Over the last two years, I have come up with many ways that I make my life easier when I am trying to put together my Project Life layouts. Last year, I posted about how I use Dropbox and Lightroom together to organize my photos by week. That work has made a world of difference in my life. Today, I want to share with you how I go about choosing the pictures I want to use for each Project Life layout, using Lightroom to make the process easier.

Step 1: I navigate to the folder for the week I am working on. Under “Collections” in Lightroom, I go the the PL 2015 stack and select the week folder. Because of the set up work I’ve done, all of the photos that I have from that week show up on my screen.

Step 2: Instead of looking at the thumbnails of all of the photos for the week, I double click on the first photo and that brings it up as a single photo that I am looking at. You can see the thumbnails in the filmstrip below the larger image.

Step 3: I begin navigating through the photos using the arrow keys to move forwards and backwards. This is where my little “trick” comes into play. While I am navigating through the photos, when I see a photo I want to include for the week, I click “B.” By clicking the B key, the photo is added to the “Quick Collection” section of Lightroom. A quick dialog box will pop up telling you the picture was added to the quick collection, and a small icon will appear on the picture in the filmstrip below. I navigate through all of the photos for the week, and quickly pick the ones that I want to use, adding them to the quick collection.

Step 4: Once I’ve made it through all of the pictures, I go back to the Catalog and click on the “Quick Collection.” Automatically, I will see all of the photos that I have selected to use for the week. From here, I can edit the pictures, and then open them in Photoshop to create my layouts.

Once I figured out about the trick of clicking the b key, I found that I was saving a ton of time in my photo selecting and editing workflow. Instead of working out of a group of 40+ photos, I pick the ones that I really want to use and work with them. It seems like a small change, but I have found that this small change makes my workflow easier. I hope it does the same for you!