Here's the thing...
Lightroom is a fantastic program that offers not just excellent photo-editing tools but is also a great way to organize your photos.
Typically, cataloging photos in Lightroom goes something like this:
- Add a new album
- Name the new album
- Select the photos you want to be in the album
Then, if you want your albums to be in folders, you have to add a folder, add the desire albums to the folder, and name the folder.
On top of that, if you want to see the photos in each album, you have to select the Album section from the Info panel, select a photo in the corresponding grid, and click on the "Info" button to see where the photo is located.
Organizing photos in Lightroom isn't much easier:
- In the Photo Grid, Square Grid, or Detail view, select the photo(s) you wish to tag
- Click View>Keywords
- Manually enter the desired keyword(s) for each photo
I'm here to tell you that this way of cataloging and organizing your photos is simply all wrong...
Learn More:
How to Organize Photos in Lightroom
If you really want to take control over the power of Lightroom as a tool for organizing, cataloging, and making your photos easily searchable, manually tagging everything and making folders and albums isn't the way to do it.
Instead, you can enhance your Lightroom experience by using an awesome plugin I came across a few months ago: Excire.
Excire offers two plugins, actually.
Excire Search is a high-performance search engine that allows you to create collections and make your photos incredibly easy to search.
For example, after you install the plugin and initialize your Lightroom catalog, you can search your catalog for specific images based on certain criteria.
To search by example, you select one or more images for Excire to reference, and then it will automatically create a Lightroom collection with images similar to the reference images.
That means if you want to create a catalog of images that feature mountains, Excire will do it for you while you sit back and watch. See what I mean in the video below by Suzette Allen:
You can also use Excire Search to create collections and search images based on keywords. If you're looking for that boat photo you took a few months ago, Excire will find it.
As if that's not good enough, Excire Search allows you to search images by faces. Using its intuitive facial-analysis interface, you can search based on one, two, or more faces. You can even select age groups, gender, and search for photos based on whether someone is smiling or not.
Crazy right?!
Learn More:
Expand Lightroom's Functionality With Excire Search Pro
Excire Search Pro steps it up a notch with added features that make it a great option for amateur and professional photographers alike.
Where Excire Search offers 125 keywords, Excire Search Pro has more than 500 to expand your cataloging and search capabilities.
Also, in addition to all of the features of Excire Search noted earlier, Excire Search Pro allows you to transfer keywords. That means that keywords extracted by Excire can be transferred to Lightroom and then used as if you manually entered all the keywords yourself.
Just imagine all the time and energy you can save by having Excire do all the heavy lifting for you!
And I know what you're thinking...
"I don't need a fancy AI-powered plugin to help me in Lightroom." Maybe you'll be convinced after watching the video below:
I'm telling you, though, even if you picked up a camera last week and have only begun to dabble in photography, Excire is a tool that you can use forever, and it will only increase its worth to you as you upload more images to Lightroom.
As someone that has tens of thousands of photos in my Lightroom catalogs, Excire has been a Godsend, and it will be for you as well. So, stop using Lightroom like the old days and step into the future with Excire. It's the best Lightroom plugin out there!