PixelatedImage Blog

With my Lightroom catalogs getting fatter and fatter and my images beginning to serve several different markets, I finally got around to making use of the colour labels in a way that is more than totally ad-hoc and half-assed.

My usual routine is to use the colours simply in place of collections – it’s a lazy way of indicating which images I’m selecting for a stock submission or a competition. And after doing it for way to long I have collections full of colour-coded images that indicate, well, that’s the problem. I haven’t a clue what they indicate.

So last week, in the middle of a huge stock submission, I finally caved-in and implemented the system. I changed the colour-coding in my catalogs to meaningful designations. Now at a moment’s notice I can tell if an image is one I’ve reserved for personal use or is licensed to a client. I can tell which ones are stock submissions, and which ones are tweaked and ready to go.

I’m an unusually organized person, but this particular area of chaos in my life has been a bit of a skeleton in my closet. How do you manage your organization? Do you have a system? What’s going to happen 5 years when your library hits 100,000 and you can’t remember which images you submitted to stock or sold to a client?

Two Things You Should Know

When I made this change I lost my colour labels on all my other images. Lightroom set them all to white and I needed to go through and change them all – about 100,000 images. It was short work as I usually shoot in batches, so I could re-code whole collections, but I would have been really choked if I’d lost important coding. I think I just missed something, so I suggest you dig out your copy of Kelby’s Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers and follow his instructions – page 121-122

But if you don’t have that book, and you should, then you can find the re-name dialogue by going to the Metadata menu choosing Color Label Set, and choosing Edit. Once you’ve assigned designations to colours,  name the set something more meaningful than what I’ve done (Default (edited) – not very descriptive, eh?). Finally go back to Metadata > Color Label Set – and select the set you just created, telling Lightroom which set to use.

Presumably you can create different sets and select them based on needs. You might have one label set for Usage, one for Post-Processing, and one for, well something else. I haven’t played with switching back and forth and that may be why I lost my original colour-coding. It was probably as easy as going back, selecting the un-edited default set, and going from there.

The colour-coding I’ve done to this point revolves around the need to delineate between Stock, Personal, and Client files. The green one isn’t going to be useful. Why? The moment I change a red client file to a green “ready to go” file, I lose the red label and I lose the advantage of the whole system. At some point, when I’m feeling brave enough, I might try creating a whole additional set of labels. If anyone out there is using multiple label sets for multiple uses, let us know how it’s going.

Stay organized, stay sane.