Organize your photos with albums

The ability to organize your photos, so that you can easily locate the images that you want to work with, is a key element in any photo library.

Hi, I'm Seán Duggan from the Adobe Learn team.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use albums and smart albums in Lightroom to create an organizational system that works best for you.

The Photos panel offers some automatic categories that Lightroom uses to group your images.

You can find the images that you've recently added, photos that you've edited recently, as well as locating images by the date they were taken.

For a more personal way to organize your photos, you can use albums.

In the Albums panel, you can see that I already have four albums.

At the top of this list are two folders, which is a way that you can organize your different albums.

I already have two albums with photos from a trip to Louisiana, and I want to organize these further by creating an album for the images that I took during a boat tour of a bayou.

Before I create the new album, I want to select all the photos from the bayou by clicking on the first one from that location and then Shift-clicking on the last one.

Then I'll click the + symbol at the top of the Albums panel, and I'll choose Create Album.

I do want the selected photos to be added to this new album, so I'll make sure that option is checked.

I'll give the album a name, and I'll click Create.

And here you can see that the new album shows up alphabetically in the albums list.

You can also add photos to an album by selecting them and dragging them on to the album name.

And here's a handy tip.

If you're working on a project involving a specific album, you can right-click the album name and set it to be the target album.

Then you can add photos to that album just by tapping T on the keyboard, and you can remove photos from the target album by tapping T again.

I use this shortcut all of the time.

Albums are a bit like playlists for your photos, and just like a song can be part of multiple playlists, the same photo can be included in more than one album.

Next, I'll create a folder for the Louisiana albums.

It makes sense to put this in the existing Travel & Road Trips folder, so I'll select that folder, click the + symbol at the top of the Albums panel and I'll choose Create Folder.

I'll call this new folder Louisiana Trip.

Since I had the Travel & Road Trips folder already selected, when I created the new folder, I get the option to nest the new folder inside that folder.

Now I'll select the three Louisiana albums by clicking one, and then Command-clicking on Mac or Control-clicking on Windows to select the other two, And I'll drag those onto the new Louisiana Trip folder.

To delete an album, right-click on its name and choose that option in the menu.

You'll see a message that the album will be deleted, but the photos will still be in your library.

Now, if you're viewing an album and you have a photo selected, tapping the Delete key will remove it from the album, but it will still be in All Photos.

If you're in the All Photos view, however, tapping the Delete key will display a message telling you that the photo will be deleted from the entire Lightroom ecosystem, including any albums and shared albums.

Another way you can organize your photos is by taking advantage of smart albums, which automatically gather images based on rules that you specify.

Let's see how you can use smart albums to streamline your photo editing workflow.

I'll click the + symbol and I'll choose Create Smart album...

Next, I need to create a rule that will determine which photos are automatically added to the smart album.

I'll click on Add New Rule, and here you can see that there's a wide range of metadata categories that I can choose from.

For this example, I'll choose Flag and then I specify the Reject Flag.

I'll give the album a name, Rejected - Review & Delete.

And I'll click Create.

Now I have an album with all of my images that have been flagged as rejects.

Whenever I assign a Reject Flag to new photos, they'll automatically be added to this smart album, making it really easy to review and delete them, so they're not taking up space in my Lightroom library.

Albums, smart albums and folders offer different ways to organize your photos.

Taking advantage of these will help you create a system that is customized for how you want to organize your image library.

Give these features a try with your own photo workflow.