I'm not going to pretend that any of these are original ideas. In fact, if they were, most of them wouldn't be in Lightroom because I didn't suggest them. Thank heavens, others did, however.

Ever since I arrived in Costa Rica, I've been having a ball photographing one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It just oozes with comfortable warmth, lushness, and vibrance. Of course, between teaching classes, writing blogs, and making all those pictures I have to confess that the aspect I've been paying least attention to has been winnowing, titling, organizing, and keywording all those images.

Then, one morning I woke up and realized that people would be willing to pay me for these pictures if they only knew they existed. I thought I'd better start sending them to magazines, calendar/poster companies, and stock agencies. When I realized that after a mere quarter they were numbering in the thousands I said to myself, "Ken, you'd better get serious about this!"

Thank heavens for Lightroom, 'cause I gotta tell you that doing all this organization takes a lot of time and it's not nearly as fun as taking the pictures. That's why I wrote the blog about the "workflow" of it all a couple of weeks ago. But in just that short time, I've been discovering some really cool things that I hadn't really appreciated the value of when I wrote the first article.

• Start by picking one keyword that fits a whole huge category of the things you like to shoot the most: nature, people, glamour, etc. Then choose "Select All Photographs" in the Library panel, press G for Grid, make the thumbs little so you can see lots of them at once. Put only one of those words into the Paint slot and click on everything you see in that category. Repeat the process for the next main category and keep repeating this procedure until you've entered all the categories. Never put two of these category words into the same image. So be sure you do it from a list. When you're done, Sort on the date shot and enter the category name in the Find panel field. Instantly, all the photos in the catalog are organized by category and date shot. This makes it really easy to find whole groups of images that will have nearly identical keyword lists.

• Fill out keywords that many of the images in the shoot have in common, then highlight all the images for that shoot, click on the Paint icon (a spray can) and click on any of the selected thumbs to paint in that whole list. If a few of those keywords don't pertain, it's much easier to delete them from an individually selected thumbnail than it is to remember what does pertain. Just select the first of the thumbs you just added them to and use the arrow keys to go from one to the next while keeping your eye on the keywords panel. If an unwanted word shows up, just double-click it and hit Delete/Backspace.

• You can also save all the keywords in the Keywords panel as a Keyword Set. Then, when you want to assign this same group of words to another image or selection that you encounter as you're moving along, just select the image(s), go to the Keyword Set pane, and click the name of the set.

• If you have taken a trip or shot a large number of photographs that have a characteristic in common, such as the client's name or fashion, go to the folders that have that entire shoot, open the folder, and Select All. Look through the thumbs quickly to make sure there aren't shots of something unrelated in that folder and, if there are, Cmnd/Ctrl + click them to de-select them. Then add that category keyword to everything else in that folder. Later, when you want to find Florida or Glamour, just type the word in the Find field in the Library Modlule's Find panel. Before you can finish typing the keyword, you'll see every picture in that catalog that has anything to do with that topic. Of course, you could also do that by painting they keyword.

• This doesn't have anything to do with keywords, except that I often do this while I'm doing the keywording: I've found an even faster way to set the Develop settings from a whole group of images. Just Adjust the first one the way you like it, press Cmnd/Ctrl + Shift + C to copy all the settings made for that image, and then press G to take you to Grid mode in the Library module. Then Cmnd/Ctrl click each image you'd like to apply the same settings to and press Cmnd/Ctrl + Shift + V. The settings are instantly pasted onto all the other images even faster than using the Sync Settings buttons. Of course, there's nothing to stop you from re-adjusting after you've copied settings, so it's a great way to get a whole bunch of images "into the ballpark" when you're going through the files. Also a great help if you have to nearly instantly send the client an email "proof."