Today’s daily tip Podcast brought to you by ScopeBox. Check them out at www.scopebox.com.

Welcome to the TDMD Daily Tip Podcast. My name is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude. Today’s tip is for Adobe Lightroom 1.3 in how to use the survey mode.

In the survey mode, you can arrange selected photographs the way you want to, kind of like and the light table. However it’s not as flexible as for example the light table in aperture.

So let’s checkout the survey mode, okay here in the Lightroom. We’re in the library mode and to get to the library mode you click on G. And basically to get to the survey mode, what you need to do is you need to select the files that you want to survey. So for example in this case I’m going to survey these photographs. Now the way I selected them is by clicking on them and holding on the command key which will go ahead and select all the ones that I clicked on.

Now to get into the actual survey mode, there are couples of ways. You can go into the toolbar here, now if you don’t see the toolbar, click on the letter T, that toggles toolbar on and off as you can see appearing and disappearing here. The fourth icon right here, this is your survey, if you click on that. That will take you to the survey mode. The other way to get to the survey mode is by going to view, click on survey and the last way is by clicking on the N key.

So let’s get to the survey mode by clicking on the letter N. Now here we are in the survey mode and as you can see it’s showing only the files that I want to see. I can add more files to the survey mode by selecting them in the filmstrips. So for example I can hold out my command key and select this file and you can see that it added them. I can easily remove files if you’d want to put your mouse over any photograph, if there is an X, you can click on it. You can also hit the command key while clicking on the photograph and then they’ll actually remove them. To move files around. You click on them and then drag them around.

Now I want you to notice something that’s interesting. I’m clicking on the photo, but it’s not moving at all. There is a reason why that’s happening. I have selected previous import or if you select all photographs. Neither are those while I remove it. I’m not sure if that is a bug in Lightroom itself or a feature, but unfortunately if you have all photographs selected or previous import selected. You will not be able to move your images around in the survey mode. You need to be either in a quick selection in a folder, for example my folder right here which is the LA Auto Show or any collection that you may have created.

So for example I’m going to go ahead and click on the 2008 LA Auto Show folder. And now you see my five images are still selected. I’m going to go back to my survey mode. And now if you click in drag, you can see that you can actually move around, arrange them the way you want to.

Now there are limitations to this. You can’t really print the images the way they appear on the light table here. You can’t really move them freely the way you would for example in Apple’s aperture or you can actually overlap images, resize the images. Make them look the way you want to. You cannot do any of that. And I’m hoping Adobe will go ahead and add those features in future versions.

In here you can kind of label them. You can rate them. You can flag them plus in the other feature that is found within Lightroom. So for example if I right mouse click on an image, I can remove from selection. I can open them in a loop. I can see him and find her, so on, so forth.

Well that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed this Podcast. I love to hear from you. If you have a moment please email me at marcelo@thedigitalmediadude.com. So until the next Podcast, this is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude. Cheers.