Lightroom: Building a Portfolio
I need to build a new portfolio. This time it's commercial and industrial. I have 2 catalogs. One with 19 thousand photos and another one with 146 thousand photos.
The official story is pretty simple:
- Select the 5 star photos
- If you don't have enough 5 star photos, just add the 4 star photos to your selection
- Ten minutes later, you are done!
The problem is that life, sloppiness, laziness, sleep, family… gets in the way of a perfect world.
- The 5 stars may not match the content of the portfolio. I need industrial photos, this means workers, warehouses, stores… My family, the cat, the dog… do not match the topic required.
- Isn't it why we have keywords? The keywords may be missing. As I'm looking through the 19 thousand photos catalog, 8125 photos do not have any keyword. Shame on the lazy photographer, oops it's me.
- The keywords may be wrong. Could be. It's very easy to assign a keyword to a whole bunch of photos, including the one that I do not want.
- The keywords may not be detailed enough. I may need a much more detailed criteria than the keywords will provide me.
- …
So first of all, I cleared all the photos from the Quick Collection. Or you can setup another default Quick Collection see: <http://www.foto-biz.com/Lightroom/Target-collection>
It's not that easy to see which photo is already in the Quick Collection or not. It's only a grey dot at the top right of the photo in the Grid View. And pressing the B key by mistake will remove the currently selected photo from the Quick Collection if it is already in. I don't need these mistakes. So I created a Smart Collection of all the photos not in the Quick Collection.
Lightroom: Smart Collection of the Photos Not In a Specific Collection
That's still 18+ thousand photos. I can't go through 18 thousand photos in one go. So I broke it down alphabetically. The photos starting with A, then B then C… I just have to press the letter b to add the current highlighted photo to the Quick Collection target and at the same time it is removed from my Grid view.
Lightroom: Find the Photos that Start with the letter C
I do the filter on the smart collection.
Then it's just a matter of eyeballing all the A photos in the Grid View. A couple of hours later, time to start with the Bs… Then the next day the Gs… A week later, I narrowed it down to 74 photos. I still have to narrow it down to around 30. Then reprocess the 30 photos and reselect between 15 to 20 photos for the portfolio.
Robert Frank did one of the most important photographic essay/book: The Americans. He drove across the US with Jack Kerouac in 1955 and 1956 on the funding from a grant of the Guggenheim Foundation. He took 25,000+ photos and this was before digital. He printed 1,000 8” by 10” photos. He published 83 of them in his book.