Best workflow for getting rid of the useless: Make sure Lightroom is in Full Screen mode. Go to Grid mode and, in the Command Bar, drag the Thumbnails slider until you get only about 6 thumbs filling the screen. Slowly...

For a number of years I have been looking for a complete Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool. A DAM tool is a piece of software that helps download, rename, backup, rate, group, catalog, filter, archive and keep track of all...

While speaking with Steve Yadzinski, a colleague of mine lately, who also happens to be a top Photoshop retoucher, it became clear just how important folder naming conventions are in Lightroom. I cannot stress enough how important it is to...

As a workflow consultant, I get a backstage pass to analyze and dissect what our clients are doing to streamline and perfect their workflows. What amazes me time and time again is how small inefficiencies add up to make processing...

James Duncan Davidson’s last post, Copyright and Metadata, expounded on Lightroom’s ability to painlessly embed the creator (& copyright) information in your photos (both within the master—or sidecar—files and exported copies). I just want to touch upon one other beneficial...

In my quest to track my photos out in the wild, I’ve settled upon an efficient but slightly–less–than–ideal solution: drag the photos in question from Lightroom (both the filmstrip and grid will work as drag sources) to my destination of...

My last post describes how I started (loosely) keeping track of where my photos end up. For example, my photos published in Fast Forward have the “Fast Forward” keyword applied to them through my “Exported” keyword set. However, I’d like...

One of the very few annoying things in my Lightroom Experience has been what I perceived as the awkwardness of storing and moving my photographs to different media and drives as my work moved along. Often, in fact, if I...

The problems I blogged about last week with my Lightroom library were mostly—but not completely—fixed by rebuilding my preview database. My library of around 2800 images was useable, but there were still some irritating things happening that hadn't been cleared...

A few weeks ago I discussed using Lightroom as a Digital Asset Management tool and while answering some questions posed by readers I had the idea that giving each project its own catalog might be an interesting concept. The pros...

A nice feature of the new Lightroom catalogs is that you can have multiple catalogs. I have been playing around lately with exporting and saving catalogs for individual photo shoots which I then archive along with the raw images. It...

Strike the P while any or several images are highlighted in Lightroom to save yourself a lot of time. Striking the P assigns the highlighted image(s) as a Quick Pick. At the bottom of the screen in the Filters...

In my last blog post, talking about the Tom Hogarty interview, I decided to investigate just how well Lightroom would work as a digital asset management tool. I must say that I am reporting the facts as they are here...

When you can't decide how you want to process a particular image, the easiest thing to do is to make a number of Virtual Copies and apply various settings or presets to the individual images. At any point you can...

I have to confess that I'm not the most diligent user of keyword, so when I am looking for specific related images, I have to hunt through a number of folders that I know contain the images I am looking...

The new catalog structure in Lightroom version 1.1 solves a lot of problems many photographers had with Version 1.0. The biggest solution it offers is moving images between computers. I wrote an extended blog post on XMP metadata files a...

First, lest I be left out, let me tell you that Lightroom 1.1 is available as a free download to anyone who already has a copy of Lightroom 1.0. More importantly, you'll be very glad you downloaded and installed it....

Since January, I've been spending most of my time away from home. This means that while I've got all the hard drive space I need at home, I've been getting a bit creative to keep my images near to me...

I'm sure many of you may already know this trick, but I was thrilled when I heard about it. I'll call it the F2 trick. Did you know that you can rename virtually any group of files you've pre-selected in...

My last week's post about using Lightroom on multiple computers has received some excellent comments, and not everyone agrees about the need for this. My challenge is that both my girlfriend and I share the same camera in many situations,...