Much as many of us “hip gurus” have written about the importance of keywording in our workflow, some of us sometimes forget to add a keyword that might be important in the process of gathering a whole collection of all they images that would fit that keyword. For instance, I recently went to find all the animals I’ve ever shot as candidates for a photobook I am working on.

I knew myself well enough to know that I hadn’t thought to include the general category of “animal” every time I’d keyworded an image with bird, dog, cow, giraffe…or whatever. But I wanted to see all my animals, whether they flew, swam, grazed, or bit.

Keyword Paint Can to the rescue. I just go to the Library and picked All Photos from the Catalog panel. (Lightroom 2 is now “hefty” enough to include a virtually unlimited number of photos in one Catalog…so you ought to just import everything, BTW).

Then, in the Grid’s Toolbar, I click the Paint Can icon so the keyword field opened (you can right click and choose from Keywords, Label, Flag, Rating, Metadata, Settings, Rotation (there’s a neat shortcut when your page layout won’t accommodate anything but portrait or landscape shots), and Target Collection (someday a topic for another blog).

In the keyword field, I just type in the keyword for the category I want to be able to find.

Now I scroll all the way to the top of the Grid, make the Thumbs fairly small, and tap the Page Down key until I see a frame that has the subject who’s category is in the Paint can field…in this example, an animal. If I place the cursor over the image and it is already keyworded with “animal”, the Paint Can instantly turns into an Eraser, so I know I don’t have to click.

If there’s a whole group of photos, I highlight them all, then run the cursor over each one. The instant it isn’t an Eraser, I click and it adds the keyword to any of the selected images that don’t have the keyword.