We're all busy, some more busy than others, and some just busy pretending to be busy. And we all get excited about the fresh batch of images we just shot and can't hardly wait to see them in Lightroom.

So excited in fact that we (yes, me too) often forget to enter any amount of keywords, thinking that we'll get to it later. Well, do you? Really?

One of the reasons we put off entering keywords is the thought that managing a keyword database means we have to have thousands of words and synonyms in perfect organization, with capitalization, without capitalization, in groups and subgroups, species 'n all.

Relax. Just like an image database, keywords take time to build up, unless you buy a pre-generated list which may or may not contain all the words you actually need. And just like an image database, it starts with just a few words. Each image you take can be described by simple keywords. You dont have to figure out all of them in advance. Start with the basics:

Ask yourself, does this image have a predominance of:

color - gender - cities - places - animals - plants - names - subject

You can make your own checklist based on your kind of photography but keep it general enough that you won't spend too much time doing it and therfore are more likely to do it.

Another reason people don't use keywords is simply that they think they can remember where everything is because they have a "system". Poppycock!  I know I've lost a lot of time waiting for someone to show me an image that "was just there a moment ago" and I also know Ive lost a lot of time looking for my own images. Some say they never need to find images later because once they are done with the shoot and handed the file off to the client then they're done. Well if that was true, why do they keep them?

It actually takes very little time to enter keywords in Lightroom and assign them to images. The first opportunity you have is the import dialog. Pretty much a no brainer if you're shooter of an event kind (as opposed to someone who shoots occasionally, and in multiple locations on the same card) Just don't forget to check that import dialog the next time you import images. Lightroom tries to help by remembering them for you.

The next opportunity is after import in the Library module. In version 2 on the right side you will see the Keywording Panel or the Keyword List. Select one or more images in the grid and enter a keyword in the panel. Thats it!

To add existing keywords to images you can simply select the image and click the check box next to the keyword in the List. To create a hierarchy of keywords, you can drag and drop one keyword on to another, but thats another post on another day. For now, just get in the habit of creating and using the keywords you have.