Good morning! I hope you enjoyed your weekend. 🙂

Do you know what is all this getting “smart” in Lightroom about? I think you do. 😉

It’s about Smart Collections of course!

Smart Collections are a bit like searches that you save in Lightroom. But they are so much more than that. First of all, they show in the Collections Panel and they appear in all Modules! This is great! I mean, you can jump into Web Panel and they’re there! You go to Develop Panel and they’re there as well! Pretty amazing, isn’t it? It means, you don’t need to switch back to Library Module to move between Collections (yes, you can have more than one).

Very often I get asked:

Why would I use Smart Collections and not normal Collections or Filters Tab?

First of all, when you use normal Collections, you manage them manually – you need to add and remove images from a Collection manually.

Filters will only show the current view and you would need to move between sets of images or “All Photographs” while Smart Collections update automatically.

With Smart Collections, you can just forget about them. They will run automatically without any intervention and update remembering the settings you used.

So how do we create Smart Collections?

To create a Smart Collection, go to Collections panel and click on + (Plus) button and choose “Create Smart Collection…”:

Next, you will select your criteria (Smart Collections are based on certain criteria if you didn’t know). Additional criteria can be added by clicking on + button at the end of each row, and when you’re done just click on Create. This will create a new Smart Collection for you.

By the way, you can also name it in Name area on the top of the dialog box 😉

More about Smart Collections tomorrow 😉