One of the many things that Lightroom 2.0 does to revolutionize the efficiency of your workflow is to make it much easier to keyword your images. It then goes another big step further by making it much easier to instantly find huge groups of images by a number of cross-referenced criteria. You can use those criteria to instantly add to a new type of Collection called a Smart Collection.

Smart Collections allow you to automatically group your images into special purpose collections. Once you define the criteria for those collections and have gotten in the habit of entering consistent keywords, any time you want to put together a stock submissions or create an up-to-date portfolio for one of your specialties it's already been put together for you. All you have to do is export it to the file type and location you want it presented in and then use Lightroom to make the web site, slide presentation, or printed portfolio directly from that export file. Talk about magic!

So this afternoon, I became intrigued with the idea of working out an efficient way to use Lightroom 2.0 to categorize my images and then use the new Filter Bar (click the first image below)

to find them so that I could then sub-categorize them using words from the Keyword List (click the second image below).

Let's say I want to create Smart Collections for submitting images to a stock agency. The first thing I do is add the keyword "Stock photo" to every shot in my library that I think might be worth submitting for any reason whatsoever. To do that, I press G to enter the Library Module's Grid mode. I choose All Photographs in the Catalog panel, click the Paint Can in the Toolbar, enter the words "Stock photo" in the Paint: Keywords field, drag the grid's scroll bar to the very beginning of all my photos, and then start clicking the page down key. Every time I see anything I think belongs in the Stock Photo category, I click the center of that image. If there are several contiguous images that qualify, I select them all, then click the Paint Can in the center of any of those images. I just keep pressing Page Down and repeating the Paint Can routine until I've added Stock Photo to every single image that could be a candidate.

Next, I press Cmnd/Ctrl + F to bring up the find bar, click Text and type in Stock Photos. Now I see nothing but thumbs of all my stock photos. In the Paint Can field, I type in the sub-category keyword for the first image I see at upper left. I then repeat the Page Down and Paint click routine to stamp that keyword into ever image that meets the category. Sometimes I'll see an eraser instead of the Paint Can because the word in the Paint Can has already been assigned. If I mistakenly click anyway, it will remove the word, but all I have to do is click again to put it back.

Since I currently shoot more Nature shots than anything else, I usually start with Nature, then tag all the Landscapes, then all the Trees, then all the Flowers, then all the Animals, then all the Sunsets, etc. Then I go to People, which I subdivide into Men, Women, Kids, Girls, and Boys. I sub-divide each of them into Portraits and Candids. I sub-divide them into Business, Fashion, Glamour, Expressions... Anyway, I think you get the idea.

Now, when I'm done with all of this, I can press Cmnd/Ctrl + F and get the Find bar and use it to very quickly call up just about any collection I want. If I know that I'm probably going to want to keep adding to this collection as life moves along, I just use the same criteria to create a Smart Collection. Then, anytime I Import my images from a card to a new Folder, all I have to do is use the same routine to keyword that collection that I used to keyword all my images. Any that belong in the pre-defined Smart Collections will automatically end up there.