junglejim1949 wrote:
I am looking at Lr Classic. I have watched several videos which explained several approaches to organizing your photos.
One person stated don't use folders, use collections. Can someone elaborate?
I use folders AND collections. I consider them completely separate concepts.
Folders are fairly well understood by people who use computers because that's one of the primary ways of organizing files (not just image files).
Collections are a concept related to a database. Since the LR catalog is a database collections are applicable there. The database stores the path to image files. It does not store the image files themselves. Since it stores the path, you have to make sure you don't move your images without telling LR where they are now. A collection in LR is just a list of paths to different image files. One important thing to remember is the difference between files in a folder and files in a collection.
Files in a folder are something that you probably know about. It's the computer's way of organizing things.
Files in a collection DO NOT have to be in one folder. They can be anywhere in your computer storage. They CAN all be in a folder, but it's not required. Since a collection is a list of paths, the image files in the collection can be on your main drive, an external drive, or several different folders or drives.
The advantage to collections is that any given image file can be in more than one collection. Files in a folder can be duplicated, but if the file is changed you have to remember which folders it is in and copy the new file over the old files or else you will have more than one version of that file. Files in a collection are only ONE file, so if it gets changed, the new version is contained in all the collections.
Should you use folders or files for organizing your images?If you use LR, collections are a great way to organize images. LR doesn't care where the images are as long as they are always in the same location. You can display all the images in a collection with one click, no matter how many different folders they are in. So collections are ideal for handling a given subject that the image(s) represent.
If your family is going to need access to your images, folders are probably a good way to go unless your family knows how to find things in LR. If your family uses computers, they probably know how to look for things in folders.
You can use both.