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Do you use smart collections in LightRoom?

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alexa_adrian2001:
Hi, I am coming again with one more question regarding how to organize my images with Lightroom.
I want to take benefit of its smart collections or simple collections. Do you use them and how?
First method that might work is use simple collections and just drag them into each collection. For the moment I participate into 4 stock agencies. If the number will increase I want to be prepared. So I have there is a Label property for images. Would there be a chance to set certain categories and automatically be added in smart collections? Or do you use colors and stars?
Please help me get on the right way from the very beginning. 
Best regards,
Adrian.

Imagenomad:
Smart Collections and Collections work well in Lightroom (as they do in Aperture, where they're called "Albums").

For what you want to do, one scheme is to have a Simple Collection that you drag your stock images to and call this, say, "Stock Images". I have separate folders for RM and RF images.

You can either colour-code or label your images according to agency but this would limit you to five agencies. To get around this, you can use private keywords (i.e. non-exported keywords) for the name of each agency. You could also do the same, for instance, if an image was exclusive, if you wanted to separate out images that way.

You then need to set up Smart Collections using filters. In this example, you could use the filter <Collection contains "Stock"> AND <Keywords contains "name_of_agency">. After you've dragged your images to your global "Stock" folder, the Smart Collections filter them based on keywords. If you were so inclined, you could also use the non-exported keyword "_stock" and set up a Smart Collection rather than dragging images. (Note I tend to use an underscore for my non-exported keywords in case they can also be genuine keywords).

Having said all that, some might argue that you don't actually need to do any of this. They take the view that if any images are rejected from one agency but accepted at another, don't bother re-submitting. On the other hand, I know that others like to manage everything, setting up spreadsheets recording downloads and earnings across agencies to the last penny, all tied in to their image database. YMMV.

I tend to use Smart Collections to control workflow using labels so I know which are selects, which need further tweaking, which need metadata and which have been published. I'm not too bothered about whether an image made it into SS but not DT. But I am bothered about whether I've keyworded and captioned or not. Again, YMMV.

alexa_adrian2001:
I am sorry, did I understood well? You say that there are non exporting keywords. How? That would mean that in the moment I upload to SS(for ex) they will not take into consideration keywords that starts with '_'? Is this what you said?
A functionality like this would be great especially because then I could have smart collections, easily.

alexa_adrian2001:
Wow. In the meaning time I searched and found out that you can really have non exporting keywords. I found out how to create such as keywords.
Now I did as followed:
created a collection - Entire Collection Stock - which I set it as target collection.
Then I press B on all photos that I have uploaded for at least one stock agency, so it means is a stock photo. After that I created 2 smart collections(for the moment) ShutterStock Accepted and ShutterStock Rejected. For both I set as criteria: source->collection is from collection above, and keyword _shutterstock. Then for first I added extra filter condition: keyword _accepted, respectively 'rejected' for second smart collection. Will repeat for all agencies.
In this way I can now which are rejected/accepted for all agencies and I might have all kind of results.
What do you say about my approach? :)

alexa_adrian2001:
uhm... well I found out that this wasn't working as I expected. I wasn't testing case when one image has been approved to SS and rejected to DS. In that case it would have been _accepted, _shutterstock, _rejected, _dreamstime. So filter would not be effective.
Then I tried to do hierarchical keywords. Like in image.
Now I face another issue: I can not apply filter for a smart collection in order to take only a hierarchical keyword.
Could anybody help me on this?
I tried like this: keword contains: _dreamstime < _accepted but this returns also those that have _shutterstock < _accepted.
:-?

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