CHG_CANON wrote:
Folders are just the most basic level of organization on your harddrive. You'd be better served just hiding the entire folder display from your LR desktop.
Instead, begin to display and work and think about your images inside LR using 'collections'. This starts by going to your 'Navigator', ie the left-hand panel display in the Library, at the top of the section you've screen captured showing your folders. Right-click and de-select the folders and click the Collections.
Collections are like folders, but they're virtual and entirely inside LR. They also allow you to 'hold' a single image inside of 1 or many unique collections. You can create virtual copies of images and stick those in collections too; the intelligence of LR manages all the virtual copies (of copies of copies) back to that single original image file that resides in a single folder on disk.
Consider both Collection Sets and Collections. A Collection Set is a collection of collections. You can't change a collection to a collection set, but you can drag n drop collections into a collection set. So, you have full flexibility to organize your collections and to redo that organization if / when needed. If you delete a collection, the images remain as-is, including all the multiple collections where they exist, except for just the collection being deleted.
You might have a Collection Set = National Parks. Then, maybe collections that represent each park's images. There's no need for collection YNP2014 and YNP2016. Of course you can, but inside a collection Yellowstone NP, you can use the Metadata filters to filter by year, or combinations of attributes. As you continue to build your library (database) of your images, all the multiple visits to Yellowstone and similar parks are organized together.
You might have a completely different Collection Set of Wyoming, with collections for each city and / or Vacation-2014. Although this cross-filing organization at first seems redundant, it is completely virtual. You could even have a Collection Set of Vacations, with YNP2014 as a collection inside this set. There's a set-up effort, but once you have a content-based organization that fits your needs, you can think of finding your images in numerous ways, whichever fits your needs.
Beyond collections, it's critical to keyword your images. Keywords give quick search terms and additional filter options. Put everything in that makes sense, such as: city, state, park, people's names, restaurant name, rock formation, flower name, so forth. The EXIF data covers the date, camera and lens that you can filter on without needing to include these as keywords.
The 'hardest' part of getting started with keywords and collections is the rigor of doing this admin work. It has to become part of your workflow, maybe after initially importing the images. It takes the same time to keyword 1 image as to select 100 images together and to apply the same keyword to them all at the same time. I do the keywords even before culling as deleting the images with keywords costs me nothing.
Maybe you like flowers and you toss the flower images from all your various trips into that 'All flowers' collection too. You also should have flower (or flowers) as a keyword. The more distinct keywords you apply, the more different search and filtering options you empower within your LR database. With all your flowers in a common collection, images that span years and different cameras and different lenses, you can use a keyword filter to look at all the daisy images inside this collection, then maybe all the daisies from the same lens on the multiple cameras used. And so forth.
Folders are just the most basic level of organizat... (
show quote)
I will be bookmarking this thread for my summer project! Thank you CHG_CANON.