Organizing with Keywords

Keywords are an efficient way to categorize photos. Once applied, they can be used to quickly sort and filter images, and are often required for selling stock photography. This video demonstrates using keywords when managing your photo library.

Photo: Frank Salas

Transcript

A good time to apply keywords is during the process of copying images from camera cards.

In the Metadata section, type in a keyword. Additional keywords can quickly be added with a comma-separated list. Existing keywords in the keyword library can be selected. These options are also available when the camera is tethered to the computer. Learn more about that process in our Tethered Shooting video.

The photos in this demo share several event-related keywords. In the Apply Keyword field, add information like the venue, the location, other vendors, and more. Click OK to copy images with these keywords applied.

Exposure’s keywords tools are in the Metadata panel. The Keyword Library is the collection of keywords from all of the photos in Exposure. The library will be empty until you add them. That can be when a bookmarked folder has images with keywords, or when you add keywords to an image, or when you add keywords to the library directly.

Add a keyword to an individual image by typing it in the Apply Keywords field. When a keyword is used, it is also added to the keyword library. Then it becomes an option to select from the list.

Click the X to the right of a keyword to remove it from the selected images.

There are several ways to sort keywords: recent, all, or sets.

A keyword set is a group of keywords under a larger theme. This is an example for weddings. 

When the keyword library is large, filters are helpful to navigate through them quickly. This includes keywords and keyword sets.

Click the Keyword icon to filter photos by keyword. Entering wedding-related keywords will only display wedding images.

Keywords come up again at the end of post-processing, when exporting files. Control which keywords are included in the Metadata section of the Export dialog.