Importing and Organising in Adobe Lightroom

Importing + Organising

First go to File > Import Photos From Disc/Import Photos From Device. Click import from disc to import pictures already on your computer... import from device to import directly from a device i.e your camera.

That should bring up a screen that will look something like this:

I choose to 'copy photos to a new location and add to catalouge' this will create a new folder with the pictures in my pictures folder, and also add them to my lightroom catalouge. I organise them by date, i feel this makes it easier to find things. I dont usually apply any presets when i'm first importing, although you can do this by clicking on 'develop settings' and it will apply the chosen preset to all the imported photos. The one preset i always use when importing is one under 'metadata' i created a copyright preset so that when chosen all my imported photos have a copyright notice embedded in the metadata.

Now everything is imported and you can see the newly made folder on the left side under folders > 2009.

I'm going to create a new collection and add them to it now. First go to the collections section and click the '+' button then 'Create Collection'

Which should bring up this box:

In the name area type in what you want to call the collection - i called mine 'Uni work - Lighting Techniques' and i will put all my newly imported photos into this collection, as well as any more lighting technique pictures i do in the future. After you've done that click 'create' and you should have a new collection!

Next select all the photos you want to add to the collection - in my case it's all the ones i just imported, so i select the first one and hold down the shift key and click on the end photo, that should select all photos. All you need to do now is drag and drop them to into your new collection - on the left hand side!

Writing a caption:

First, go to the library section and select the image you want to write a caption for.

 

Next, scroll down on the bar at the right untill you get to 'Caption' under 'Metadata' and type in your caption.. and thats how you write a caption, in this section you can also embed your copyright notices into the metadata aswell as lots of other details.

You can also write a caption for more than one image at the same time, by selecting all the images you want to write a caption for (using either the shift or ctrl key) and doing the same steps you normally would.