Thanks!

Those that complain the most loudly are those who for one reason or another cannot wrap their heads around what a catalog is.

Here is an analogy. They have a screw, two pieces of wood, and a hammer. All they have ever used to attach two pieces of wood to each other was the nail, which they had always used the hammer for. They are shown the screwdriver, but since they only know how to use the hammer, and since the screw looks a lot like a nail, they persist in using the hammer to drive the screw into the piece of wood. Then they are unhappy at the effort required, the missteps as the hammer mangles the screw, and the results of a loosely driven screw, not to mention all the hammer dings on the piece of wood. When all they needed to so was examine the screw, the shape of the screwdriver's tip, and how the screw thread, an inclined ramp, could be leveraged to drive the screw into the wood with less effort, less possibility of mangling the wood, no bruised thumbs, and a tight joint, with superior holding power and longer lasting than anything possible with a nail.

I suggest the naysayers embrace the screw and the screwdriver as a new and better way to do things. Not that the hammer and nail is a bad way to do things, but in certain circumstances, the screw is more appropriate and better. And there is no value to using a nail when a screw is clearly a better solution.

When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

That is my comment to address reason and rationality. . .

Ok guys, I get that there is a great powerful "Catalog" function called Lightroom. The fact that I can do adjustments that don't require much hand-eye (as in eye/mouse/scree control or tablet/stylus) etc.is an appeal for me since I failed crayon, pencil and pen back when Truman was President. I've tried to wrap myself (a 40+ year Computer industry vet) around the catalog for 3 years and I STILL can't find stuff. Done the You Tube thing, Jim Gray has helped, but I STILL can't find photos that I've imported, modified and worked pretty hard on.

Now the tendency to lose patience with some of us and assign traits or rude claims of incapability and unwillingness is just plain unhelpful. I've searched You tube for hours and either get excessively detailed nuanced detail laden workflow for what should be a simple process or just blithely click on files and go to work doing sophisiticated imabe processing that I'll never do. I'm unable to proceed TO the basics to be able to understand the fine points.

Is there a training source equivalent in succinctness and understand-ability to "Understanding Exposure" that someone (I avoided saying "You Geniuses") can suggest?

I'm not looking for another hammer nor am I looking for the ultimate variable powered reversible wireless screw/nut/impact driver either. But without the basics, the refined points are hard to grasp.

Then maybe I'll graduate to becoming a pixel level editor along with a photographer. But for now, please suggest some material, preferably free, that can help me find my work. And don't insult me along the way.

C

Love the heron avatar, btw. I share your experience, only I had arrived at the realization in 2013, when I started using LR3. I was completely confounded the first two or three times I tried to use it - not being able to figure out where things went. So it sat on my computer as a project for idle time. I continued to use Capture One - a somewhat similar workflow raw converter/file browser, but it was project based.

I had digital images that dated back to 1999. And for the life of me I could not figure out how LR would deal with them. Luckily I had all my images in folders that were named as follows:

mm.xx - verbose description of shoot/job/trip/subjects - dd-mm-yy. The xx is a sequential shoot number in a given month. For instance 12.09 would represent the ninth time I used the camera in December.

These folders were aggregated by year, and each year was under the parent folder "my pics". I organized this, including the sequence number prefix, to enable me to have somewhat of a chance of finding an old image. Using raw shooter initially, and later Capture One, I was able to keep the folder structure as I had originally designed it. Adding keywords to the metadata helped a lot, and when I finally decided to plunge into LR3, I locked myself in my office, unplugged the phone, turned off the cell, grabbed an unopened bottle of single malt (no glass), and was determined to leave after either I had figured out how LR worked, or the bottle was empty. Well, I didn't have to empty the bottle. I hardly had more than a quick sip. I discovered the "ADD" option when importing files into the catalog, and how importing into the catalog was not necessarily the same as importing from a card or a camera, which explained how the other options for importing worked. I realized that I had an incredibly flexible tool in front of me, and that I could continue to work, using my existing file naming and folder structure, without missing a beat. The rest is history. I now have over 250,000 images in two catalogs - one that covers from the beginning of time to 2015, and another that I started last January. The nice thing is that even though I did not keyword any of my old images, I could still search for images shot during a specific occasion or containing a specific subject, just by opening the library module, going to the top level folder (my pics) and doing ctrl-F to open a search field and typing in a partial character string, like "eagle" to find all of my eagle shots. The filter is instantaneous - and in the tiled view, I can see all of my images. I use a dual screen setup, so when I highlight an image on my LR desktop, I see the full screen version on the second screen. The 100s, maybe 1000s of hours I have saved since 2013 were clearly worth the effort that one Saturday morning when I decided it was do or die with LR.

Ok guys, I get that there is a great powerful "Catalog" function called Lightroom. The fact that I can do adjustments that don't require much hand-eye (as in eye/mouse/scree control or tablet/stylus) etc.is an appeal for me since I failed crayon, pencil and pen back when Truman was President. I've tried to wrap myself (a 40+ year Computer industry vet) around the catalog for 3 years and I STILL can't find stuff. Done the You Tube thing, Jim Gray has helped, but I STILL can't find photos that I've imported, modified and worked pretty hard on.

Now the tendency to lose patience with some of us and assign traits or rude claims of incapability and unwillingness is just plain unhelpful. I've searched You tube for hours and either get excessively detailed nuanced detail laden workflow for what should be a simple process or just blithely click on files and go to work doing sophisiticated imabe processing that I'll never do. I'm unable to proceed TO the basics to be able to understand the fine points.

Is there a training source equivalent in succinctness and understand-ability to "Understanding Exposure" that someone (I avoided saying "You Geniuses") can suggest?

I'm not looking for another hammer nor am I looking for the ultimate variable powered reversible wireless screw/nut/impact driver either. But without the basics, the refined points are hard to grasp.

Then maybe I'll graduate to becoming a pixel level editor along with a photographer. But for now, please suggest some material, preferably free, that can help me find my work. And don't insult me along the way.

C

Anyone who tells you no is incorrect. I don't use the catalog feature AT ALL so I know what I'm talking about.
1- Create your own method of locating images. I have a folder on my DESKTOP called PHOTO SOURCE; there are sub folders of catagories (Friends, Animals,Travel,Etc.); these folder can have sub folders (East Coast Friends, Animals Running, North America, South America, Etc). Get the idea? Set up a system for your own benefit so you can locate an image when you want to (you really should have done this whether you use LR or not).
To work in LR simply click IMPORT and browse to the photos you want and Import them ...... work on them .... When finished editing, EXPORT them into a sub folder of the folder they came from (This is an option to be set on the EXPORT screen) .... AFTER the files have been exported, DELETE them from LR.
Be careful here, you only want them deleted from LR. I don't have the program open now so I can't tell you which option (there are 2). That's exactly what I do.
There is something you should be aware of: LR will have no history of the editing you did to the images. Because you have deleted them from LR, LR will never give you any grief about not being able to locate an image. Every time you want to edit an image, simply browse to it and IMPORT it. When you are finished EXPORT it and DELETE it from LR. This method works very well. If you have any problems following what I wrote, send me a PM.
BTW, my browse looks like this: Macintosh HD > Users > Howard > Desktop > Photo Source > Birds > Birds on one leg > Etc.

Ok guys, I get that there is a great powerful "Catalog" function called Lightroom. The fact that I can do adjustments that don't require much hand-eye (as in eye/mouse/scree control or tablet/stylus) etc.is an appeal for me since I failed crayon, pencil and pen back when Truman was President. I've tried to wrap myself (a 40+ year Computer industry vet) around the catalog for 3 years and I STILL can't find stuff. Done the You Tube thing, Jim Gray has helped, but I STILL can't find photos that I've imported, modified and worked pretty hard on.

Now the tendency to lose patience with some of us and assign traits or rude claims of incapability and unwillingness is just plain unhelpful. I've searched You tube for hours and either get excessively detailed nuanced detail laden workflow for what should be a simple process or just blithely click on files and go to work doing sophisiticated imabe processing that I'll never do. I'm unable to proceed TO the basics to be able to understand the fine points.

Is there a training source equivalent in succinctness and understand-ability to "Understanding Exposure" that someone (I avoided saying "You Geniuses") can suggest?

I'm not looking for another hammer nor am I looking for the ultimate variable powered reversible wireless screw/nut/impact driver either. But without the basics, the refined points are hard to grasp.

Then maybe I'll graduate to becoming a pixel level editor along with a photographer. But for now, please suggest some material, preferably free, that can help me find my work. And don't insult me along the way.

C