I hate to say it but it’s true! Over the last two weeks we made the commitment and set ourselves to the task of saddling up in front of the computer and keywording every one of our over 87,000 images that we have on our system.

I have always just avoided the brain numbing task and convinced myself that it was really an unnecessary and tedious exercise. Well, actually I was correct about it being tedious, but no sooner did we finish and it showed it’s worth.

Our entire library of images (both digital and those images on film that over the years we have deemed important enough to scan) reside in Lightroom. These days we are actually spending more time in Lightroom than even Photoshop. It has become our MAIN workspace and for the most part I love it. It certainly does help with tasks such as keywording. I shudder to think how long it would have taken to accomplish this task without such a program. Actually without it, the task probably would have simply not happened. AND without it the keywording would not be as useful!

Both of our stock agencies require submitted images to be keyworded. But beyond that, a couple of days ago we got a request for some sample food & drink images. Before we had keyworded, the task of pulling together samples and getting them off to a client would have taken a couple of hours; trying to remember what we had done in the past and where it resided. With this request coming in just as we finished the keywording process, we were able to pull up everything we had ever done (of value) in less than 30 seconds and made a quick and easy selection of about 25 images, popped over to the Web Module in Lightroom, and with a template we had made about a year ago, exported and uploaded a web gallery in about 5 minutes, sent a link off to the client and went about the rest of our day.

So.. now that the task is done, and all new imagery will be keyworded as it comes into the system, the speed at which we can find images will really illustrate the power of this amazingly arduous but highly beneficial task!

Our advice?…. sit down, set yourself to it… and just power through till it’s done! It will pay off, and once it’s done, if you make it part of your workflow from now on, it really is not very painful!