I’m a little late to the party when it comes to using Collections within Lightroom.  My friend, workshop partner and Adobe Certified Expert Nat Coalson has been recommending their use to me for at least two years but until last week I’d never really seen the benefit.  Now that my eyes are finally open, I thought I’d share how I’m using Quick Collections with all you good folks.  I hope it’s helpful.

Last week I put off working on a large submission because I just wasn’t looking forward to all the work involved in assembling it.  Yeah, I know – it’s a good problem to have and I shouldn’t be such a slacker but frankly, I am.  At any rate, I started thinking about how I could streamline the process when I hit on a genius idea: create a Quick Collection of the images to submit and then export them all as properly sized jpegs.

It’s easy to add photos to a Quick Collection.  As you scroll through the filmstrip all you have to do is press the “B” button and they’re automatically added.  Once your Quick Collection is complete, select all the images and export them using whatever settings are needed.  When you’re done, you can remove all the photos from the Quick Collection and you’re ready to do it all over again when you receive the next submission request.

Another option would be to make a new Collection for each submission.  This way you’ll always have a record of each submission in the event that you need to resubmit the images, or for later reference when you’re making a fresh submission and don’t want to send duplicate images.

How do you use Lightroom Collections to speed up your workflow and make your life easier?