. If there are any video files, all the images without keywords, which is kind of important, a little bit later. And then example photos, just all of my photos. I just called this collection here.

Image photos, so that’s all the images that I put in in the beginning So let’s start off with a new collection a new smart collection And I’m just going to go up to here And I’m actually going to start with a collection to begin with I’m sorry So I’m to click this button and I what I want to do is I want to create

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collection set. Now, what a collection set is is a collection that other collections go into. Sort of like the filing cabinet, if you will, if collections are folders. So I’m to click this collection set, and you see this box comes up, and this is where you name it. And I’m just going to name this A. And the reason I name it A is that I want it at the top of the list.

I don’t really want it as a smart collection at this point. So I’m going to click this right off. I don’t want it inside another collection set. I want it as its own collection set right here, A. And you can see there’s nothing in it when I click this button. There’s nothing in it. Now I want to create a smart collection, and I’m going to put it inside A.

So again, we go up to Collections, we click this plus button. Now we want to create a Smart Collection. And we’re going to go over what a Smart Collection does as we create it. So again, you need to name it. And I’m just going to name this Photos to be Sorted.

(05:05.415)

And I want it inside a collection set of A.

Now we need to do these matching rules. So we’re gonna set up rules. So all I really want are all the images that I have imported. And I said the key here is that I added one star with a preset. And again, that’ll be in another video. All the images with one star in one place. So I want a rating, which is what the stars are, is greater than or equal to. I don’t want that. I want it to be equal to is one star. That’s all I want for all the rules for this folder so when I hit create, it is now added to this collection the smart collection photos to be sorted in the collection set a and you can see now there are 365 photos, so all the photos that I’ve imported in this catalog are now here in this file or photos to be sorted. Now I do create other ones. For example, let’s create another one. Again, we’re going to do a smart collection. So I’m just going to hit the plus for the collection. I want another smart collection. And this one is going to be four later. So these are going to be

Images that I do probably want to edit, but I don’t want to edit them right now, and I generally do that with a rating of 2. So now we go down here. We’re going to match all the rules, and again, this one’s rating. We’re going to come up with some other ones other rules in a little bit is 2 stars, and I want to be inside the collection set A

(06:59.753)

So that’s for later right there. You can see that there’s zero. I don’t have any two-star photos. Not at all. And again, these are aligned alphabetically. So here’s how I get around this. And I want to show you that you can do this. I really want the photos to be edited first, right? So let’s click on this. We’re to right-click with the mouse. And we’re going to edit the smart collection.

And we’re just going to name this, and we’re going to put a one in front of it. Because remember, these are alphabetical or numeric. So I’m just going to put down one period space and then leave everything the same. Now it’s in the front, then for later, I’m to click on this, right click it, edit it, and change the name. You can, you can do whatever you want to, but I like these to be second.

Now you can see that they’re rearranged in order. So that’s the first collection set I do. So now whenever I want to come into my Lightroom Classic and I want to look at the files that I’ve recently uploaded, I’m going to go into here, and now I can decide whether I want to edit them, save them for later, delete them, or whatever I want to do, but they’re all in one spot. I don’t have to go back into the folders and open up a folder and wonder which folders I’ve edited and which ones I haven’t edited. I know every photo that I have not sorted, whether it be edited, deleted, or saved for later, is right here in this Smart Collection. So that’s the Smart Collections. So…from these smart collections, you see they’re in this collection set. This is the collection set A that I started. So what happens with a collection set is you can put collections, which are places, folders if you will, where images or reference images are stored, or smart collections, same thing, where the reference images are sorted.

(09:10.194)

So, the outside is always collection sets or collections. So what if I wanted to do a smart, let’s close this smart collections up. Usually I just get rid of this one. I don’t really use any of these, but I just wanted to show you that it’s there to begin with. So I don’t use colored red, five stars, past month files without keywords. that one’s important, but we can do that later. So we can come up to collections, smart collections here, right click it, delete it.

going to ask us if I do want to delete it. I’m to delete it and now it’s gone. Same with this example photos. This is just a set that I put in here originally because I wanted to show you how I set up this A folder. So example folders. This is a collection. Right click it. Just hit delete. Confirm it. It’s deleted. So now all we have, don’t worry about this published services. This is something that’s completely different.

So what we have in our collection folders is a collection set A. Inside the collection set A, we have photos to be sorted and photos for later. So now let’s do something else with Smart Collections. Let’s say I am eventually going to do a book on barns. I want to do a whole book on old barns.

And let’s say that all these images in here, none of these have been edited. But let’s say I import my edited images back into Lightroom Classic. I just want to put them in one place. I want to know what photos of barns do I have that are ready for the book. So how do we do that? We just come up to. The plus button we want to do a smart collection. We’re going to name it. And this is just going to be barns.

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I don’t want it in collection set A, I want it separate. So we’re just going to click that off. Now what we want. Do I want a rating? I don’t want this rating at all, but we’ll get rid of that in a minute. So again, we want it to match all rules. So I use keywords. So if you click this rating button here, you can see that we can…

Make a smart collection with exported images, any with a pick flags, which is like rejected or not. A label text has a smart preview snapshots. These are all things that are in there by date, camera info, location, the develop stage, size, color, there’s all kinds of things. But the main thing we want to do is go to other metadata. Click on this, this comes up and we want to go to keywords. And then here, the keyword contains.

contains all, doesn’t contain. So if it contains, and I have, I just wanna put in all the images that just have barns. If I put in old barns and I have barns, all of those will show up because it contains barns. So even if has the old in front of it, that’s what’s gonna happen. So I just want it all. I’m sorry, contains, contains all.

And I’m just gonna type in here, barn.

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I’m going to create this and you can see below our smart collection set there is this smart collection with barns for Books and there’s no photos in it and here’s the reason let’s click on this and reopen this edit. I still have this rating of 2. I don’t have any 2 star ratings right? So we need to get rid of this. We’ll click this. Keywords contains barn. So that’s all we have now. All the rules. You can also change all this. Has any, all or none. So there’s different ways that you can go through these rankings or these rules to get the photos that you want to into the folder. So now let’s hit save.

Now you can see I have five photos of barns right here. One, two, three, four, and five. So why this is useful is when you come into here and you go to collections, we’ll click into this one first. We go into collections and we want to see, how am I doing with my books or my barns for my, the barn images for my barns book? We can just click on this, and there are the ones that I have.

Here’s another one that I use pretty frequently. lot of these photos to be sorted, you’re gonna see down that I’ve actually labeled some of them. Again, I’ve got a lot in here. This one I have not labeled. I have some in purple. And what purple means is that those are images that are set as a focus stack. So this is the first image in the stack, the second. So all these images are in a series, ready for a focus stack. So a lot of times, focus stacking is a little bit tedious. Some days I’m not in the mood for it, but I actually like to go through them once in a while and do them. So I’m going to start another smart collection. Again, we’re going to add a collection. We’re not adding a smart collection. 

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I don’t want it inside the collection, I want it separate. I don’t really care what the rating is. The rating should be 1 because after I get done focus stacking, I take the 1 off. So we can put that on there. So we can take this off and just go is 1. I don’t need it with the barns, so we can delete that one. But I do want to add another one. I don’t want a rating, I want a label color.

So we’ll pick the label color and the label color is not red, it’s purple. Hit create.

And now you can see that there’s twenty one images in this smart collection so here’s some cohosh and that’s all that I have in this library it’s just these cohosh waiting to be focused stacked

Here’s another one. Let’s say we are a nature photographer and we photograph flowers. So what I want to do is start a collection for flowers. But I may have several different types of flowers I want into this collection set. So I don’t want a smart collection, but I want a collection set. So I have a new collection set. I’m to call it flowers.

I don’t want it inside a collection set itself. This is a collection set. We’ll hit enter. It goes into here. Now you can leave these alphabetized as they come in if you want. A lot of times for these sets, I actually put a letter on them and I’ll show you why. We’ll edit this, rename it. I put the letters Z in front of it and then a space like this. Hit rename.

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That way, all these come to the bottom of the collection sets. So collection sets are first and then collections. All right, so now we want to say we have a collection set of flowers. Now we need to add the different types of flowers. So let’s create a smart collection and we’re going to put it inside of the collection set Z flowers. I don’t really care what the rating is. Oops.

Let’s get rid of that. I don’t really care what the rating is. I don’t really care what the color is. But we got to leave that. We’ll just add a new one and delete it later. I’m going to use a keyword. Again, we find keywords down here in other metadata, keywords, contains. This time I’m just going to put contains. And I’m going to put cohosh.

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Why did I put contains and not all? Because what if I labeled some of them blue cohosh? Or what if I was doing zinnias and I put red zinnias, purple zinnias, something like that? So I’m just doing the root name. So we have that created, but we don’t need the label color, so we make sure we delete that. And we hit create. Now under the collection set flowers, in the smart collection,

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I’m sorry. Why did that not put that in there?

Did I not name it?

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Hmm, let’s edit this and see. Edit the Smart Collection. I didn’t name it. I’m sorry. So this is cohosh. That’s the reason. Now the Smart Collection name is cohosh. Hit Save. And you can see there’s 21 images of cohosh which just happened to be that focus stack. But let’s say we have another flower. Let’s say we have Spring Beauties. So again, we’re going to add a collection. Set a Smart Collection, I’m sorry.

This one is gonna be called Spring Beauties.

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And we’re going to put it inside the collection set flowers and I want it to match keyword that contains, and we should just put down probably we don’t want to put oops we have a spell it right too communities. We want to make sure that we don’t put spring down because what if we’re doing seasons then we’ll also get words with spring. Beauties, we probably won’t use anything else or we could put in spring beauties if we want to.

And see what comes up. We’ll hit create. And we did, that was the key word. So now you can see, we go back under flowers, we open up this collection set, we have a smart collection for cohosh, we have a smart collection for Spring Beauties.

We can do this with anything. We can do this with locations. And you’re to see that when I do set up my filing system, generally, the only keyword that I actually add as I’m importing is the location. We’ll go over that with another video. But I really want to go over here what all these things are. So again, I like to use collection sets to put in smart collections or regular collections.

Now one that we’re going to be using, and I haven’t done this yet, is I want to create another collection set.

So hit this plus button. We’re gonna do a collection set. And I’m gonna call this one locations.

I don’t want it inside of any collection set. I want it by itself. So we’ll hit create And you can see the locations is right here Again, these are sets are first and then collections Okay So this is a collection set collection set locations collection set for flowers and again I put the Z down there and if I was doing waterfalls I if I was gonna do waterfalls I would put I’d create another smart collection. I’d call it waterfalls. I’d put it Z waterfalls. I’m sorry. Z dash waterfalls. I don’t want it inside locations. I don’t want it inside of anything. And I’m gonna put use the keyword contains waterfall.

and if this was for my finals I might have another rule so maybe when I get all my images edited and I completely edit with a photo maybe I add another color to it that way we can actually separate these more but let’s just go with this we’re not inside a collection set we’ll click create and you can see it’s down here as a collection set I’m sorry I set that wrong

See, here’s where we did a collection set, and I did a smart collection instead of a collection set. So what I really need to do is delete this. This is what’s good about this, so can show you the wrong things. What I really need to do is start a collection set, not a smart collection. And this is gonna be Z dash waterfalls.

I don’t want it inside locations. I want it by itself. So now it’s underneath the flowers. Then I can set a new smart collection. And we’re going to call this one, let’s say, New York waterfalls.

And we’re going to put inside the collection set waterfalls. It’s going to match the word waterfall. And I want to put another one in here.

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And this is what I’d be adding. This is gonna be another keyword. Or you could put the location if you wanted to. If you wanna go state, we could put this in here too. We could go state is.

New York. If you’re abbreviating them, hit another one.

Here’s where we gotta be careful with this. So we’re gonna click another one, location, state. Let’s say…

We just put the abbreviations. This way we could do either. And then this one was made by mistake, so we’ll delete that. Here’s the problem, though. It’s gotta match all these rules. So it has to contain the keyword waterfall. It has to be labeled as New York and has to be the state or NY, right? So this is the problem is we probably not gonna label these both, right?

So we can put any.

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And then we hit create. There will not be any inside this. I do have six. There we go. There are, six waterfall images.

So that’s the difference between collections, collection sets, and smart collections. So let’s go over it one more time. I’ll just click this open. So a collection is a place, basically a folder, where reference images, not the real image itself, not the real file, but a link to the real file, is stored for a certain subject.

And what we’re gonna really do is, I’m gonna show you this later, is how I import images. always put them into collections inside a collection set, but we’ll go over that in another video. So a collection set is a folder, the mouse isn’t working here, is a collection set is a folder that other collections go into. A smart collection is a folder that reference images with certain parameters. Set the parameters that will go into that folder. So that is the difference between collections, collection sets, and smart collections. And you can see, you can go crazy on all this and set up a whole bunch of these. you’ll see on my other catalog that I do have a lot of these. And I really like this because I can come in here and someone says, like, hey, have you been to…

Walkins Glen State Park. Do you have any images for Walkins Glen State Park? I can go into my collections in my Lightroom catalog. I can go to, if I don’t have a folder set up, I can search for all the images from Walkins Glen. That’s a little bit of work. But I can already have a collection or a smart collection set up that will actually put all the…

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Previews of waterfalls pictures taken at Watkins Glen State Park in one place, I can immediately go to them and find it. It’s also great to set up collections or smart collections for images if you’re doing a book or if you’re to do a PDF, if you’re going to do a presentation.

Say you have a store and you’re doing images for somebody for their store, like product page collections. You can have that all set up. There are all kinds of things you can do with collections and I really think that it’s a great idea to put as many keywords in as you can. Keep them simple. We don’t want to go too far with keywords because then, when you start sorting them it becomes harder and harder. But keywords to me are key.

as well as locations. But generally, for locations, I also use keywords. I just stick with keywords. It’s just as easy. You can add them, subtract them. You can put them in when you import them. You can put them in when your final image, when you’re done. There are all kinds of things you can do with these collections, collection sets and smart collections. That’s just going to make your future self appreciate your previous self.

So I hope this video helped. If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I’ll get right back to you. Have a great day.