Using keywords in Adobe Lightroom is a useful way to organise your photos. These keywords can be applied during the ‘Import’ stage. Using broad terms such as ‘tree’, ‘grass’ or ‘green’ can help provide a good base for categorising your photographs, making it a lot easier to find them later on.
To apply keywords to your photographs during the ‘Import’ stage, simply click the ‘Import’ button on the bottom-left of Adobe Lightroom’s library screen. This will open the Import window.
Once the Import screen has opened, you will see a panel called ‘Apply During Import’ – On this panel you have the option to edit the photograph’s metadata, choose a develop preset to apply on import or add keywords to each image. Ensure every image that you wish to apply a keyword to is selected, or if all images require keywording with the same words, you can use Ctrl + A (or CMD + A on a Mac) to select all photographs before editing the keywords.
Keywords must be separated by commas – any strings of words will be taken as 1 keyword. It’s a good idea to be as specific as you can at this stage as this will make finding photographs easier in the future. Adding tags such as ‘green’, or ‘grass’ are usually vague enough to ensure a wide variety of results when searching for keywords with a large library.
Once you have inputted all of your desired keywords, you can then go ahead and import for photographs as you normally would. Keywords can then be searched from Adobe Lightroom’s Library pane – You will see in my example below that all of the photos showing match the keyword ‘foulness’, which is a location for a current photography project.
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