Adobe Lightroom

When in Grid view, you’ll find the Filter bar located at the top of the image display area. You can show and hide the Filter bar by pressing the \ key, so if you don’t see it right away press the \ key once to bring it out of hiding.

There are three types of filters—Text, Attribute, and Metadata—found on the Filter bar. You can use them independently or in tandem to drill down into your photo collection. It can’t be understated that the more data you enter in the form of keywords, flags, color labels, and IPTC, the more powerful the Filter bar will become. In other words, the keyword search won’t help you if you don’t first apply keywords to your photos.

Let’s start by taking the Text filter for a test drive.

Step 1.

Click All Photographs in the Catalog panel. This tells Lightroom to display every photo in your catalog. Likewise, if you wanted to apply the filtering to a single folder or collection you would start by clicking on that item to display just those photos.

Step 2.

Click the Text label in the Filter bar. This reveals the Text filter options beneath the bar. By default, it is set to Any Searchable Field and Contains All. Click into the text field and start typing a keyword that you know you have applied. In my case, I’ll search on “glacier”. As soon as you begin typing, Lightroom starts filtering. Any photos that don’t match what you’re entering are removed from view. I only entered “gl” and found all my glacier photos in this catalog.

To exit the filter you can click None in the Filter bar or press Ctrl+L (Mac: Cmd+L). This works on every type of filtering. I’m going to leave my text filter active and drill down further using the Attribute filter.

To use more than one filter in tandem, just hold the Shift key and click another filter type. In this case, I clicked Attribute, which results in the attribute options expanding below the text filter. The Attribute filter allows you to narrow your results based on flag state, rating, color label, and virtual copy vs. master photo.

Back to my example, I’d like to leverage the ratings I’ve applied to only display glacier photos that have been rated 1 star or higher. Here’s how:

Step 3.

Hold the Shift key and click Attribute to expand its options.

Step 4.

Click on the attribute(s) you want to add to the filter. I wanted to use ratings to drill down further, so I clicked the first star so that now only photos with the Glacier keyword that have been rated 1 star or higher are shown.

You can apply more than one attribute filter as well. So, if I wanted to drill down to photos that had a color label applied and/or were virtual copies, I could click those attributes too and make my filter even more specific. I’ll add the red label attribute just to demonstrate.

OK, let’s add the Metadata filter to the mix.

Step 5.

Hold the Shift key and click the Metadata attribute to expand its options. The Metadata filter is comprised of customizable columns that display data stored in the Lightroom catalog. This includes data recorded by your camera at the moment of capture as well as metadata you’ve entered through Lightroom.

When the Metadata filter is expanded, you’ll see the accumulated metadata for the group of photos being displayed. Click on any piece of metadata to drill down to just the photos that match that criterion. So, in my example, the group of photos currently displayed was taken with two different lenses. If I click on the 12.0-24.0 mm f/4.0 in the Lens column, I can drill down to just my wide-angle shots.

Move your cursor over each column and you’ll see a drop-down menu arrow appear next to each column header and another menu arrow appear on the right. Click the header drop-down menu to change the metadata displayed in that column.

The menu on the top-right of each metadata column allows you to remove that column or add a new one. You can add up to eight different columns!

If there is a particular configuration of filtering that you find you use a lot, you can save that as a filter preset. Click the drop-down menu at the right edge of the Filter bar and choose Save Current Settings as New Preset. Give the preset a name and it will be added to the drop-down menu for future use.

The Filter bar is incredibly powerful and customizable and it only becomes more useful over time as you add more and more metadata to your photos. Be sure to experiment to get a feel for all the ways you can use it!