In our previous post we covered the basics of tagging photos with Lightroom. However, when you’re tagging hundreds of pictures every second counts so here are a few more tips to ramp up the pace.

First of all – Importing:

To speed things up we want to do as much work as possible automatically when importing our photos and Lightroom has a very nice feature that lets us specify things like Copyright information and tags in Metadata Presets that we can use when importing race photos.

To make one just go to the Metadata drop-down menu in the Import Photos window, and choose New..

Enter the information you would like to have in all photos imported with this preset, name it and click Create. Now you have a preset that you can use when importing your pictures. We’ve put 42run in the Keywords so we only have to add the tag for the race name that we will post on our blog. For the Santa Run 6k 2008 in Battersea Park, London on 6 December we put SantaRun08. Once you’ve done this, click OK.

Now wait for the photos to import – it might take a few minutes.
Once the photos are finished importing, choose the first photo to tag and hit E on the keyboard (or simply double click the thumbnail) to see a larger view. Click in the “Click here to add keywords” area in the Keywording panel on the right and enter the bib numbers of the people in the photo (separate the keywords by commas) like this.

Once you’ve entered all the bib numbers you can read, hit Enter and Cmd + Right Arrow (Ctrl + Right Arrow if you’re on a PC) and this will take you to the next photo. The advantage of entering the keywords here instead of the area that you see your keywords in is that you will still have the keywords field selected when you go to the next photo and can start entering them straight away.
Lightroom is a very powerful application and it takes a while to learn its features. If you’re new to Lightroom and want to learn more check this video by Terry White on Creative Suite Podcast. It is for the previous version of Lightroom (v1.1) but he takes you through the whole workflow of managing your photos in Lightroom. In Lightroom 2 Adobe has added a lot of new features and you can see them in other videos on Terry’s site.
One of the best blogs for news, tips and tricks, presets videos about Lightroom that we read is Adobe Lightroom Killer Tips by Matt Kloskowski.
Check out these links and we’ll show you how to save time exporting your photos to flickr in the next post.

If you’ve taken a couple of dozen photos of runners at a race, it’s easy enough just to upload them to Flickr and use Flickr’s tagging functionality.

If, like us, you’ve taken hundreds of photos you’ll want to use some software like Adobe Lightroom to tag your photos before you upload them all to Flickr.

Load all your race photos into Lightroom, open up the ‘Library’ module, and find the keyword window over to the left – take a look at the screenshot below.

First up, select all of your photos from the race and add the keyword tags ‘42run’ and the name of the race to all of them. These are the tags that 42run uses to find your photos on Flickr.

Next, the fun part. You need to go through all the photos one at a time and tag each one with the bib numbers of the people in the photos. This enables the runners to find photos of themselves. With a bit of practice, you can tag about 500 photos like this in an hour, especially if you brew youself some strong coffee beforehand.

You’re now ready to batch upload your photos to Flickr using Flickr Uploadr or whatever software you prefer. When you’re done, all of your tags will be visible in Flickr, and 42run will be able to find them.

This beautiful morning we were snapping Santas at the annual London Santa Run in Battersea Park – photos will be up very soon.  We’ve never seen so many Santas – but we have to ask the question, where did they park all their reindeer?