I really started realizing how important it was to do keywording, titles, and captions as soon as possible, and with a plan in mind, when I started writing classes on using Lightroom’s Slideshow and Web modules. These are both incredibly powerful communications and sales tools on many levels. If you work out a set of your own guidelines for creating certain metadata and keywords as you do your downloading and winnowing, you’ll be amazed at how quickly and efficiently you can communicate and promote the results of a shoot…regardless of whether that shoot was done for pay or play.

Lightroom Slideshows shows make a great and instantaneous way to quickly pull together a live presentation or to create a short and to-the-point communication via email for any number of reasons.

Lightroom Web galleries give you a timely way to create on-line portfolios in minutes…especially once you’ve created the look and style in which you’d like to present your work.

If you plan correctly, you can then pull together a collection and publish it within minutes. First, you use your keywords, text, and ratings to pull together an instant collection for the portfolio you want to present that’s exactly suited to the reason you want to present it. You should be able to use the program’s Library Filters to filter text in any or all of the searchable fields and according to any of the content criteria shown on the two menus below:

You can also place information for almost all of these fields in your slideshows and web galleries.

You can add as many text boxes as you like to a slideshow. Just keep clicking the ABC box in the Slideshow module’s toolbar. When the textbox appears, you can re-position it by dragging with the Hand cursor and re-size by dragging any of the Textbox handles…just like you’d re-size any other selection in Photoshop.

You can also place information for almost all of these fields in your slideshows and web galleries.

You can add as many text boxes as you like to a slideshow. Just keep clicking the ABC box in the Slideshow module’s toolbar. When the textbox appears, you can re-position it by dragging with the Hand cursor and re-size by dragging any of the Textbox handles…just like you’d re-size any other selection in Photoshop.

There’s a choice called “Custom Text.” It gives you the option to add any text you want that will stay in the whole slideshow. So you could use it to add your address, to give credit to a co-author…anything that might stay the same from slide to slide. If you click the Edit button in the menu, you’ll get a dialog called the Text Template Editor, shown below. You can then add any or as many of the categories as you see next to the Insert tabs. This information can be re-positioned and re-sized just as it can with any other custom text, but the content of that text has to come from whatever you added to either Keywords or Metadata in the Library Module. I often switch back and forth as I am making this up, adding the information for each slide in the show as I’m previewing the slide show.

Web Galleries also provide a lot of flexibility when it comes to displaying text that’s either entered to identify and personify the entire gallery or that’s called up from image metadata to “personify” individual thumbnails and slides. Simply choosing Title or Caption will let you make an entry that will display on all the pages. If you want a different caption and/or title for each photo, choose Edit and a Template Editor dialog will appear. Choose the data you want to put into those positions from either the IPTC title or caption metadata element and click Done. You’ll notice that the Text Template Editor will let you keep Inserting any of the various pieces of data. These will change for every individual slide as long as you leave the entries at their defaults (such as {Title>>}.

So now that you can see how much the right text can add to your slideshow or gallery’s ability to communicate the message you want your audience to see and hear, I’ve some naming and metadata entry suggestions:

Name each of the subjects in the shoot, either by proper name or by subject type, such as raccoon.

Add that name to the original file name or number. I prefer the former because I can instantly identify the camera I shot with. That won’t do much, though, if you’ve always stick with the same brand of camera. The important thing is that you want that name to be able to appear in your slideshows and web galleries. It’s also insurance that you’ll be able to quickly pull all the shots of that subject or subject type up at once so that you can add them to a collection. That’s especially handy when you want to present a portfolio of a certain category of work. If you’re presenting a private slideshow to a group of people, you’re more likely to get orders for subjects that they either see their name on or that are named something that they can identify with.

Add a real caption to each photo. You get more words to search on. You’ll get more ideas for keywords. It’s also another very handy way to create collections by topic. Make sure your caption helps to sell your photo. Captions also help stock agencies to keyword your photos if you’re not already submitting keywords with the photos (because some agencies prefer to have total control over that).

Be careful about naming a folder for subjects that are some entirely different thing. Otherwise, they’ll come up when you do a search for the main topic of that folder.

When you’re captioning and titling, you may want to look over the keywords you’ve already associated with the shots. They might inspire you to write a more meaningful caption or title. It’s no problem to duplicate words here. In fact, it can be helpful. Just remember that the main reason for names and titles is communicating information to your audience.