Orginizing PS & Lightroom library

I was wondering if anyone has a good tutorial or info on organizing your library? I have everything in one catalog but have heard its better if you use one per shoot. A few photographers I know just use system folders and open them when they need. I need something with even the basics of them. Ive found a few on YouTube and they seem to complicate and confuse me. I need it explained to me like Im 5.

Well I use LR as my go to image management system, so I made a bit of an effort to make it work for me. Firstly I would definitely keep with the one catalogue, especially if you ever need to find images from more than one shoot at a time, and this can include simple things like sending a print job to the lab.

Once you are in the LR library you have many ways of managing your images,on the file system and with collections and smart collections are probably the two easiest ways. I tend to not bother that much with the file system, since this way you can only sort the images by which ever folder you chose to place the image in. So I have a master folder for each year, and then images get put in folders by date. Probably the most simple solution after just folders by date, since you cannot really count all images in the same folder as organisation.

What I do do though is keyword all my images, and also apply IPTC Subject Codes, this makes sorting images very easy. I then use collection sets and mostly smart collections to organise the images. This ends up looking much like a folder tree structure, the smart collections look at things like particular keywords and IPTC codes, as well as other added metadata such as star ratings and labels to select the images to show in the collection. The great thing about collections is that a single instance of an image can appear in multiple collections. This is a great way to get round the multiple categories problem that doing similar sorting using the file system causes.

Your choices for working with collections allows you to use just about any bit of information relating to the image as a sort option. Or you can just use a standard collection, and add images to it manually. The great thing about smart collections is that they sort from all of the images in the catalogue, regardless of location in the file system. Although location in the file system is one of the sort criterion.

This is how I do my LR catalogue, and I also now only have the one, when I started I had a couple for different projects, but it got to be a PITA having to close LR to open a different catalogue, because the image was in the wrong one when I needed it. At the time I felt I had a good reason to do this, but I soon realised the error of my ways. I think back in the days of LR 1 and LR2, large catalogues caused some performance issues, but that was sorted in LR3, so that now catalogue size doesn't really play a part in LR's performance issues.

Alan

What sort of photography do you do?

The way I see it, you can sort your images by date, subject, or both. Do you take photos just for your enjoyment, or are you taking images professionally? I'd keep the folder structure separate if you do both.

My organization starts when I import images to lightroom - I use a folder structure, and name/number the images based on the subject.

Photos\Year\Month\Subj​ect_img#

So a typical file in my structure would be Photos\2017\04 April\Easter_01

Any image collections that have more than say, 50 images I'll add a subfolder in my month folder. Photos\2017\04 April\Baseball Opening Day\Tigers_01

If you were say a landscape or macro photographer, you may want to sort images by location or subject instead of by date.

Another great way to sort is to use keywords- I add keywords based on location and the people in the image- so if I want to make a collage or collection of prints that span multiple years/months/subjects- I'll just filter based on keywords and I can see all the images with those tags in my collection.

It's a daunting task to clean up and organize a massive photo library, so you need to decide how you want to organize going forward, start tagging and sorting your photos when you import them, and then chip away at the backlog to sync it to what you are doing now.

These may help you. http://blogs.adobe.com …lightroom-training-videos

I use one library. I see no benefit to having more.

Organising photographs I think depends on how you work, if you do one off jobs then I would think tagging with job info and keeping a separate record of jobs in say a notebook could work well. I find lightroom seems to work better by separating each year out as a new library or stopping it getting too big. As I work on long term projectsI have set up the machine to have enough storage to keep separate folders/libraries for various long term projects. I copy all appropriate images to a separate folder and create a new library from that, some of these projects have been worked on over years and having them in one place makes working on them easier. Someone asked why I don't select the best images when I first import to keep file sizes down but I like to put a bit of time between taking and selecting and sometimes a reject is the perfect bridge on a sequence. If you think how you work and how you think it would be easiest for you to get to a set of photographs you are after and work your organisation from there. Do consider that scrolling through years and years of work can become a pain if you are a prolific shooter, then it can become easier to sort in to bite sized chunks. Given the ease of organising libraries in Lightroom you can experiment with different ways of doing it, say year or shoot or project and one massive on if you like, only you can workout the best for you.

Qlayer2 wrote in post #18326844
What sort of photography do you do?

The way I see it, you can sort your images by date, subject, or both. Do you take photos just for your enjoyment, or are you taking images professionally? I'd keep the folder structure separate if you do both.

My organization starts when I import images to lightroom - I use a folder structure, and name/number the images based on the subject.

Photos\Year\Month\Subj​ect_img#

So a typical file in my structure would be Photos\2017\04 April\Easter_01

Any image collections that have more than say, 50 images I'll add a subfolder in my month folder. Photos\2017\04 April\Baseball Opening Day\Tigers_01

If you were say a landscape or macro photographer, you may want to sort images by location or subject instead of by date.

Another great way to sort is to use keywords- I add keywords based on location and the people in the image- so if I want to make a collage or collection of prints that span multiple years/months/subjects- I'll just filter based on keywords and I can see all the images with those tags in my collection.

It's a daunting task to clean up and organize a massive photo library, so you need to decide how you want to organize going forward, start tagging and sorting your photos when you import them, and then chip away at the backlog to sync it to what you are doing now.

I have a similar strategy, but I abandoned including any kind of subject in the folder structure or file name. I have a lot of pictures that are sort of random, not related to any special event, and often different subjects in the same day. I had a lot of pictures named baby1.cr2, baby2.cr2, etc and again the next day. Now every file basically gets a serial number. For example, my main Lightroom library looks like this:

LRLibrary\2017\2017-01\2017-01-01\20170101-001.cr2, 20170101-002.cr2, 20170101-003.cr2, etc

I used to have a folder for each day immediately under the year folder, but I was doing too much scrolling and each time LR launched it had to spend time counting the photos. Having month folders lets me collapse months I'm not working with at the moment.

The file names are applied after I've done all of the culling and having leading zeros keeps them sorting properly on whatever device I might view them on. This system let's me quickly find the original file as long as I have the original file name.

The day's folder might contain vastly different subjects: A picture of a flower in the morning, a bird in the afternoon, and my kids in the evening. I use keywords and Lightroom collections to organize images by subject or event.

gmm213 wrote in post #18326714
I was wondering if anyone has a good tutorial or info on organizing your library? I have everything in one catalog but have heard its better if you use one per shoot. A few photographers I know just use system folders and open them when they need. I need something with even the basics of them. Ive found a few on YouTube and they seem to complicate and confuse me. I need it explained to me like Im 5.

The videos that Larry linked to are excellent for explaining how the system works.

I would certainly recommend one catalog, with keywords and the use of Collections to sort your images.

Here's the best tutorial ever on the topic, IMO, from a well-respected photographer and blogger. He has a knack for logically explaining concepts so one can decide if/how to alter them for one's own use. Step-by-step instructions and screenshots included.

https://photographylif​e.com …nize-photos-in-lightroom/

I shoot for a hobby. I have one catalog with two folders. One for shoots and one for personal (family, outings etc). Under shoots, I have a folder with the models name, then date. The personal is by function.