Organizing Your Pics

I just picked up Lightroom and bought a book by Kelby to make sure I understood all that it can do. He starts in chapter one with getting LR setup and where your pics go.

All this got me thinking about how I organize my pics. On my computer or in my ext HD, they are under My Pictures and then organized by general subject, ie, Braleigh > XXX time frame > Event or Lake Mattamaskeet > Date. For each event there are 2 files - RAW and Edited.

Do you guys do anything different to your filr organization or is it pretty similar to what I have going on?

The Raw workflow can lead you to wherever you want to go!

I used to have a system cluttered with all kinds of sub-folders and such, but as I locked into the Raw workflow things have become much simpler and more efficient -- Raw and Lightroom are typically all I need and I can export to a jpeg or print without needing files copied for special reasons. If I need to go to Photoshop a tiff is automatically generated and incorporated into my Lightroom library so I don't have to mess with a more complicated file system unless I really want to and as a rule I don't!

Tony, Do you switch formats over to DNG during importing? That's something Kelby encourages and his explaination kinda makes sense.

If you are using a tool like Lightroom(or another tool that has built in DAM features) I like to keep my my physical storage as simple as possible.

So for me I keep them in pictures\year\month\fu​ll date folders. I then use lightroom to keep track of things like Event names or trip locations. This keeps the file system simple but still gives you the ability to quickly get to all your pictures from Lake Mattamaskeet if you are so inclined. This has a lot more flexibility.

As for keeping two copies, I don't do this with lightroom. I just keep my original RAW files. I let lightroom keep track of the changes and versions. The only time I have two copies of the files is if I need to go into Photoshop for something which occurs less and less as Lightroom/ACR continue to become more flexible.

huntersdad wrote in post #12394985
Tony, Do you switch formats over to DNG during importing? That's something Kelby encourages and his explaination kinda makes sense.

I don't -- I don't have any need to at this point because my Raw software all works with the cameras I use, and also because I like to use DPP (Digital Photo Professional) along with Lightroom and Photoshop -- it's a nice quick way of handling Canon Raw files. DPP does not handle DNG.

Now if I upgrade to a new Canon body, I'd consider DNG for work in Photoshop CS3, but that would be on occasion, not as a replacement for my CR2 files.

It gets speculated that maybe in the future our CR2 files may lose support, and when we see that coming then I'd look at DNG but for now everything does play well with the Canon Raw files.

I catalog similar to dalto. Pictures/year/month/mo​nth-date.
Example: Pictures/2011/05/05-11
After import I will add a descriptor to date ie: 05-11_Daughters_Concert.
Works for me so far.

If I'm shooting RAW+Jpeg (as I usually do), I have a folder named RAW and another named Jpeg. Then I create one named "standouts" and one named "work" and one named "web". I copy the Jpegs I intend to process into "standouts" and work on them and save them as Photoshop files into "work." Then when I optimize it for the web, I save it as a jpeg into the "web" folder. I only process from RAW if I'm not happy with the results I can get from the original Jpeg.

Photo Librabry > Year > Month > Day/Event

I keep all version of a photo in the ""Day/Event" folder. The RAW, TIFF, JPEG, XMP file, etc. all together in the same folder