Sometimes we need to find photos that fit very specific criteria. Let’s say for example that I want to find a picture of a flower. I may have hundreds of flowers in my Library, but let’s say I want one that was shot as part of a long exposure, and that I tagged it with the Keywords Flower and Long Exposure. We could start with the Keyword List, but in truth it’s easier just to use the Filter Bar.
1. To open the filter bar, press \ or select it from the View menu>Show Filter Bar.
2. Click on the word Metadata.
3. Change the first column to Keyword. The default is Date, so click on the word Date and select ‘Keyword’ from the list. Depending on the number of Keywords you have, this may take a short while. Select your first keyword from this list. In our case it’s ‘Flower’, and there are 47 keywords tagged with it. (We’re ignoring the copy with 3, which is a child keyword in a heirarchy as it happens).
4. Next change the 2nd column to Keyword also. What will happen is this column will now list the keywords in all the photos that contain ‘Flower’. From our list we can see just one tagged with ‘long exposure’. Clicking this will reduce the number of thumbnails down to just the one photo that contains both keywords.
Of course the key to all this is to put keywords on the images in the first place. You don’t have to keyword everything, unless you shoot stock, but you should definitely tag your selects.
