You know, last video, we looked at folders and we talked about how these folders that we say in Lightroom, it just regular everyday folders that live on your computer. Lightroom is just looking at at them. Now I'd like to look at collections. So down below folders, we've got collections now collections is something very unique to Lightroom. You can't see these collections outside of Lightroom. These collections are a wonderful feature.

And you can gather things together based on their particular topic. So as we know, in the folders, the folders are Cambodia, China, Germany, Japan, and so forth. But my collections if I go down and I've got little subsets of collections here, if I go down to my subject set, you can see I've got a collection of flamenco. So this is just all the flamenco dancers I've photographed in my various trips to Spain, or I've got a folder of eagles, all the Eagles flying high in the sky over in Kyoto in Japan. I've got a folder called goudy of old Gaddy architecture have been lucky enough to photograph you In Barcelona, I've got one for geishas. I've got one for monks for all our Cambodia trips.

I've got one here for smiles, lots of fight eyes. And the interesting thing about this one is it you can see it's a broad mix of photos, lots of lovely smiles from all over the world, from Japan, from Spain, from Cambodia, and from China. So these collections are a wonderful way to manage your images just based on content. So let's have a look how we create these collections Actually, I'm going to start by showing you an alternative to collections that you may unwittingly have, have done yourself. And I want to show you why collections are so much better. So if I go to Japan for a moment, I'm in my Japan folder now and you can see we've got lots of photos of the cherry blossoms because we like to go to Japan in springtime and see the cherry blossoms so we got cherry blossoms there and they're and they're and a number of other places to boot.

So if I'm To isolate my cherry blossoms I could go up here to the little flyout menu, or rather I could right click on I could Yes, sorry two eyes, I can do it. I can either right click here on travel photos and say create sub folder or I can click on this little plus symbol here and I can do add sub folder as well so either or, so I'm going to right click on travel photos I'm going to say create folder inside travel photos and I'm going to call it Sakura is a k u, a Sakura Sakura, and that's what the Japanese called the, the cherry blossoms the sakura. So with my sucker a folder there, I'm now going to select all my cherry blossom photos. There's one there, now I'm holding down the command key that's Ctrl on Windows, so I can do an out of line selection cherry blossom there and there.

And scrolling down we should have some more there and there and there. And there and there and there. It's a duplicate that photo isn't it. Maybe I'll just Take up one, cherry blossoms there and there and there and there. Lots of cherry blossoms all the way through, but maybe that'll do for now. So I've got 15 selected.

I know that because it tells me down here of the 282 photos 15 are currently selected. Now I'm going to drag and drop those photos into my new Sakura folder. So I click there, and I drag and I drop into Sakura and I move and you'll see that all those photos are being moved across into that folder. And if I just right click there for a moment and say show in Finder, you can see here here's the sucker a folder, I just created a sucker. And here's all the images I've just moved into it. So that's the I did that inside Lightroom it's reflected outside Lightroom So this seems wonderful, doesn't it?

I can click on my cherry blossoms and I can say look, let's have a look at my cherry blossom photos in isolation and here they are all there to say Wonderful, lovely, very good. However, there's a small problem with this method of organizing images in folders. And it's this, if I now go to my Japan folder, there's no cherry blossoms. I've taken all the cherry blossoms out of the Japan folder, and I've put them into their own separate folder, which is not so good when I want to say a nice overview of all my Japan photos Is it because I'd like to see some cherry blossoms in there as well. So I'm going to go back to my Sakura folder, I'm going to go Command A to select all that would be Ctrl I on Windows, I'm going to drag and drop those photos back into Japan.

Lightroom is going to say this will cause the corresponding files on disk to be moved. To which I say Good, that's exactly what I want to happen. I click move to look they all go back. Now my Sakura folder is empty again. I'm going to right click and I'm going to go remove which gets rid of that folder now and I'm going to do something very Different now I'm going to create a collection. So I go to my little plus sign here and I'm going to say create collection.

And I'm going to call my collection, you guessed it, Sakura, and create. So now I've got a brand new collection called Sakura or sucker out down here and currently nothing in it. So I go to Japan and I click on all my lovely cherry blossoms there and there and scrolling down I thought to be few more at the top there no got there and there and there and nothing to that a sucker Kai and I've got the I'm sorry, I'm confusing myself. They're moving right along and cherry blossoms there. We wanted that one and that one and that one and that one. And that one and one more for good luck.

So that's 14 now got one less dollar. Oh, there's more than I look at them cherry blossoms everywhere. grab those guys. Now. They go into my Sakura collection. So I drag and drop, I go in, there's no message, no warning, nothing's actually being moved.

So now I can go. Down here you can see I've got my Sakura collection. So I click on it and boom, here's all my cherry blossoms. If ever, I want to look at them in isolation, they're ready to be viewed like such. But the important thing is if I go back to my Japan folder, then there's they're still there. There's no missing cherry blossoms, they're still in the folder.

Because this collection is just a lovely little shortcut, a lovely little Lightroom trick that enables me to look at them in isolation without upsetting any of the folder structure. So this makes collections very powerful. I think I'd like to analogize collections to an iTunes playlist if you if you manage your music on iTunes, you can have my little playlist of the favorite songs and they're easy to access, they don't duplicate the song, and if you delete the playlist, the songs are still there. So very, very flexible way To work, in fact, you can have the same image in multiple collections. If I was to click this image here of the woman walking down the path with all the lovely cherry blossoms overhead, we can see this image is also in my Sakura collection right here. And if I go into my subject set this image is also I believe in my people collection.

Is it now I thought it was maybe it's not, maybe I need to put it in there. To illustrate that point. It's not actually my paypal collection. So if I go to Japan, and I take this photo of the woman walking down the path, and I drag and drop it into my people collection, now it's also in the people collection just there. So I can have the same image in multiple collections, no problem. It doesn't make any difference to the fact that it ultimately resides in the folder.

But if I wish to view it when I look at my people, then I can do that. And if I wish to view it when I look at my cherry blossoms, then I I can do that too. So collections a wonderful way to manage your images based on their topic based on their content as opposed to their simply the date that you shot them or a particular sort of project. So collections that there's there's other things we can look at in collections as well. There's the quick collections. So I mentioned the quick collection earlier on.

When we looked at the catalog tab. The quick collection is just like regular collections, but the thing is, you can just make it much more quickly and easily because it sits right up here at the top. And I often I use the example of imagine somebody contacts me and says they're having a group exhibition and the theme is red, and they say we'd like you to submit some images with the theme red. So I think okay, let's say there's some nice red Latins there. So I'm going to click on that photo, go up to my photo menu here and I go photo, add to quick collection. And you can see there the keyboard keyboard shortcut is the letter B.

So that image goes into my quick collection. So here's another nice image, lots around I'm going to press the key Bay, and that goes into my quick collection as well. We've got some nice red pimentos. There, I can also drag and drop and it goes into the quick collection. And let's find a few more images where the color red is a strong element, maybe that one, I'm going to press B, that one, I'm going to press B, that one, I'm going to press B, and couple more, we should have some nice red flamenco dresses there and there and there and a little bit more variation with too many flamenco. Now there's no maybe we'll take that one as well.

Because we like that one, we got a little bit of red there on the label. We got some nice red tomato there and we got some nice red beads right there as well. So now I've just made a quick collection of these 13 images over here, quick collection 13 images. So I click on my quick collection, and here's all my red photos. Now I could refine that a little bit more I could think well maybe there's a little little bit of duplication with these tools. So I think I'm just going to click on that one and press Delete.

So that just removes it from the quick collection, but obviously not from the, from my catalog, it's still in my catalog. And I'm going to keep these, maybe there's not a lot of reading that image, I might just refine it a little bit more and remove that one too. And I will submit these 11 images for consideration in the red show. So the thing about quick collection is you can actually only have one quick collection. So that's part of its convenience and it's instant accessibility is you can only have one so it's a good idea to keep it empty, use it for a certain purpose, then you get rid of it. So if I want to keep this collection, I'm going to have to save it.

So I go up to the file menu, and I go save quick collection and I'm just going to call it read collection. And notice the little checkbox there saying click quick collection after saving, and that's generally a good policy clear the quick collection to keep it empty, ready for the next project. So when I click save, my quick collection gets saved. And when I look down here, you'll see that my read collection is now sitting there in amongst my regular collections. So quick collection is just a great way to very quickly and easily make a collection feel consideration. You might choose not to keep it or you might choose to save it for future use.

So lots of different ways to make collections and there's a few more collection things that we'll look at. In a later movie. The Smart collection in particular is not actually so I'm just scrolling through and I thought oh, there's that's a nice reading that one too. Can I add that to the collection later, of course, I can click and drag and drop into read collection it goes because I think that one's worthy of consideration also. So there's my read collection and there's collections as opposed to folders. So just in summary, for this video, I it's some people get a bit confused by the difference between folders and collections.

They seem similar in that they both are used for Storing images. But what's important to realize is the folders live outside Lightroom. And they store all the negatives all the original high res images. And it's generally best to keep them in, you know, in a particular order based on a particular project or a particular job or a particular trip, have all the photos from that particular event in those in all the photos from a particular event in that folder. Collections on the other hand, a much more flexible and diverse. You can make multiple collections about particular topics, particular moods, particular styles, anything you like.

And remember, when you create collections, you're not duplicating the photos, you're not duplicating the photos at all, you're simply making a little shortcut to them. I've got different travel collections here from different trips, different Cambodia trips, I've got a bike panning is a little project I like to do in Cambodia with all the people going by on this screen. As you can see I've got a little collection there. I just press the F key quickly to share some Some of these you might have seen that one already. But we've got a bunch more here of all the antics that go on on the streets of Phnom Penh as people go whizzing around with many passengers on their scooters. So that's another nice reason to make a collection for that little.

That little project there. So collections very flexible, very easy to make. They don't take up a lot of space. They don't duplicate the photo, and I encourage you to explore collections to manage your images.