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Image Editing Tutorial – Organising Your Pictures

Author	Cliff Smith
Published	27th Oct 2008

Image Editing Tutorial – Organising Your Pictures

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Adding keywords to your photos is extremely simple. In the Bridge file browser tab, navigate to the folder containing the photos that you want to label, so that you can see them all in the central thumbnail pane. Here I’m using a folder of holiday photos from last year. You can label any number of photos simultaneously. Simply highlight all the photos you want to label, and then click on the check-boxes next to each keyword that you want to apply to those pictures. This automatically saves those keywords as part of the metadata for those pictures.

These keyword labels allow you to search through your images using filtered searching. In the Essential workspace you’ll see over on the left of the screen a tag called Filter. If you open a folder of pictures you’ll see a list of all the keywords attached to files in that folder. If you click on any of those keywords, only the images so labelled will be displayed. This enables you to narrow your search by clicking on several different keywords.

The metadata keyword labels can be read not just by Adobe Bridge, but also by other image sorting programs. Also if you upload your pictures to Flickr or other photo-sharing sites, the metadata keywords are transferred along with the file, and can be used to search for that image online.

Many online image libraries use the same keyword system as Bridge, and if you sell your pictures to such a library, adding labels to your pictures before you upload them the library’s submission site can be a great time-saver.

If you’ve got a big photo collection, going through all of them and adding keywords could be a very time-consuming task, but it really is worth doing. Once you’ve got all your current collection labelled, just adding keywords to your new pictures every time you download them is a lot less hassle, and it really does make searching your pictures so much easier.

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