Smart Album

All image cataloguing programs use albums (or ‘collections’, in Lightroom). You might use them to collect together pictures for specific projects, for example. ‘Smart’ albums (collections), however, are different.

With a normal album, you add pictures manually, but smart albums are populated automatically by pictures that match the album’s criteria. In a way, smart albums are like saved searches. You set them up in much the same way as you would a search, by specifying keywords, ratings or other properties.

Smart albums appear in iPhoto and Aperture on the Mac and now in Adobe Lightroom too. Here’s an example of a smart album/collection in Lightroom.

How was it done? Very simply…

1. First, you choose a name for the new smart album/collection. We want one which contains all the RAW files shot with our Canon EOS 400D.

2. Underneath you add the criteria for the album/collection. It’s just like specifying search criteria. Each criterion has its own row, and you can set up the album to match all the criteria or any of them. First, we choose ‘Camera’ as the type of data we’re matching, ‘contains’ for the middle pop-up and ‘400D’ in the box on the right as the data we want to match.

3. Now we need to add another search criterion, this time one that specifies RAW files only. So in the first pop-up we choose  ’File Type’ as the thing we’re looking for, in the second we select ‘is’ so that we’re matching it to a specific value, and the third column already lists the available file types, so we choose ‘RAW’.

There are a couple of things you might want to know about smart albums/collections:

• You can’t manually add photos to smart albums/collections or remove them. The only way to achieve this is to change the properties of the image(s) you want to add so that they meet the album’s criteria. Similarly, the only way to remove an image is to changes its properties so that they no longer match.
• When you have a smart album/collection with multiple criteria, you can choose whether the album matches ALL the criteria or ANY of them. In our example above we only wanted pictures which matched ALL the criteria. In another example, we might want an album which displayed pictures taken with an EOS 400D or an Nikon D3. Here. the album needs to match ANY of the criteria. The album can be set up to do one or the other, though not both.
• Lightroom doesn’t automatically populate the list of available cameras in the smart collection dialog, so you have to enter model names manually. This is a problem where the model name includes spaces, for example ‘Nikon D3′, because Lightroom will find all instances of ‘Nikon’ and ‘D3′. What you have to do here is set up two criteria, one looking for ‘Nikon’ and the second looking for ‘D3′. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but it works.