Pro Photography Show has a similarly expansive collection of links to free Lightroom presets. Collections range from authors Sean McCormack, Jack Davis, and Matt Kloskowski to Adobe’s Exchange community.

Related Links:

• Presetting Lightroom Flickr group
• Wonderland Lightroom Presets
• Presets Heaven
• Adobe’s Exchange community
• Pro Photography Show

In his article he gave 4 valuable tips how to backup and optimize you Lightroom catalogs.

So if you missed it – do it right now!

Original article – http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2007/archives/718

Assuming that not every photo you take is a keeper (well, may be it is just me who takes bad photos sometimes) you’ll inevitably need to delete photos.

There’s two ways in Lightroom:

1. Deleting from your catalog but leaving them on your computer.
2. Removing them from your computer all together.

First of all, if you are browsing your photos using keyword tags, you have to “Go to Folder in Library”:

To do it just right-click you photo and then click “Go to Folder in Library“.

Then, when you are in Folder you can right-click you photo again and then choose “Delete photo…”

There you will have two options:

Press Remove button to remove photos from your Lightroom Library, or Delete from Disk to move them to Recycle Bin.

The other option is to use keyboard shortcuts:

• To delete them from only your catalog but leave them on your computer just press Alt-Backspace (Mac: Option-Delete).
• If you want to delete them from your computer too just press the Delete key and then press the Delete from Disk button. That moves them to Recycle Bin.

Photographs can be automatically imported into Lightroom, bypassing the need for a camera card and having to configure the Import settings every time you import a batch of images.

This is also referred to as ‘tethered shooting’ and Lightroom has the ability to do this, but Lightroom will need to rely on other software that can communicate with your camera and put image files to a specified folder location.

This way, Lightroom can be configured to automatically import these images into the library using ‘watched folders’.

Connecting the camera to the computer

To shoot in tethered mode you need to connect your digital camera to the computer. Ideally, you want the fastest connection possible. Most digital SLRs will offer a Firewire (IEEE 1394) or USB 2.0 connection, which in practice will allow you to shoot and download at almost the same speed as you can with a fast camera memory card. The only problem is that you have to have your camera connected to the computer via a cable and this can restrict the amount of freedom you have to move about without pulling the cable out, or worse, dragging a notebook off the table!

Camera capture software

Lightroom can appropriate the tethered shooting component of the camera communication software and from there, directly take over the image processing and image management.

Here’s how it works: the camera communication software should be instructed to download the files to a specific folder location and once the files appear in this ‘watched’ folder, Lightroom can be instructed to immediately copy the files into the Lightroom library. And since the files immediately deleted from the watched folder by Lightroom, you effectively bypass the camera software and the images will appear directly in Lightroom.

It is confirmed that it is possible to use Lightroom in conjunction with the Canon software designed for the Canon EOS range of cameras.

Nikon users can use Nikon Capture, which includes a Camera Control component that allows you to do the same thing as the Canon software and establishes a watched folder to download the images to. The latest version of Nikon Capture supports all the D Series cameras as well as the Nikon Coolpix 8700.

Alternatively, you might want to consider buying Bibble Pro 4.9.8 software from Bibble Labs. Bibble Pro costs a lot less than Nikon Capture. And it enables tethered shooting with a wide variety of digital cameras, and again, allows you to establish a watched folder for the downloaded images.

By using the Remove Spots tool along with the Synchronize feature you can get rid of lens spots and dust in just a few seconds.

First and most obvious way is to set it using mouse when you are looking at your images Library Loupe view. Just click on the star and you will set corresponding rating to the image.

The other way is by using keyboard shortcuts. Select your image or look at it in Loupe view, then use 1 to 5 keys to set Rating 1 to 5 stars accordingly. After selecting use your arrow keys to move to previous/next image.

Or you can use Shift-1 – Shift 5 to set image rating 1 to 5 stars and move to next image automatically.

There is even better, undocumented way to do it. Turn your Caps Lock on and press 1 to 5 keys. You will set rating and move to next image like if you did this with Shift-1 – Shift-5.

Also you can use same key combinations for setting color labels for images using numbers 6 for red, 7 for yellow, 8 for green, 9 for blue, and 0 for purple.

Summing everything up we have following table:

This structure has three main features: consistency, uniqueness, and backup management.

1. Consistency is important. You want to make sure that regardless of camera, subject or any other variable there is a consistent way to find a photo.
2. Uniqueness of photo name is important. Even though the directory structure would allow for multiple files with the same name, you should guarantee that every file is unique and “fully qualified” for each individual photo.
3. Backup management is handled most simply through your file structure. I don’t like to rely on fancy backup programs to know what has been backed up or not, I like to be able to achieve this through chronology.

This looks to be solid, but I personally prefer to have 3 trees of directories with similar trees and independent backups for each:

1. First tree for Shoots – here I store everything I shoot in RAW format.
2. Second tree for Processing – there are shoots that were considered to be good for Photoshop processing.
3. And third is Print. Here I put all final versions of photographs for printing.

Inside these trees I have very similar structure like Jamie has.