You’ve rated, ranked, added metadata, and done all the stuff you’re supposed to do to help you locate that one photo that you need in a hurry. Now you need to know some of the most important techniques for getting to those photos fast.
Step 1
Let’s say you’re getting ready for a slide presentation to a client and you want to use a shot from one of your trips to Amsterdam (but you’re not sure which shot, or which trip you took it on). Go to the Find panel (in the left-side Panels area). Lightroom automatically searches the folder or collection in which you’re working; to search your entire library, go to the Library panel and click All Photographs. Now, in the Find panel, from the upper-left pop-up menu choose Any Text (see Figure 1) to search everything—filenames, keywords, metadata, and more. Then click in the search field, type a search word ("amsterdam," in my example) and press the Return (PC: Enter) key. You can narrow your text search by choosing search options from the pop-up menus, as shown in the figure.