Jack 13088 Loc: Central NY

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/ Will get you an absolutely free well written quick start guide for either/or LrC . Follow the “start here” arrow.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

Marcia Byrd Loc: Georgia

This is a big help. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

Marcia Byrd Loc: Georgia

Looks like another good place to learn. Thank you.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

You probably want to remember to use <quote reply> when responding to specific posts.

skyjump Loc: niagarafalls

although not free Phil Steele has a video Lightroom course that's easy to understand and very complete helped me a lot https://www.steeletraining.com/tutorials/lreasy/index.html

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

LRCC wants to save your photos to the Adobe Cloud. It’s great if I’m traveling and using LR on my phone or iPad but when I’m at home I use Lightroom Classic. For import you can either use “copy”, just make sure the right panel settings are correct where you want them, or you can manually copy them to the right location and use “add” to import them. While I do have a standard folder structure I use it’s really not that important if you learn to use keywords and collections to logically organize your library.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

Wow Cliff; tis made me dizzy. If you want a directory (not really needed) of , landscapes, family etc. Use smart folders in Lightroom.

I do not understand your “Picture Upload” & “My Lightroom Pictures” directory structure. Why two? why not one based on a date structure, As Paul says whom you advised following? Smart folders can be atomically updated used keywords.

If you are used to doing things this way, It may be easy for you, but a system with folders by date is so much easier, at least for me and a lot of others. I don't think a portable drive is a good way to go for a working drive, it is slower than an internal one. External can be used for backups.

All my photos are on an internal drive named "photos". Light room keeps the catalog in it own place unless you change it. Under photos, I have sub directories 2019, 2020, 2021 etc. Under the year I have subdirectories, 0121, 0221, 0321 etc. Under one of those I mat have a specialty folder, something like "031521 Clovis water polo match". Using keywords, etc., I can find any photo in a matter of seconds, or I can just click on a smart folder. After adding the directory to my computer, that is where my photos are copied to, After copying, I use a program like faststone image viewer to cull the obvious bad shots (did I just say bad, no one does that), then I import that directory into lightroom.

If someone sees one of my photos and wants one, I just ask for the file name, title or whatever and I can find in in seconds. I have only sold a few, directly from a sight, but say the see something I've posted elsewhere, I just ask the questions.

The op is already confused and discouraged, so as you say following Paul's advice is a great one, using a date based structure is part o f his recommendations. Buy, one must understand how their computer system handles first. Once one understands this, it is SO much easier.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

FYI...

While it's possible to configure LR to do so, it actually isn't necessary to handle downloads. You can set up folders and do image downloads into them simply using your computer's operating system.

I do not use modern Macs, so won't presume to tell you the steps doing that. But it's bound to be pretty easy.

When doing downloads always COPY the images to the location on your computer. Never MOVE them. By copying you leave the original on the memory card, just as a precaution until you can confirm the copying has been done correctly and all the images are safely on your computer. Later when you're sure all is safe, you can simply format the memory card in your camera to "erase" everything on it, prepping it to take new images.

Once the images have been copied to your computer, start up Lightroom and have it Import from whatever location you chose (after you click "Import" there is a dialog in the upper left corner that lets you select the location to import from).

You also can do backups to external drives (or wherever) simply using your computer operating system, although it's also possible to have LR make backup copies during Import.

All a LR Import does is make a record of the images, wherever they're located. It doesn't actually move the image files at all. The files are never actually "inside" LR. It's just a notation and a preview of the image you see there. Once they're Imported, you can work with the images, but are never directly making changes to the image file. There are all sorts of things you can do with the images in LR. You can rename them, straighten them, adjust the exposure, tweak the color, etc., etc. But all these things are NOT being done directly to the image file. All the stuff you've done is recorded to a little "sidecar" file that LR saves alongside the image file. (An exception is renaming the file... which actually effects the original. However, if wanted for some reason you can have LR remember the original file name.

When you "Export" from LR the changes you made are applied... but usually only to a new image file LR creates. With RAW files this is always the case... the RAW file is never changed in any way. But with JPEGs LR will ask if you want to create a new file or overwrite the original, and normally I'd recommend creating a new file in case you ever want to go back to the original for some reason.

You can even make "virtual copies" of an image file in LR and have different versions... for example maybe one in full color, another in black and white and a third with a vintage sepia tone finish.

When you do an Export you are given a lot of options. You can choose the size, the file type, the destination, can have LR add a watermark or signature, can have the image sharpened appropriately for different types of display, etc., etc. As a time save, I added some plug-ins to my LR to do fairly automated uploads to galleries on websites.

People learn differently. I learn best from books. Others may need to take an actual class. Still others can get what they need from online seminars. YouTube videos can be helpful to learn specific actions, but personally I don't find them very good for general overview of how products like LR work. There's always the question of how "expert" someone is on YouTube, too. Maybe they know even less than me!

rbest77701

I will just throw my $.02 in here about importing. I use an external drive for my photos, so how I do it, is create a folder for the year and name it Master Catalog 2022, then create folders for each month in there. Then when I do a shoot (I do landscape photography) I create a folder for the location. I copy all the photos from the SD card into the appropriate folder, then I import from that folder on the external drive into LR. If for some reason I ever need to move my images (which I have), having them all nested under a year makes it easier to point LR to the missing images. Anyway, that is just how I do it, which doesn't make it right or wrong, just another way to do it.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

Normally I agree with you 110%, but not this time. As a file organizer, I believe using Lr for this job, in one pass, is much faster and more efficient than doing the same job three times on your own. YMMV!

Marcia Byrd Loc: Georgia

I just took a look at her site. Looks helpful. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Marcia Byrd Loc: Georgia

That makes sense. I do have an external HD. Thanks

Robg

You've already gotten lots of good advice, particularly from CHG_CANON who, IMHO, is the resident Lightroom Classic expert.

Only a few things to add - One, don't be very worried that you'll mess things up with Lightroom Classic. Every visual change you make to a photo is recorded in a separate file so that the original photo remains unchanged. (Note that changes to EXIF data, like keywords or dates are recorded in the physical file.) It is possible to delete a photo permanently, but when you ask Lightroom to delete a photo, it will ask you if you want it deleted from the disk drive or just removed from the catalog. If you do the latter, the photo remains on your disk drive but you just won't see it in Lightroom Classic. You can always import it into Lightroom Classic again later.

Two, and this repeats what others have said, your actual folder structure and naming conventions that you use on your disk drive for the folders and files is not very important. The only situation under which that becomes important is if you were to stop using Lightroom Classic because then you will need to rely on that folder structure to find a particular photo.

And, lastly, Lightroom Classic gives you many orthogonal ways of organizing your photos. By orthogonal I mean that each way you organize is independent of the other way and each way you organize is hierarchical in nature. The first one of these is the actual folder structure. But because there are so many other ways to organize, it becomes less and less important. Another way to organize is to use Collections. Although a photo can be only in one physical location, e.g., a folder, it can be in many Collections. Collections can be grouped together into Collection Sets so that they also behave in a hierarchical fashion. Another way to organize is through keywording. Keywords can also be hierarchical. For example, I have a geographical set of keywords with countries at the highest level, then states or provinces, then cities, and in some cities particular buildings. As a result, when I assign the keyword Philadelphia to a photo, it automatically also gets the keywords Pennsylvania and USA. Finally, you can use Labels (shown as colors) and Stars to organize photos. How you use them is up to you. The advantage of these two organizing tools is that using them is very fast, a click or two per photo. Say I want to pick out 10 photos to send to someone, but I have several hundred to choose from. If I'm not currently using the yellow label, I might use that and as I browse through the several hundred candidates on my first pass, I can quickly label a subset with yellow. Then I filter to see only the yellow labeled ones and discover that I've still got 23 candidates. Now it is easy to compare these 23 with each other, and remove the yellow label from the ones I rule out until I eventually get down to the 10 I want.

Bushpilot Loc: Minnesota

The basic rule of Lightroom is to do everything inside Lightroom. There is some really good courses here, https://www.greylearning.com/collections.