When you need to get to the image that you want very, very quickly, you are going to be using a filter. Now, it is a little different here in Lightroom 2. Let me just show you Lightroom 1. In the earlier version of Lightroom you had a fine panel her eon the left and then you would activate it to be able to find text and you type in some text here or you can isolate by specific date and if you wanted to filter on over the existing area here, you needed to do it down here in this panel. And I think that that kind of got a little lost and made it really hard for people to get into the filtering portion of Lightroom.

Now, in the new version of Lightroom, that has been replaced. You cannot find any of this here. This is actually a lot smaller. And you can not find any of it here either. In order for you to be able to get into the filtering section, you got to have to go into the view menu and then set the view menu, you will see that you have a show filter view here. You can click on that and now, you have a giant filter that shows up and you have a different ways to be able to filter these texts. First of, you can start by filtering text and you have file name, copy name, the title, and keywords, and the EXIF information or metadata.

So you can set a rule that says, either contains or does not contain or starts with or end with. So, if I wanted to I can go ahead here and say contains and I can say, or let us say nutcracker and that will automatically bring up the entries that I have that have the word nutcracker in them. If I wanted to refine that, I can go ahead and click on the refine and that will add additional things that I can filter against. So if I wanted my nutcracker pictures and I only wanted the pictures that were one star or higher, notice that all of them show up. But if I can click on this drop down and lower, there is only one image.

So, it lets me kind of drill down a little bit more into the images themselves. So what I will do from here is I am just going to go ahead and click on refine again and that is going to turn that off. You can also filter your information by metadata. I am going to go ahead and click on the metadata tab here and that is going to bring up a filter list that you can use based on the metadata that sits inside of the image. For example, I have this image selected and if I click on this drop down for metadata, you will notice that there is a ton of information in here, the dimensions, when it was captured, what the exposure was, what focal link I used, so there is a lot of things that the camera thinks at the moment of capture and stores all of that information in the file. You can use that and have it be something that you use to filter down your images.

So like for example, if I wanted to find all of the images that I shot with at 14 to a 24 range, this would be a good way to be able to do that. If I wanted to find anything that I shot between the 17 range and the 55 range that would show me that. If I wanted to show all the images that I shot with a 50 mm, notice that shows up here. They are my shots in 50 mm and all of the images that are shot with that. It also lets you set up different cameras, so images that I have shot with the D300 and with my D200, and you can start by then.

So, you can drill down further and further and further. Notice that it is selecting all of this stuff. So for example, if I wanted to finds out all of the D3s that I short with a 24 to 70, this would allow me to be able to drill down and get into those sections. So it is a great way to be able to do that. I am going to go ahead and click on this and notice that you can set up a series of different presets as well. So for example, if I wanted to make sure that I kept all of my 24 to 70s that I shoot with my D3s, as a preset I can get and click on this custom and save current settings as a new preset. And I will call this D3 with 24-70.

Now, I am going back over to the text and if I wanted to go see something, let us go ahead and just, let us go and turn this off, and now, we are going to move somewhere else. I will go to my collections, and now I want to turn on that menu. So I am going to go to my filter view again and I can drop down here and you will notice that I have a D3 with a 24-70. If I click on that, automatically shows all of that information. So they have made filtering a lot better that it used to be in earlier versions of Lightroom. Make sure you check that out.