I figured I’d throw some suggestions out there for birders who take pictures or people who take pictures and happen to have birds in their lenses quite often. I fall under the later category, I’m a photographer who happens to also really enjoy taking pictures of birds. I think it’s partly their beauty, partly the challenge (it’s not as easy as it sounds), and partly to get me out from behind the computer. Let me try and stay on topic, that is for a whole different post. I use Adobe Lightroom to organize my entire photo library. I have all my work (weddings and portraits), my personal (family and friends), and my nature (wildlife and scenic) photos all in one library. Adobe Lightroom is an incredibly powerful organizational tool and I am able to use it to properly handle all of my different photography and make it easy to find pretty much anything I want. I’m going to give a few suggestions for general organization and a new method I’ve just implemented myself that really works well for birders.

To start off I’ll let you know my current LR (Lightroom) catalog, which is what Adobe calls the photo library, as of this writing has over 23 thousand photographs in it. It still runs quite nicely and doesn’t seem to really slow down compared to when I had 100 photos in it. I’m going to generally describe how I organize everything because to describe it thoroughly would take way too long for one post. I import all of my personal and nature photographs into LR and allow LR to organize them into folders by date. I then use collection sets, collections, and smart collections to organize everything so that I can actually find stuff. Keywording is also another very important (although time consuming) step I use to be able to locate a particular photo. If anybody would be interested in me describing that more, mention it in the comments and I’ll be happy to do that in a future post.

Now, onto how this can be helpful for birders. The key is using LR’s ability to have nested (hierarchical) keywords. I’ve basically created the keyword structure that matches my favorite bird identification book, or in my case iPhone App called iBird Explorer. Below is a screen shot of how my keywords look in LR, I’ve only expanded a few to show the structure, the entire list expanded would be a bit long but you should be able to see how it works.

As you can see above the main keyword is “Birds”, nested inside of that keyword are different likenesses (ex. “LIKE_HAWK”), following with categories of that likeness (“FALCONS”, “HAWKS EAGLES AND KITES”, “VULTURES”), followed by the actual species (“Bald Eagle”, “Northern Harrier”, “Osprey” etc.). There are a few advantages with this structure. First, it’s easy to take a look at what you have by different groupings, second if you apply the keyword “Bald Eagle” to a photograph LR automatically applies it’s parent or containing keyword to the photo. Following the “Bald Eagle” keyword LR will apply the “HAWKS EAGLES AND KITES” keyword, then the “LIKE-HAWK” keyword and finally the “BIRDS” keyword. So the photograph I have added the “Bald Eagle” keyword to automatically has 3 additional descriptive keywords applied to it. Once the structure has been created all I have to do is apply the keyword for the actual bird only and the rest is done. You can download the keyword set I’ve created for use in Lightroom here

The next step is taking all that info and organizing it into something I can easily view. I do this by using the “collection sets” and “smart collections”. Collection sets are the containers that can hold additional collection sets and the smart collection inside them. Smart collections are groups of images based on criteria. I created a collection set for each of the groupings that match the keywords. The final step is to create a smart collection based on keywords. I’ve chosen to create the collection of images down to the last grouping before the individual species. For example I’ve created the smart collection called “Hawks Eagles and Kites” that adds all images that have that keyword applied to them. You can see that structure below and a sampling of the images in that smart collection.

Now that I’ve created this setup, the only thing I have to do to organize my bird photographs is to import them and keyword them with the species of bird. LR then handles the rest without me having to do any additional work. I can even select a smart collection of birds such as the “Hawks Eagles and Kits” group and type in a search for, let say, “Red-Tailed” and it will filter that set of images to show only red-tailed hawks. Click the image below to see that in action.

It took about 2-3 hours to create everything and organize it properly but it now saves me a ton of time while importing new bird photos and keeping them incredibly organized. I think my next project will be to go through each bird type and toss the old “not-so-good” shots from years ago, although it’s always fun to look back and see what I was shooting back then. I hope this was at least a bit informative and if you have a different way of handling your organization, whether with Adobe Lightroom or another program, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Ray