Using automation features

Galleries and collections can be associated with a series of actions to automate your workflow.

Automatically assigning images to a Collection or a Gallery

In the collection’s or gallery’s More / Automation settings, you can choose to automatically import images to the collection based on their metadata.

For example, you can create a collection named “Landscapes”, and use the Automatically import files that match… feature so that all images that match the keyword search “landscape” will be assigned to the collection.

Matching for images and videos occurs in the very same way as for the internal search in your library. Refer to the help on the internal search for more details!

Note: Images are checked for automatic import upon upload, keywords or author changes and when moved to another library. Check the box Rescan whole library and import matching files to check at once all images in your media library against the keyword search criteria.

Automatically applying pricing profiles or metadata to images

The following example automatically completes keywords and location metadata for images matching the search criteria “Manhattan”, and publishes them to dedicated gallery:

1. Create a new collection ;
2. Set the collection to automatically import images matching the search criteria “Manhattan” ;
3. Set the collection to set the images’ Location to “Manhattan”, City to “New York”, and Country to “USA” ;
4. Set the collection to add the keywords “city, megalopolis, metropolitan area” ;
5. Set the collection to publish the images to a gallery named “Manhattan” ;
6. Done! New images, or images with updated keywords, will be automatically considered for processing.

Metadata processing order

When files are uploaded, metadata are processed in the following order:

1. First, metadata added in the upload form, via the Lightroom plugin or via the API are applied;
2. Then, when the files are published to a gallery at the time of import, the automated actions of that gallery are performed. If a file is published at this stage to new galleries/collections that define their own automations, these are also performed;
3. When a file is being processed (thumbnails generation), its embedded IPTC/XMP metadata are applied according to the chosen setting at upload (Ignore, Embed, etc…);
4. Automated publishing into other galleries or collections based on metadata search, as well as the metadata processing actions that can be defined in those automations, are applied last. Metadata added here does not trigger a re-run of that stage.