Recently, I was thinking of a certain photo that I have of myself and a musician after a concert. I had imported the image into Lightroom at the time but since it was a one-off image and not taken as a part of a set of images so it didn’t have a dedicated folder to put it in. This was awhile ago and the image wasn’t keyworded or renamed to anything to make it easier to find. I kind of panicked a bit although I knew the file was still there……somewhere.

I started thinking that maybe I had uploaded the image to FLickr at the time so I went looking there to see if I could narrow my search somehow as Flickr might give some clues as to when it was made in the first place. I found out that the photo had been made in 2008. You know when people say “time flies”? Well, when you are trying to find a file from the past, you often find that way more time has gone by than you think. The file that I thought was from 3 or 4 years ago turned out to actually be from 12 years ago! This was the piece of information that I needed to find my file.

In Lightroom, you have some extremely powerful tools designed for this reason. You can search your whole photo library by using various criteria. One of the searchable attributes happens to be the year of the file according to metadata. I simply went into the Library module of Lightroom and called up 2008. That narrowed my search from 66,000 images to 2,000. In only a couple of minutes, I had found my photo and took note of where it resided on my hard drive. If I had keyworded the image in the first place it wouldn’t have taken even that long to find, when will I learn?

I have been a Lightroom user since version 2 which as it turns out was released in mid 2008 so 12 years, and I am still learning little tips and tricks that exist within it. The cataloging part of Lightroom alone is very powerful before you even consider the editing side of the app.