Last week, I was Wiesbaden, Deutschland, hanging out with fellow photo geek Patrick Lenz. We ran about, took lots of pictures, and traded notes about both photography and Lightroom. Wiesbaden was a lot of fun, especially since it’s off the beaten path for tourists. As we traded tips and tricks for using Lightroom, Patrick showed me some really nice little tricks to working with Lightroom, including a few ways to really speed up metadata entry.

Photo of Wiesbaden. See more in my Wiesbaden Flickr set

You probably know that you can enter metadata for a group of photos at once by selecting them all in Grid View and then adding a title or caption for all of them at once. But what if you want to reuse a title or a caption somewhere else? Have you been using Copy and Paste? You can stop now. Just click on the Title label, and your recently used titles will pop up. Here’s an example:

This little trick works on captions and it even works further down the metadata list where you can set IPTC location data. Here’s another example where you can see recently used country labels:

I’ll bet that some of you knew that you could do this. But after using Lightroom since it was released, this is the first time that I have run into these little gems, and Patrick found them simply by experimentation, so maybe this will be new to some of you as well.

Even if you knew these tricks, here’s another tip that I bet most of you haven’t found. If you are putting in captions for multiple photographs at a time, you can skip clicking around in the library view or in the filmstrip to move to the next or previous image. Instead, just hit Command-Right Arrow or Command-Left Arrow. You can use this to quickly caption a set of images in one smooth flow.

It’s funny what you can learn just by trading tips with other users of a program. You can think you’re pretty good and then, in just 10 minutes, somebody else can show you some little trick that will make using the application just that much easier. Thanks Patrick!