Photoshop Lightroom: How to organize photos | lynda.com tutorial

Here we are going to start to talk about how we can organize our images and media files
by using the Library module. In particular, we are going to be focusing in on three different
topics. We will look at how we can locate our files in a particular folder on a hard
drive. We will also talk about how we can most effectively relocate those files; in
other words, how we can move those files to different folders. And then we will talk about
how we can rename our images or movie files. Well, let's start off with this image here.
With this image, what I want to do is take a look at the file name, and I want to look
at that as some information which is overlaid on top of the image. So let's go ahead and
press Command+J on a Mac or Control+J on Windows to open up our Library View Options. In the
Loupe Info, make sure you have the File Name option here, then go ahead and press the I
key in order to turn that information overlay on. Well as you can see with this file name,
it's the generic file name that came straight off the computer. Well, what I want to do
is I want to change that file name. To do that we will go ahead and press the F2 key.
Once we've done that, we can go ahead and click on this pulldown menu. Here I will choose
Custom Name. I will go ahead and name this file lake_casitas, because that's where it
was captured, and then I'll click OK. Now we can see that this file has a new name.
Next, I want to take a look at a few other images. As I click on these other images,
I notice that there are some custom names here; Santa Barbara Harbor 01 and 03. Yet
actually what I want to do is make a new sequence, or I want to rename a sequence of images.
So I want to reorder my images. To do that, I can either work in the filmstrip here, and
I can click on a photograph, and then click and drag it, or if you press the G key to
go to the Grid View, you can also click and drag to rearrange your images. I want these
three images to have a name which reflects the sequence. So here, we'll go ahead and
select those three images. You can select those files by doing this either in the grid,
or in the filmstrip. You click on the first image, hold down the Shift key, then click
on the last image in the sequence, however long the sequence is. Next, press the F2 key,
and here in our File Naming pulldown menu, this time we will use Custom Name -Sequence.
I will go ahead and name this sb-harbor, and then I'll go ahead and click OK. In this way,
if we press the E key, you can see we have one file named sb-harbor-1, here is sb-harbor-2,
and then we have sb-harbor-3. So you can see that we can rename either single images, or
images that are in a sequence. Well, what about locating a file in a particular folder
on a hard drive? Well, to do that, you simply click on the image that you want to target
or locate. And here, then, we'll press Shift+Command+D on a Mac, or Shift+Control+D on Windows to
deselect the other photographs. Next, you can right-click or Control+click, and then
select Show in Finder, or Show in Explorer, depending upon the operating system that you're
using. In my case, I'll click on Show in Finder. This will then pull up my Finder window, and
it will point to that folder, which is titled Other, and there you can see the image. The
reason why I wanted to highlight this here is it is helpful to know how to locate those
files on particular hard drives, and it's also helpful to point out that when you view
your images in these folders, you don't want to make any changes here. You may be tempted
to relocate the file, or to change its name here; you don't want to do that. Changes like
renaming or relocating files, you always want to do those right inside of Lightroom. So
let's go ahead and close this Finder or Explorer window. Next, let's go to the People folder.
In the People folder, if you press the G key, you can see that the top two images are not
people photographs; these images are in the wrong folder. So hold down the Command key
on a Mac, or Control key on Windows, and click on both of those images in order to select
them. Now, if we want to relocate these, say we want to take these to the Travel folder,
we can go ahead and hover over the image, and then click and drag on those images to
this Travel folder. This will open up a dialog which is saying, hey, you are moving these
files on the disk; they are now being moved from one folder on your hard drive to another
folder. This will cause these files to be moved. This cannot be undone. So that's exactly
what we want to do, so here we will simply click Move in order to relocate these files
to a new folder. If we go to the Travel folder, we will now see those files, and we will now
see that they reside inside of that folder. Also, if we were to select one of these images,
then we could go ahead and right-click or Control+click on the image, and you can select
Show in Finder, or Show in Explorer, and that will then open up that particular folder on
our hard drive, in this case, the Travel folder, and here you can see those two images reside
in that folder.