bettis1 Loc: Texas

My first foray into digital photography was back in 2004-05 with a little 5 megapixel Olympus point and shoot. Back then I just dumped the images into my computer in the Pictures file with little thought to an organization. Later, I tried several various photo organizing/modifying softwares, most of which were discontinued. When I first loaded Lightroom I made the common rookie mistake of just loading all of my Picture file into LR without first doing any organization. It resulted in a hodge-podge that continued to grow each time that I downloaded a card.

Over the years I have become comfortably proficient in the development area of LR. But in that same time, I have spent enough to buy a good lens on various CD's, videos, books, classes etc. to help me organize the Catalog but with no success. Most of those instructions (all from very knowledgable and skilled instructors) have still left me struggling. The majority of them suggested using a date format. I tried that for a while and didn't find it any more usable than the alphabetical hodge podge that I already had. The date format seemed to work fine for many professional photographers, particularly those who needed to differentiate between this years trip to the Galapagos from last year's trip and the year before. Name format seemed to work well for wedding photogs who only had to remember the groom's last name but was sadly lacking in function for me.

I think that I have finally found a simple system that I can utilize for my style of photography and it is a simple folder tree consisting of the following primary branches: Animals; People; Places; Things; Macro; Miscellaneous; Test Shots. Each of these can include the various identifiers for the specific shoot. I spent a day dragging the unsorted mess into those folders and now I don't dread losing things or wasting time searching anymore. In my case, at least, simple is better. I hope that it may be helpful for someone else who is struggling with the cataloging function of Lightroom.

Bob

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Congrats on finding happiness in your organizational decisions...FWIW (which may be nothing I guess) this is how I've got my images catalogued:

First, I rename them using the "date + short name identifier" process - e.g. - 2016-08-21_LAZoo_nnn (where the "nnn" is the sequential number series applied during renaming. LR will do this, I know, though I use A Better Finder Renamer (on Mac) to rename them before importing. The reason I think renaming this way is that even without the catalog, if I have some clue as to what I am looking for I can search based on the date the image was taken and perhaps a clue (like "Zoo").

The LR catalog itself allows for you to virtually have one image in multiple folders, as it were. To use your example, if you took pictures of Grandma Emma while visiting the New Orleans zoo, those images could be displayed in both the People and the Places catalog folders. And if you use the naming convention I mention above, you could have a smart folder set up such that any images with the word "Zoo" in the name could automatically be part of that folder as well.

A somewhat silly example, perhaps, but the point is that by taking advantage of the ability to have a given image in multiple catalog folders (without duplicating the actual image file) is something that can be quite useful. Of course, with the facial recognition capability of LR today any photos with Grandma Emma in them could also be automatically found in another smart folder looking for that piece of metadata.

Just some thoughts - hopefully not to confuse things further.

cmoroney Loc: Pasadena, California

I mostly shoot on trips, so the top-level of my LR catalogue is organized by place (and there may be several layers of places such as California/Los Angeles/Downtown), and then underneath each of these folders I have the yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd structure which is generated automatically by LR. This way if I've been to a place more than once (Germany for example), I can look at Germany/<town_name> and then see the "2011" and "2014" folders.

I then have a separate top-level folder (very informatively called Miscellaneous) populated with several sub-folders for other photos that weren't taken on a specific trip.

So my folder structure is definitely geared around travel locations but this works very nicely for me. I then use keywords to label people who appear in the pictures, the subject of the photo (wildlife, sunsets, etc) and so on.

This is so much nicer than the old Aperture/iPhoto structure of separate events. But I still have a lot of photos in Aperture that need to be migrated. If Southern California ever has a rainy day again, that's what i'll work on!

lloydl2 Loc: Gilbert, AZ

Ben willmore from creativelive sells a keyword hierarchical structure bases on who what where when.....it will allow you to find any photo in seconds

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

I sort mine by year, then by category--eg. Arizona trip, county fair, etc.

RichardRW Loc: West coast of Florida

Can you give us a link to creative live please. My google search resulted in a wide variety of various subject matters.

lloydl2 Loc: Gilbert, AZ

Www.creativelive.com

http://digitalmastery.com/keywords/ this is a better link!