Working with Albums and Collections in Lightroom, Part 1

Lightroom and Lightroom Classic let you store your entire photo library in one place… which can turn into a vast disorganized bucket of images. In an earlier article, “The Right Way to Assign Metadata to Photos in Lightroom,” I extolled the benefits of assigning keywords. That’s a great start, but there are times when you want to group photos into discrete containers for easy access or sharing. This is where albums are helpful.

First, Some Terminology Nerdology

Almost every other digital photo manager out there uses the term album to describe a group of photos that you gather into a separate container, harking back to ye olde printed books into which you taped photos.

Lightroom Classic, however, prefers the term collections, which honestly makes more sense. Do we really need to persist with analog metaphors for our digital containers? A collection more accurately describes a group of digital files. Lightroom Classic even uses icons that look like little bespoke boxes.

Alas, album remains prevalent elsewhere, including the newer, cloud-focused Lightroom application. Kudos to Lightroom Classic for fighting the good terminology fight, even if it’s ultimately a losing battle.

Create an Album or Collection

The idea behind an album is to collect a set of photos that usually share a theme: images of an event or person, or related to a specific project. I sometimes create temporary albums to include shots I’m considering for further editing.

To create an album in Lightroom, do the following:

  1. Select one or more photos you wish to add to the album.
  2. Open the My Photos pane (press P) to reveal the Albums list.
  3. Click the (+) button and choose Create Album.
  4. Give the album a title and make sure the “Include the [number] selected photos” box is checked.
  5. Click Create.

Alternatively, you can create the album first with nothing selected, and then add the photos later.

In Lightroom Classic, the process is similar:

  1. Select one or more photos.
  2. In the Collections pane, click the (+) button and choose Create Collection.
  3. In the dialog that appears, type a title and make sure “Include selected photos” is checked.
  4. Click Create.

You’ll notice that Lightroom Classic includes a few more options than Lightroom. I’ll cover those shortly.

Work with Albums and Collections

Once an album or collection is created, drag photos to it to add them. You can also remove photos from an album by pressing the Delete key, or choosing Edit > Remove Photo from Album (Lightroom) or Photo > Remove Photo from Collection (Lightroom Classic).

Keep in mind that albums and collections are just organizational tools within the Lightroom library, and don’t reflect the location of files on disk. One photo can belong to multiple albums or collections. This detail becomes important when editing, because adjustments you make to the image appear the same in every album or collection.

If you want different versions of a photo in separate albums—let’s say you create a Black and White album in addition to the album the image is currently in—you’ll need to make copies of the photo.

In Lightroom, select the image and choose Edit > Make a Copy, or right-click and choose Make a Copy from the contextual menu. Then, move the copy to a separate album.

In Lightroom Classic, select the image and choose Photo > Create Virtual Copy, or right-click and choose Create Virtual Copy from the contextual menu.

If you know at the outset that you want to make separately-edited versions in Lightroom Classic, enable the “Make new virtual copies” checkbox when you’ve selected images and you create the collection.

Folders and Collection Sets

In Lightroom Classic, a collection set is a container into which collections can be gathered to provide another level of organization. For instance, you may want a collection set called Vacations, and within it include albums for each location you visited.

Lightroom uses the metaphor of folders to do the same thing (because you’d put a physical album into a folder? See, this is why the album metaphor doesn’t exactly work, but we’re stuck with it). Fortunately, folders show up as just hierarchical containers, so at least we don’t need to be confused by folder and album icons.

You create collection sets or folders using the same (+) button used to create albums.

Target Collection and Target Album

A target collection or target album is a neat shortcut in both versions of Lightroom. It identifies a collection/album as a quick destination for adding photos. Using the vacation example earlier, you could create an album called “Best Vacation Photos” and set it as the target album, and then quickly add photos to it by pressing a key instead of dragging images.

Select an album or collection and right-click to bring up the contextual menu, and then choose Set as Target Album or Set as Target Collection.

To add photos to the target, select them and press T (Lightroom) or B (Lightroom Classic).

Lightroom Classic includes a target collection by default, called Quick Collection. Specifying a different target collection makes Quick Collection just a regular collection until you re-specify it as the target.

Not-So-Smart Albums and Collections

One key characteristic about albums and collections is that they require manual labor to populate and organize them. It’s up to you to add and remove photos. In my next article, I’ll explain how Smart Collections in Lightroom Classic can automatically change their contents based on various factors. (Currently, the cloud-based Lightroom doesn’t offer Smart Albums.) And I’ll also dig into how albums and collections sync with Creative Cloud and other devices.

Author and photographer Jeff Carlson (@jeffcarlson, jeffcarlson.com) writes for publications such as DPReview, CreativePro, and Macworld, and is a contributing editor at TidBITS (tidbits.com). He is the author of numerous books, including The Photographer’s Guide to Luminar AI, Take Control of Your Digital Photos, Take Control of Your Digital Storage, and Take Control of Apple Watch, among many other titles. He also co-hosts the podcasts PhotoActive and Photocombobulate, and leads photography workshops in the Pacific Northwest. He believes there's never enough coffee, and does his best to test that theory.
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