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How do you organize your photos?

weezintrumpete
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · How do you organize your photos?

I've been taking photos for the better part of 20 years and for the longest time I have used Lightroom to manage and edit my photos. I'm starting to get frustrated with my ability to find a specific photo, or a set of photos when I want to based on the way I organize my files. I'd like some advice!

I have several cameras that I use weekly, and most of my photo taking is snapshots of family, street photography random photos I take on walks, etc. Random images on random days. Some days I'll take 5 photos, other days 0, other days 250. A particular day does not mean that all photos within that day are of the same "subject". An individual day might have photos of family, snapshots, street photos, etc, all from different cameras.

Here's my workflow:

1. Take photos over the course of days, weeks, etc.
2. Occasionally download those photos to a temporary folder on a backed-up Drobo.
3. Do that a few times over the course of a month or so.
4. I am almost always behind on editing photos in Lightroom, so before I import anything in, I finish editing the photos I already have in there.
5. When I'm ready to do something with the photos in the temp folder, I use Lightroom to move all of those photos from the temp folder into my Lightroom folder, and organize them into folders by date. I have a single Lightoom catalog for ALL of my photos.
6. I then use the "Previous import" "folder" in Lightroom to go through the images, and "flag" any of the ones I might like.
7. Within the same "Previous Import" folder, I then open the Develop module and go through the flagged photos, removing the flag on any I no longer want, and editing the ones I do want.
7a. When I'm feeling organized (not often), I will rename the date folders to something like "[date] - subject 1, subject 2, subject 3". This gets messy when a single day has many different photo types in it.
8. I then do a variety of exports based on what I want from the photos. Many get exported to the Apple Photos app for sharing with family, others get exported to a "web" folder (resized down) within the date folder for uploading to the web, etc.

Say I want to find a photo I took in a specific spot some time ago. I'm not good with remembering dates, so in order to find that photo, I have to open the root folder in lightroom, apply the "flag" filter, and then search. This results in me looking though many thousands of photos. Say I want to find all of my "flagged" street photos - I have no way of doing that. What about that photo of the thing I found on the street that I can't remember when I took it?

Does anyone have a suggestion of how to better organize my photos to make finding them later on much easier without TOO much more manual work? For a size reference here, I have about 24k photos in lightroom from 2022 alone, 25k from 2021, 17k from 2020, etc. LOTS of photos.

Is tagging the way to do it? Collections? Is subfolders within the date folders the way to do it? Should I be exporting full-size photos from lightroom once they are edited to some external folder structure? I have no idea - any help is appreciated!

Dec 10, 2022 at 06:31 PM

melcat
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · How do you organize your photos?

I doubt my scheme would scale to your shooting volume, but there are probably a couple of ideas you could take from it.

First, I extensively use the “select folder” feature in my cameras. If I'm shooting two different kinds of things, or I'm going on different trips, the images go in different folders, and I will if appropriate switch the camera back to using an earlier folder. Then, everything in one folder stays on the card (and nowhere else, not backed up) until I'm ready to postprocess it. This corresponds to your steps 1 to 4. Note that I have less to keep track of than you, because I probably remember which body I used for what, when.

Next, when I copy the files onto my computer (“ingest” it) all the files are renamed, and their file names are unique across my entire archive and have a “batch code” which corresponds to the folder. Once a file gets this name, it never changes. This file name looks like 202212_BATCH_007.CR3, where BATCH is a mnemonic batch code. Note that it starts with the year, month and batch code so that whatever folder the file ends up in it will be sorted that way when displayed sorted by file name. Two camera folders from the same month never have the same batch code.

On ingestion, I archive 800px thumbnails of every frame but after that am fairly ruthless in deleting crap. The thumbnails are useful to jog my memory about the sequence of events when captioning, or to get a different view of a bird or animal for identification purposes.

Once every folder on a card has been ingested, I can format the card in the camera. If it’s really important, I will wait until a macOS backup has run.

I use Capture One for my archive. Images are organised in folders on my drive; I drag them from the ingestion folder to the appropriate folder using Capture One (but if Capture One were to disappear, the folder hierarchy is still there, visible in macOS Finder). Folders are named by subject, not date; the date is redundant because of EXIF metadata and the file names. Notice that within a folder the images are sorted by month and then batch code, because of the form of the file names. A few images could be classified multiple ways, and for those I make an arbitrary choice for what will determine the folder, and place them in Capture One collections for the other attributes.

I think Lightroom, like Capture One, uses the SQLite database for its catalogue. I have no problem trusting SQLite, as it has been validated for avionics use and is super-reliable. It should have no problem handling records for millions of images, so I see nothing wrong with your decision to use a single Lightroom catalogue. I do run two for Capture One: one for bird photography, and one for the rest, but this is really for convenience.

Edited on Dec 11, 2022 at 01:14 AM · View previous versions

Dec 10, 2022 at 11:32 PM

schlotz
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · How do you organize your photos?

One thing I find interesting is that there is no mention of using keywords in Lightroom. Very powerful option when implemented correctly. Unfortunately having gone down your current workflow path for as long as you have, just about any modification is going to require some significant work to restructure.

In your 'specific spot example': if you had added a keyword to those photos (that represented this spot) you could easily click on that keyword in the right panel and only those photos would be displayed. You could use the Library Metadata filter to then further refine that display list. EX) assuming you had added a keyword for night, clicking on it in the metadata at the top would show that spot where photos at night were taken. Lots of options in the metadata to choose from.

Keywords can be setup with a substructure as well. EX)Animals then a keyword can be placed within Animals for the type like dog, cat, eagles etc...

Dec 11, 2022 at 12:38 AM

melcat
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · How do you organize your photos?

Hierarchical keywords use Adobe’s proprietary XMP metadata extension. I think these days most other programs can read that, and write it through to the IPTC keywords, but I know for a fact DxO used to get that wrong.

The IPTC keywords field, which e.g. Flickr probably uses, is limited to 64 bytes, not even characters. (If you use diacritics, curly quotes or kanji, it will be fewer than 64 characters.) This will very quickly fill up when every level of the hierarchy is dumped in there:

Hierarchical keywords: Birds/Australian/Australian Magpie
IPTC: Birds, Birds | Australian, Australian, Birds | Australian Magpie

That’s already 60 bytes and heading for truncation with a longer bird name. As you can see, it also adds noise keywords.

This is why, when/if I move to keywords, I’ll avoid hierarchical keywords and instead use a controlled vocabulary, where the keywords are stylised or chosen from a supplied list. I might decide, for example, that "acn=" denotes an Australian common name for the bird and use the keyword "acn=Australian Magpie". Or I might use just two keywords: "Australian Birds" and "Australian Magpie".

I’ve put off designing such controlled vocabularies both because I don’t yet have enough images to need to, and because I might want to adopt someone else’s. This is one reason why birds are in their own Capture One catalogue – I can imagine adopting a controlled vocabulary from a bird observing society, but wanting to use a different one for everything else.

In the meantime, I just put the bird name in the Description (also known as “caption” in some software) and use Capture One to search/filter on descriptions containing that. It’s pretty fast, which makes me think it’s using full text indexing. I’d be surprised if Lightroom doesn’t too. Quite long descriptions are possible, they don’t require the XMP metadata extensions, and pretty much all software understands them.

OP may be better sticking with keywords, unless he has (like me) the scripting skills to create the keywords from the descriptions later. Just be aware of the interchange problems and keep the scheme as simple as possible.

Dec 11, 2022 at 04:12 AM

schlotz
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · How do you organize your photos?

+1 on keeping the scheme simple

Dec 11, 2022 at 06:53 AM

dclark
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · How do you organize your photos?

melcat wrote:
Hierarchical keywords use Adobe’s proprietary XMP metadata extension. I think these days most other programs can read that, and write it through to the IPTC keywords, but I know for a fact DxO used to get that wrong.

The IPTC keywords field, which e.g. Flickr probably uses, is limited to 64 bytes, not even characters. (If you use diacritics, curly quotes or kanji, it will be fewer than 64 characters.) This will very quickly fill up when every level of the hierarchy is dumped in there:

Hierarchical keywords: Birds/Australian/Australian Magpie
IPTC: Birds, Birds | Australian, Australian, Birds | Australian Magpie

That’s already 60 bytes...Show more →

The hierarchy is important because it allows searches to be done at any level of the hierarchy. In the example you give I may want to find all bird photos taken at a location in the year 2017. If the keywords are not in a hierarchy and are keyworded with only "Australian Magpie" it won't be found unless it is also keyworded with "Bird". That means many more keywords need to be assigned. That's a lot more work to to assign multiple keywords and avoid a lot of duplication of keywords. With a logical hierarchy it is easy to assign just a couple of keywords and be able to search on all levels of all assigned keywords.

I add at least two keywords to every file, What (or Who) and Where. For example, Peregrine Falcon Fledgling, Guy Fleming Trail. By adding one keyword "Peregrine Falcon Fledgling" I can also search on all the levels above, which include Peregrine Falcon, Falcons, Falconiforms, Birds. I add one keyword but get five levels of searchable keywords. The same is true for Guy Fleming Trail > Torrey Pines > Del Mar > San Diego County > California > United States > North America.

Typically I add keywords to many files at once, sometimes hundreds. The When (data and time) is added to the metadata by the camera. The camera, lens, and settings are also in the metadata. I use stars and colors for ratings and to keep track of the state of processing the image. That data is in the Attributes. With all that multi-level data assigned to each file I can filter out and find pretty much anything I want.

Dec 11, 2022 at 01:38 PM

weezintrumpete
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · How do you organize your photos?

melcat wrote:
I doubt my scheme would scale to your shooting volume, but there are probably a couple of ideas you could take from it.

First, I extensively use the “select folder” feature in my cameras. If I'm shooting two different kinds of things, or I'm going on different trips, the images go in different folders, and I will if appropriate switch the camera back to using an earlier folder. Then, everything in one folder stays on the card (and nowhere else, not backed up) until I'm ready to postprocess it. This corresponds to your steps 1 to 4. Note that I have less to keep track of than you, because I probably remember which body I used for what, when.

Next, when I copy the files onto my computer (“ingest” it) all the files are renamed, and their file names are unique across my entire archive and have a “batch code” which corresponds to the folder. Once a file gets this name, it never changes. This file name looks like 202212_BATCH_007.CR3, where BATCH is a mnemonic batch code. Note that it starts with the year, month and batch code so that whatever folder the file ends up in it will be sorted that way when displayed sorted by file name. Two camera folders from the same month never have the same batch code.

On ingestion, I archive 800px thumbnails of every frame but after that am fairly ruthless in deleting crap. The thumbnails are useful to jog my memory about the sequence of events when captioning, or to get a different view of a bird or animal for identification purposes.

Once every folder on a card has been ingested, I can format the card in the camera. If it’s really important, I will wait until a macOS backup has run.

I use Capture One for my archive. Images are organised in folders on my drive; I drag them from the ingestion folder to the appropriate folder using Capture One (but if Capture One were to disappear, the folder hierarchy is still there, visible in macOS Finder). Folders are named by subject, not date; the date is redundant because of EXIF metadata and the file names. Notice that within a folder the images are sorted by month and then batch code, because of the form of the file names. A few images could be classified multiple ways, and for those I make an arbitrary choice for what will determine the folder, and place them in Capture One collections for the other attributes.

I think Lightroom, like Capture One, uses the SQLite database for its catalogue. I have no problem trusting SQLite, as it has been validated for avionics use and is super-reliable. It should have no problem handling records for millions of images, so I see nothing wrong with your decision to use a single Lightroom catalogue. I do run two for Capture One: one for bird photography, and one for the rest, but this is really for convenience....Show more →

---------------------------------------------

schlotz wrote:
One thing I find interesting is that there is no mention of using keywords in Lightroom. Very powerful option when implemented correctly. Unfortunately having gone down your current workflow path for as long as you have, just about any modification is going to require some significant work to restructure.

In your 'specific spot example': if you had added a keyword to those photos (that represented this spot) you could easily click on that keyword in the right panel and only those photos would be displayed. You could use the Library Metadata filter to then further refine that display list. EX)...Show more →

---------------------------------------------

melcat wrote:
Hierarchical keywords use Adobe’s proprietary XMP metadata extension. I think these days most other programs can read that, and write it through to the IPTC keywords, but I know for a fact DxO used to get that wrong.

The IPTC keywords field, which e.g. Flickr probably uses, is limited to 64 bytes, not even characters. (If you use diacritics, curly quotes or kanji, it will be fewer than 64 characters.) This will very quickly fill up when every level of the hierarchy is dumped in there:

Hierarchical keywords: Birds/Australian/Australian Magpie
IPTC: Birds, Birds | Australian, Australian, Birds | Australian Magpie

That’s already 60 bytes...Show more →

Thanks to both of you.

@melcat - I really appreciate you outlining your workflow for me. While I think you're correct that some (much) of this doesn't necessarily apply to me, I did get some ideas, and your information about tagging is really helpful.

Just to make sure I understand about tagging - if I use the hierarchical way of tagging within Lightroom, it is not the most compatible going forward outside of lightroom, correct? Or at the least, I will lost the hierarchy? I *think* tagging is the right way to go for me, along with smart collections to assemble those photos into different easily-viewable buckets.

@schlotz - as it turns out, I did a half assed job of doing tagging back several years ago and abandoned it. I think it's the right way for me to handle this. I need to get more proactive about my library if I want it to be useable for retrieval, and this seems like the right way.

Dec 11, 2022 at 01:41 PM

Camperjim
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · How do you organize your photos?

I can tell you what works for me. Perhaps my simple system would not meet your needs.

I do not shoot daily except when traveling. When I do shoot, first and foremost is to avoid lots of poor photos and the need for extensive culling. I try to shoot only when it is likely that I will have something worth printing. I do often work a scene with multiple shots so I still end up with plenty to cull and plenty that are not very good.

When I download, I automatically download by date with the date as part of the file name. Next I cull aggressively. I try to process keepers by the next day or within a few days. That can vary a lot from maybe zero (in which case why keep the file at all?) to as many as 6-12. I am not a digital artist so I typically do not spend a lot of time with processing. Even for a photo where some extensive editing might be necessary, I at least do a quick preliminary. The edits are saved as tiffs with "fix" added to the file designation. I keep a copy in the original date file and another copy in my "fix" file for the year. My annual fix file might be as high as 800-1000 if I have traveled a lot. Most years the file size is less than half that amount. In addition to the time I spent processing, I will have looked at those processed images many times throughout the year. They are like old friends and I have no trouble remembering and finding them.

You will notice, I did not mention Lightroom. I don't use it.

Dec 11, 2022 at 06:00 PM

melcat
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · How do you organize your photos?

weezintrumpete wrote:
Just to make sure I understand about tagging - if I use the hierarchical way of tagging within Lightroom, it is not the most compatible going forward outside of lightroom, correct?

This question is best answered by someone who’s tried to move tagged images out of Lightroom to something else recently, which isn’t me.

It does appear from my online research that many or most programs read and write Adobe’s lr:Hierarchical tag in the XMP metadata. Capture One claims to export to it in their documentation. It also appears that the Lightroom "Synonym" and "Do Not Export" features aren’t understood by anything else, so should be avoided.

This post talks about problems with Photo Mechanic not handling it properly, and gives a technical rundown of how it should look like in the XMP.

Dec 11, 2022 at 07:12 PM

dordek
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · How do you organize your photos?

I've got 50+ years of photos in my LR catalog. I used to have several LR catalogs, but having just one makes overall searching much easier and thorough. Luckily I started with keywords fairly early on and it makes all the difference in the world for tracking down a particular picture or all the shots of, say, a particular person.

Lately I have discovered that the use of collections (not necessarily "smart" ones) has been something that complements key-wording very well. They make very nice "buckets" for things like all shots taken on a particular trip, and a bucket within that bucket might be the best 100 shots of that trip and another bucket within it might be the best 25 shots of that trip (or a bucket within the "100" bucket). But some things I might not have identified with a specific enough keyword might be found within a collection "bucket" I've made that is narrower than the keyword involved. A collection you've made of something like a trip might be easier to remember than all the keywords involved in that trip. Being able to make a hierarchical structure of your collections (buckets) is also very useful.

Smart collections are great for finding out what lens you seem to gravitate to or all the different cameras and lenses you've used over the years. One of my favorite Smart collections is "Without Keywords". I try to keep it as small as possible.

Of course a lot of this information only applies since 2002 when I went digital and had exif information to use. But the keywords applied before then have been very useful.

Dec 12, 2022 at 03:19 PM

johnvanr
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · How do you organize your photos?

To the extent that I do organize, I import by date without regard for subject matter. Then I use keywords and color codes. Keywords are granular, color codes just identify things like personal, birds, nature, tests and city/street/people.

LR also can automatically organize by places if your images have GPS data and by faces, but I don’t rely on those.

Only exception is a separate catalog I have for model shoots, which are organized by where I lived/live, model name, shoot.

Dec 12, 2022 at 04:28 PM

melcat
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · How do you organize your photos?

I cautioned above about possible interchange problems with hierarchical keywords (that is, bugs...).

I have now verified that both Capture One 22, and Affinity Photo versions 1 and 2, correctly write both the XMP tags and the legacy IIM TIFF tags, and can read them. I used each program to create keywords (including ones with non-ASCII characters), and write a TIFF. I then dumped the TIFF using exiftool’s HTML generator and XMP extraction features to inspect the TIFF and XMP tags, and found them to be correct (including the non-ASCII characters). Affinity can read files with hierarchical keywords edited in Capture One, and passes them through on saving the file again, and Capture One can read files with keywords edited in Affinity.

Apple’s Preview can also see the keywords, although it doesn’t understand the hierarchy.

I pronounce their operation correct! I’d be confident using hierarchical keywords in Capture One. The UI also seems to have all the features for handling them that I’d need.

The legacy TIFF tags (the ones that get truncated) don’t work as described in my earlier post. Instead, the tag appears multiple times, once for each keyword. This means there won’t be truncation unless some keyword exceeds 64 bytes in itself. This is extremely unlikely, even for Chinese etc. Just use them as keywords, not long form text. Programs following the standard should detect whether a file was written by an old, non-XMP-aware, program.

The only fly in the ointment is that Affinity doesn’t know about hierarchical keywords, so if I have a derived TIFF and later want to add a hierarchical keyword to both it and the raw file it was made from, I’ll be out of luck. Affinity can’t, and Capture One refuses to edit TIFFs in any way.

(In case anyone’s wondering why I’m so paranoid, during my move from Adobe to Capture One I discovered hundreds of images with corrupted Descriptions. Something on the old system – Bridge and exiftool were candidates – was turning them into mojibake.)

EDIT – fixed so uses "keyword" instead of "tag" in places. Otherwise unchanged.

Edited on Dec 14, 2022 at 08:57 PM · View previous versions

Dec 13, 2022 at 03:52 AM

weezintrumpete
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · How do you organize your photos?

Thanks all for the responses and advice.

I think I'm going to start keywording consistently and then set up smart collections based on keywords + flag / rating status. I think this will get me where I need to be.

The other thing I'll change is that instead of importing into lightroom ever 1-2 months, do it every 1-2 weeks. This will make tagging, flagging, rating and editing far less painful

Dec 14, 2022 at 11:01 AM

Alan321
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · How do you organize your photos?

I use LrC rather than the cloud version of Lr.

LrC offers some very useful and user-friendly ways to organize photos:
1. A folder hierarchy (inherently available to all other software too).
2. A keyword (actually, key phrase) hierarchy (not restricted to single words).
3. Collections (automatic and manual).
4. Filtering by existing metadata (e.g. from the camera).
5. Flags and Ratings (probably the least useful because they're the least consistent and limited to only five values for each).

Better yet, the keyword hierarchy can be managed purely within the LrC catalog and so the keywords need not ever be put into the actual photo files or sidecar files - but you can do so if you want to.

The LrC Keyword hierarchy is flexible and can be applied flexibly (two different concepts).
-- "Flexible" in that keywords can be edited at any time, or relocated within the hierarchy, or duplicated under a separate keyword. Keywords can have different meanings depending on where they appear in the hierarchy because you are not confined to a flat structure (i.e. unstructured).
-- "Applied flexibly" in that they are not compulsory, they can be applied to any pictures at any time, they can be edited at any time, they can be augmented with subset keywords at any time, they can be unapplied at any time, etc. You can start as simply as you want to or need to and enhance or reconfigure as your needs evolve. All without altering the actual image files unless you want really to do that.

In my experience, the concept of "consistent keywording" is a false hope. If you wait until you have thought up the ultimate, definitive keyword structure then you'll never get it done. Being able to alter the actual keywords and/or their position in the LrC keyword hierarchy lets you start very simply and/or apply it very selectively to get the best and quickest return in terms of time and effort taken. Then expand, refine, reorganize as and when required or desired. If you have several hundreds or even thousands of images sharing the same keyword then it might be time to consider editing the structure to make selection easier. As a rule of thumb, if it takes too long to find what you want among too many screenfuls of thumbnails then you will likely benefit from further keyword refinement, but otherwise it may not be worthwhile.

By using the keyword hierarchy within LrC and not actually applying it to the physical image files, you will be free to modify it without altering any image files and there will be no risk of some copies of files having different keywords from other copies.

You can utilize the existing file metadata, because some of that can be used to select images as the basis for new keywords.

Here's a very useful tip: put all of your own keywords and phrases under a single parent heading keyword such as your own initials or a code word, so that any keywords that get imported with images from other people will not spoil your own hierarchy.

In my opinion, a very useful enhancement for a future version of LrC would be the ability to have and use multiple sets of ratings simultaneously, and for each set to have a heading. e.g. one set for image quality ratings, another set for image appeal ratings, another for edit status, etc., etc. Five single values for all possible options is hardly worth the mental and physical effort of trying to make it work and keep it working. Meanwhile, I'd much rather use keywords.

Finally, a warning: The approach I have outlined works best and is most robust if the keywords are kept within the catalog rather than in the image files and, very importantly, if backups of the catalog are kept to prevent/minimize data loss should something go wrong. e.g. I have LrC set to back up a compressed (zipped) copy of my catalog at the end of every session. I periodically cull the surplus, but the compressed backups are included in my routine off-computer backups and archives, for which I happen to use Macrium Reflect. Apart from the culling, it all happens automatically. And remember that the catalog does not include the actual image files; they are backed up separately.

Dec 22, 2022 at 09:11 AM

Ferrophot
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · How do you organize your photos?

I transfer my photos to my computer asap, generally the same day.
I file them under the date taken, year, month, day, then by location. eg 2022-10-26 Girraween.
I download the file into Canon's DPP and cull only keeping images that have value. These get backed up onto separate hard drives.
I then go back and cull more deeply, only keeping the best shot of each scene. These I do basic PP and convert to a jpeg and may do futher PP before saving.
This process results in only some 20 or so shots retained on the computer out of, say 200. There might be 100 retained on the backup hard drives. These HD get replaced after some time.
I also keep a notebook that lists the images by date, place and scene.
I very rarely go back into the HDs looking for an image, the few that make it into my computer HD are the best images.

Dec 23, 2022 at 07:35 AM

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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · How do you organize your photos?

Life has been easier since I discovered Excire Foto (also Excire Search). I just synch my new photos and Excire uses AI to assign multiple keywords to each photo. I save countless hours trying to organize my collection and I am able to retrieve, in seconds, that shot of a grizzly bear that I took ten years ago. Works well with Lightroom (I also use it with DXO Photolab).
There is also an "Edit With" option that I use to bring my shots into Photoshop for pp.

Highly recommended.

Dec 23, 2022 at 09:29 AM

chez
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · How do you organize your photos?

mangurian wrote:
Life has been easier since I discovered Excire Foto (also Excire Search). I just synch my new photos and Excire uses AI to assign multiple keywords to each photo. I save countless hours trying to organize my collection and I am able to retrieve, in seconds, that shot of a grizzly bear that I took ten years ago. Works well with Lightroom (I also use it with DXO Photolab).
There is also an "Edit With" option that I use to bring my shots into Photoshop for pp.

Highly recommended.

Does the AI know when Uncle John is in the photo?

Dec 23, 2022 at 09:51 AM

Zenon Char
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · How do you organize your photos?

dordek wrote:
I've got 50+ years of photos in my LR catalog. I used to have several LR catalogs, but having just one makes overall searching much easier and thorough. Luckily I started with keywords fairly early on and it makes all the difference in the world for tracking down a particular picture or all the shots of, say, a particular person.

Lately I have discovered that the use of collections (not necessarily "smart" ones) has been something that complements key-wording very well. They make very nice "buckets" for things like all shots taken on a particular trip, and a bucket within that...Show more →

Yep you only need one catalogue. Having more defeats the capabilities of LRC. There is no known limit to a catalogues size. Victoria Bampton did a project for NASA and had a catalogue with 13 million + files. From the root folder you can set up sub folders for work, play, travel.

Dec 23, 2022 at 09:52 AM

Zenon Char
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · How do you organize your photos?

I keep things simple with LrC. I always cull using Canon’s DPP to delete unwanted files before importing. My file structure is by year. In each year I name folders by event and date. Then I so some key wording and add to collections.

When I travel I create a new catalogue on my laptop and name it based on the trip. Catalogue on the main drive and files on a ED. When I get home I copy the catalogue to the ED, plug it into the desktop and use the import from another catalogue command. It merges the travel catalogue into the master and moves the files.

Over the years I’ve read about people not liking the catalogue and sometimes just because of not understanding it. Your files are not the catalogue and independent. The catalogue is just a database which why in the big picture uses very little storages. The only reason for importing is so it can read the metadata and so it knows where the files are stored. The LrC folder structure always matches the OS structure.

Dec 23, 2022 at 10:05 AM

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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · How do you organize your photos?

I shoot Commercial projects and use Capture One so I try to keep it simple and consistent. Most shoots are shot tethered and I simply use the date to name Capture folder but will name a shoot if it's a personal project. I keep a journal containing Clients names, dates and other details so I can cross reference. If it's a regular Client, I have a master folder with their name and all their session folders within it. The one off clients may only have one or two sessions and are easier to search if needed. Rarely do I find myself looking for a specific image or series. After editing an image, I will determine if it's worth adding to my portfolio or website and will add it to the appropriate folder, i.e. Food, Lifestyle, Portrait, etc. Once completed, I backup to two external drives and only then will I delete the session from my working computer.

Dec 23, 2022 at 10:29 AM

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