Tip of the Day: how to Auto Advance when culling your photos in Adobe Lightroom

Capturing photos is one thing but culling them in or out is as important and can be even more tedious. By culling in/out I am referring to the process where one defines the keepers from the rejects. Adobe Lightroom is a powerful tool for managing our photos and also offers a few ways to cull them in or out. In this short episode, I am showing you how one can quickly navigate through a series of photos during the culling process.

Tag your photos in Lightroom

While this will work no matter which Lightroom module you are in, you will most likely be in the Library module when culling your photos. Adobe Lightroom offers your three main tags to mark your photos and each variant can be used on any photo:

Flag

An image can be either marked as Unflagged (default value), Flagged or Rejected.

Rating

An image can be rated from 1 to 5 stars.

Color label

There are 5 options for the color label: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple. Notice there is no keyboard shortcut for the last colour. Some workarounds can be found on the web and are OS specific.

Keyboard Shortcuts

To cull your photos quicker, I would recommend using the keyboard shortcuts. You can find them in the Photo menu:

 Note that while they can be very creative at Adobe to develop some amazing software like Lightroom and Photoshop, when it comes down to shortcuts, they are seriously lacking something. Here they give us 5 colours to choose from but only 4 have a shortcut. It is not new though. If you really want to have one for the purple color label, I have seen some solution on the web but they are OS specific and I could not honestly be bothered.

Tag and move on

By default, once you have tagged your image with whatever mark you like, you will need to move not to the next. This is achieved by either using the keyboard arrow keys or with the mouse. However, if you were to hold the Shift key while applying the keyboard shortcut of the tag of your choice (flag, rating or color label), Lightroom will tag your selected image accordingly and automatically move onto the next one. Here is confirmed by the change in the menu appearance when holding the shift key:

  If you like this effect, you could also use the option “Auto Advance” from the Photo menu.

  You could even enable temporary this feature by pressing the caps lock on your keyboard. While active, the “Auto Advance” will be turned on. This was the tip of the Day and I hope you found it informative. I am personally not a fan of this feature as I’d rather use the filter feature in conjunction with the tags. I will do a video in the future showing my favourite workflow to cull in or out my photographs inside Adobe Lightroom. Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question in the section below.