Collections are, along with keywords, one of the central tools in Lightroom Classic for organizing your work with photos. While folders indicate where a file is stored, collections let you group photos together to work with them, regardless of which folder or even which disk they're on.
What are collections?
A collection is a set of photos grouped together within Lightroom Classic for a specific purpose: a project, a selection to edit, a delivery to a client, a presentation, a publication.
A diferencia de las carpetas, una colección no mueve ni copia los archivos: simplemente los reúne dentro del catálogo. Una misma fotografía puede seguir estando en su carpeta original de siempre y, al mismo tiempo, formar parte de una o varias colecciones.
What are keywords for?
Collections are for organizing your work, not for describing what's in the photos — that's the job of keywords. They're useful, for example, for:
- bringing together the final selection from a photo session;
- putting together the set of photos that goes to a client or a delivery;
- preparing images for an exhibition or a presentation;
- organizing a project that combines photos from different dates or folders;
- temporarily setting aside a group of photos to edit them together.
Types of collections in Lightroom Classic
Lightroom Classic offers three ways to organize collections, each with a different purpose.
Regular collections
They're static collections: you add photos manually, one at a time or in groups, and they stay there until you decide to remove them. It's the simplest type of collection, and also the most flexible for organizing your own working order.
Smart Collections
Instead of adding photos by hand, a smart collection is defined by rules: for example, "rating 4 stars or higher and keyword contains Portrait". Lightroom Classic automatically updates the collection's contents as new photos meet (or stop meeting) those rules. They're ideal for views you want to keep always up to date without any manual work.
Collection Sets
A collection set doesn't contain photos directly: it's a container folder that groups other collections (regular, smart, or even other sets) to keep everything organized. They're useful once the number of collections grows and it makes sense to organize them by project, by year, or by client.
A photo can belong to several collections at once
A single photo can be, simultaneously, in as many collections as needed. For example, a photo from a wedding session could be part of:
- the final delivery collection for the client;
- a "Best photos of the year" smart collection;
- a themed "Details" collection inside a wedding collection set.
Esto es exactamente lo contrario de lo que ocurre con las carpetas: un archivo solo puede estar en una carpeta a la vez, pero puede pertenecer a cualquier cantidad de colecciones.
What if a photo doesn't belong to any collection?
It's entirely possible: there's no technical rule requiring every photo in the catalog to be in at least one collection. However, it's not recommended to leave photos completely outside of any collection, especially in large catalogs: those photos become harder to find and to bring into any workflow, since they don't show up in any organized view beyond the general list or a folder search.
Keeping at least one reference collection (for example, one organized by year, or a smart collection that captures everything not yet classified) helps ensure that no photo ends up completely "lost" within the catalog.
How photos are ordered within collections
What gets ordered, in both cases, is not the list of collections but the photos each collection contains. In both a regular collection and a smart collection, the photos inside it can be sorted by Lightroom Classic's standard criteria: by file name, by capture date, by rating, by metadata, among others.
The difference lies in custom ordering: only within regular collections can you drag and drop photos to define a manual, arbitrary order that doesn't depend on any metadata field. This is especially useful for building a narrative sequence — for example, the order in which photos will be shown in a presentation or a book — something that isn't possible within a smart collection, because both its content and the order of the photos in it always depend on the rules that define it.
Collections and keywords: two complementary ways to organize
Keywords describe what's in a photo. Collections group photos together to work with them. Neither replaces the other: a well-thought-out keyword structure later makes it easier to build smart collections based on those keywords, and a regular collection can bring together photos with completely different keywords if the grouping criterion is something else (for example, all the photos from the same delivery).
Smart collections based on keywords: a limitation to keep in mind
If, over time, you've been assigning keywords to your photos — for example, a person's name — you can use a smart collection to automatically group all the photos that have that keyword. For example, you could create a smart collection with the rule "Keywords contains Juan Pérez" to bring together all the photos of that person.
However, this has a limitation when the rule searches for loose words instead of the exact keyword. If the rule searches for "Juan" or "Pérez" (either one), the collection will also include photos of anyone named Juan and anyone with the last name Pérez, even if they're not related at all. And if instead the rule requires both words — "Juan" and "Pérez" —, the collection can end up including photos of someone named "Juan José Pérez" too, who is a different person, since Lightroom doesn't let you search for the exact phrase: it searches by words.
On top of that, like any smart collection, it also doesn't support a custom order: the order of the photos it groups always depends on a metadata field, never on manual dragging.
Para estos casos, Keywords Manager permite crear colecciones comunes directamente a partir de las keywords, evitando esta ambigüedad y permitiendo además el orden manual que las colecciones inteligentes no admiten. También permite recrear el árbol completo de keywords como un árbol de colecciones equivalente, replicando toda la jerarquía de una sola vez.
As a collection is used over time — a session, a trip, a months-long project — it tends to accumulate additional information that's worth keeping on hand together with the photos: trip notes, a budget, comments about editing decisions, instructions for a delivery. Lightroom Classic doesn't natively offer a way to attach this kind of information directly to a collection.
Comments in Collections is a plugin for Lightroom Classic that lets you add comments to collections as plain text, text documents, or spreadsheets, accessible directly from the collection instead of scattered across loose files on the hard drive.
What is a collection in Lightroom Classic?
It's a set of photos grouped within the catalog to work with them, regardless of which folder they're stored in.
What's the difference between a collection and a folder?
A folder indicates where a file is physically stored. A collection only groups references to the photos within the catalog, without moving or copying them.
What's the difference between a regular collection and a smart collection?
A regular collection is built by adding photos manually. A smart collection is defined with rules and updates itself as photos meet those conditions.
What is a collection set?
It's a container folder that groups other collections (regular, smart, or other sets) to keep them organized.
Can a photo be in more than one collection?
Yes, with no limit. A single photo can belong to as many collections as needed at the same time.
Does a photo have to be in some collection?
It's not mandatory, but it's not recommended to leave photos completely outside of any collection, since they become harder to find and to bring into any workflow.
Can collections be sorted by date or by name?
Yes, both regular and smart collections support Lightroom Classic's standard sorting criteria (name, date, rating, etc.).
Can you set a manual, custom order?
Yes, but only in regular collections. Smart collections don't support manual ordering because their content depends on automatic rules.