jerryc41 wrote:
Regardless what people say, there is no one, perfect system for organizing that will work for everyone. I put similar images into one folder - Dogs, Cars, etc. Works for me. I've never been able to get into the Lightroom Keywording system.
What happens when you have a dog and a car in the same image? it gets complicated doesn't it.
http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/keywords.html#keywords is a useful page as is
http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/metadata-basics-actions.htmlI use Lightroom which by default uses a very simple file system
e.g Lightroom/2015/2015-11-15 this gives me a simple time line basis for storing photo's
Everything else is part of the catalog, i use a few camera's so i can filter by camera model, serial number and lens, focal length ect. so how and when are taken care of you can color code and rate. filter just 5 star images and you look like a great photographer :)
Then there are key words , I like to add events and locations subjects can be added there is a spray can that lets you quickly add keywords to a bunch of photo's I think you can start loose with keywords and get more specific e.g flowers, roses or dogs, bulldogs, you can go looser e.g plants , animals, kids , family, friends.
some loose keywords are probably easier to apply after tighter ones at least initially but if you build catagories and subcatagories you can group them so say plant animal people and so you can have animal groups and dogs and cats are animals and bulldogs and jackrussels are types of dog. its up to you how much keywording you want.
People are a special case and i use picasa face recognition and use a plugin to import the names into lightroom. i don't duplicate my image files just get picasa to look through and identify the people leaving the pictures where they are.
now the only issue is what happens if the catalog gets damaged so i think its a good idea to associate the meta data with the image. Most image formats can have your meta data and keywords embedded in them for the others there are sidecar xmp files. Lightroom doesn't do this by default but I think its a good idea since it will then be part of your backup files and should you lose your lightroom catalog it can be recreated from the image files.
naturally recreating your catalog will take time as each picture needs to be read the data extracted and stored.
The point of the catalog is to make searching and identifying images easier it's easy to pull up say all dog photo's than to browse through the images. Even events some party last summer do you remember anyone who was there then you can search for them and somebody else and pretty soon you have found the event and know where the photo's are.
when you are initially looking at photo's in lightroom you are not looking at the actual photo until you select it to do something with it at the browsing stage its a small thumbnail. Manually browsing your file system will be much slower as the big file needs to be loaded before you say no not that one. Yes there are thumbnails but generally too small to see any detail.
However your existing system can be easily brought in if you keep dogs in the dog folder then import that folder and add the keyword dog to the files you import. Importing doesnt necessarily mean moving the files just bringing the data in to lightroom. Although why not it makes sense to store them under the date they were took. you can make subfolders if you really need them too.