Gatorcoach wrote:
I recently completed a seminar on Lightroom in a attempt to learn how to organize and catalog my thousands of pictures. I knew it would be a monumental task but a necessary evil if I ever wanted to get organized. The instructor taught in a succinct and logical way how to begin (and continue) organizing your pictures.
First, he generally only uses one catalog and stores practically all of his pictures there. He will sent up a separate catalog for a particular job (wedding, etc) just to keep them separate from his personal pictures and can quickly sent proofs to his customers. Imagine the looks on the audience's faces when they learned his main catalog has thousands of pictures. His images are backed up to 2 external drives.
He also does not export his pictures unless they are going to be printed, and even then he often prints directly from lightroom.
The key element is "keywords". You can put as much information as you desire into the "keywords" function - the more the better. You can also mass tag photos with keywords to save time and effort. When you want to pull up pictures go to "search", type in keywords, and boom! they all appear.
For example: I have hundreds of pictures of my granddaughter, from her birth to 1st birthday party, soccer, holidays, graduations, etc. The keywords I use are:"Family", "Cathy", "the year", "event", "anything else of significance". So, for example, all I have to search is "Cathy", "peach picking", "2018" and all the shots from that event immediately pop up.
My instructor feels he doesn't need to export to folders - unnecessary and space hogging on his drives. I still prefer to keep folders and export to them. Either way it is a simple yet very effective way to organize.
I recently completed a seminar on Lightroom in a a... (
show quote)
I am glad you have gotten some good information on organizing your images. The instructor, however, is speaking from the point of view of a professional photographer, with client "shoots" to keep each in a separate catalog. When you are shooting for yourself, whether it is family photos or your artistic endeavors, it becomes important to organize in such a way that you can find certain images without relying on keywords.
The need to export to folders is a personal preference, and regardless of the added space requirements, this is what I also prefer. Storage is not expensive these days! I do use keywords when I want to find images that are in a variety of different folders. For instance, keywords like "winter", "snow", will bring together images from multiple topics whether they are landscapes, people, individual locations, etc.
Another reason I export [or further edits in PS and then saving] is to be able to see the actual image in the folders on my hard drive. Looking at an icon is not the same. This is important for me when posting on social media or sending in an email. Using a site's tools to display images takes you to your hard drive folders, and if you can only see that .xmp side-car, how can you know exactly what you are posting? Of course, you can jump back and forth with LR to check, but to me that is an extra and undesirable step.
The beauty of LR is that it can be adapted to whatever sort of organization set-up you prefer! Many like the dates system. I prefer to start with major categories, subdivided into topics. Within the topics I may have added sub-topics, but when appropriate I also use years to group together the images from the year they were taken. I call this a "filing cabinet" system!
The main objective of an organization system is to make it easy to find images. Because of the way my photos are organized, I also do not have checked the "show photos in subfolders" under the Library menu, unless I want to do a search that encompasses multiple folders.
To illustrate, to find images of your granddaughter, at a specific event, those photos could be grouped in a topic folder "People" or "Family", with a sub-folder for Cathy. That folder can be divided by year, or by event. And if the specific event occurred more than one year, it could have a sub-folder for each year's photos. If you have photos of her you want to access that are in group photos or other types of events, then a Catalog-wide search may be appropriate.
No one way is right for everyone, and it takes time to set up a system that works for you. I have re-organized several times, now have a system that I like which I believe will be the keeper!
Hope this helps.
Susan