How To Use Organizational Metadata In Lightroom Classic

One of the ideas I explore in my course Clean Up Your Mess In Lightroom Classic is how to use organizational metadata.

Organizational metadata is my term for the metadata in Lightroom Classic used for organizing and searching photos – that is, keywords, star ratings, flags and color labels.

It’s applied to your photos by Lightroom Classic, and (unlike metadata like camera settings) isn’t part of the original photo file. 

A central idea of the course is that most organizational metadata doesn’t work well and that there’s a better tool you can use to organize your photos – Collections and Collection Sets.

What problems does organizational metadata create?

That last statement may have intrigued you. When so much of the conventional wisdom about Lightroom Classic explains how to use organizational metadata like star ratings and keywords, why would I advise against this?

Here are my reasons.

1. Star ratings, color labels and flags aren’t robust. You can change any of them with a single keypress.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have selected a large number of photos, like you do when you add images to a Collection. Then you accidentally press the Zero key. What happens?

You may already know the answer – it sets the star rating of the selected photos to zero. 

It’s not a disaster if you realize what you’ve done as you can use the Undo command to put them back. But if you don’t realize until it’s too late to use Undo, your star ratings are gone forever.

Star ratings, color labels and flags are temporary metadata. For example, I use flags for marking the best photos in a Collection. But when I’m done I select the flagged photos and add them to a new Collection. That way if I accidentally unflag a photo it doesn’t matter.

Here are the Collections that belong to a recent shoot I did. I’ve added all the photos I developed into Collection D. Now they are there, there is no single keypress that can remove them. That’s why Collections are robust.

You can read more about this system in my article How To Find Your Best Photos Fast In Lightroom Classic

2. Star ratings ask the wrong question. Let’s say you’re going through several hundred photos, trying to decide what star rating to apply to each one. Every minute you spend doing this is wasted because you’re asking the wrong question.

The question you should be asking is “Do I want to develop this photo?”

For example, you may want to develop a photo that you would only give three stars because it’s the best photo you have of a love one, or it’s a treasured memory.

Or, you may have five photos that all deserve five stars, but are so similar that there’s no point in developing one. What you really want to do is pick the best of the five and develop that one.

Here’s an example. The four photos below are so similar they would all get the same star rating. But all I want to know is which one should I develop?

3. You can’t apply keywords consistently. For keywords to work, you need to have a good keyword system in place from the start, and then to apply it consistently for many years. 

You may think you are consistent, but you are not. No matter what you think, your needs will change over the years. It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, your keywords will end up like a garden full of plants. A wild mess, unless you put in the time and effort required to keep your keywords under control. 

The only exception to this is photographers who use keywords for commercial reasons, like sending photos to photo libraries. But in this case your keywords are for helping other people find your photos, rather than organizational purposes.

The metadata conundrum

This leads to what I call the metadata conundrum.

The metadata conundrum is this: most photographers think it’s necessary to use metadata like keywords and star ratings. 

The problem is that it’s time consuming and impossible to apply organizational metadata consistently. This leads to long term frustration. 

The solution is to use Collections instead.

Collections vs. organizational metadata

I’m surprised at the amount of resistance I encounter from some photographers about using Collections. So let’s look at some of the reasons why Collections are the best organizational tools in Lightroom Classic. 

1. Adobe wants you to use Collections. That’s why you can only access the Folders panel in the Library module. Every other module, including Develop, only gives you access to the Collections panel.

Think of it like this. 

The Folders panel shows you where your photos are saved. It is for organizing and viewing saved photos.

The Collections panel is for organizing your photos afterwards. 

The reason Collections work so well is simple. You can add a photo to as many Collections as you need to. But you can only save it in a single folder without making duplicates. 

Collections are light years ahead of folders for organizational purposes. That’s why most photographers use Lightroom Classic rather than Adobe Bridge to organize their photos. 

2. Collections are permanent. By comparison star ratings, color labels and flags are temporary, easily overridden by accidental keypresses.

A photo stays in a Collection until you remove it. A Collection stays in Lightroom Classic until you delete it. Collections are the most robust organizational tool you have.

3. Collections survive inconsistency. I’ve used a digital camera since 2005, giving me 20 years of digital photos. My needs are not the same as they were 20 years ago. No-one can be consistent for 20 years. No system that uses keywords or star ratings can survive 20 years. 

But Collections are different. Their permanent nature means that they last forever. You can look back at Collections made 15 years ago and immediately see what you’ve done. That’s not going to work with keywords and star ratings.

4. Collections help you keep things simple. Complex systems are confusing and slow you down. Simple systems help you. Collections are the simplest organizational system you can use.

Time for another example. Here are the Collections I made for last year’s End of Summer Project.

It contains Collections that organize the photos exactly how I want. Let me explain what some of these Collections contain.

End of Summer [plugin Exposure X]: This Collection is for photos developed using the Exposure X plugin.

The End of Summer [portfolio website]: This Collection is for photos used on my portfolio website.

Print Collections: The last eight Collections are Print Collections. They contain photos that I’ve printed using the Print module.

There’s no way you could do this with organizational metadata like keywords and star ratings.

Where do you want to spend your time?

You may find some of these ideas challenging. So my question to you is this: where do you want to spend your time in Lightroom Classic?

For me, the fun part of Lightroom Classic is developing photos. I love working on my best photos, experimenting with the masking tools and converting photos to black and white. 

The organizational stuff is necessary but tedious. Just like you can’t run a business without doing accounts and submitting taxes, you can’t be a photographer without some method of organizing your photos. 

The key is to keep your system as simple and fast as possible. This lets you get the tedious stuff out of the way and get on with the fun stuff.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about this.

Mastering Lightroom Classic: Book One – The Library Module

You can learn more about the Catalog and organizational metadata in my best-selling ebook Mastering Lightroom Classic: Book One – The Library Module.