Some guidance on organizing my photos please.

[Magic_x_uk]

Hi. I really want to get all my photos on my computer properly organised and wondered if someone on here can give me some guidance to perhaps a more sensible way or sorting them.

At the moment. I have my photos in the following formats.

My Pictures folder.
(then within that I have folders with the photos in it and the folders are named for example)

Christmas 2010
Christmas 2011

John 4th Birthday
John 5th Birthday

Wiltshire 2012
Pets
Motorbike

etc, etc

Now I have all my photos on my HTPC and periodically I do a full 'copy & paste' to an external HD for back up purposes of all My Pictures

I have recently got Lightroom 4.1 and am VERY slowly learning the ropes with that on my laptop.


I just would like to organize them better and I know Lightroom can help but I do not really know where to start. I can copy all my photo's over from the HTPC to my Laptop and do something with them in Lightroom. But this is what I would like guidance on. I have no idea.


Many thanks if you can point me in the right direction for a better 'workflow'


PS: I use Win 7

 

[Razor-BladE]

Copy and pasting my post from another thread..

I used to have mine as

My photos
---Blah birthday
---Blah2 birthday

But once you start getting more albums, things get out of hand extremely quickly, and searching for things takes ages if you're looking for a specific thing.

Took a few hours to sort my photos in Lightroom but now it's like this

My photos
---2009
---2010
---2011
------05.20 - Blah birthday
------12.25 - Christmas!
---------Web
------------pic.JPEG
---------Processed
------------pic.JPEG
---------pic.CR2
---------pic2.CR2

 

[Auraomega]

I've gone a different route, because I found that using folders was a bit basic and has issues when you want to sort into multiple categories.

I've let Lightroom sort out the photos by default:
...
2010
-1/1/2010
-2/1/2010
-...
2011
2012

I did try and sort out some photos when I first started using Lightroom so I have travel photos in a separate folder, however this is my layout now.

So how does that help? Tags. I've tagged all my important photos with things like landscapes, events, weddings, prints, people, etc, and then created smart collections for files containing those tags; the joy of this is that I can now have the same photo in multiple categories for example a lot of wedding photos of the bride and groom also go into my people category, landscapes regularly go into my prints category, people having photos with their pets can end in both the people and animal category.

You'll find that a lot of image viewing software has gallery-esque options which will allow you to view by tags rather than folder.

Also rather than backing up via copy/paste, I use a batch script calling robocopy to mirror my folder on an external hard drive.

robocopy "E:\Pictures\Pictures" "D:\Pictures" /mir

This copies the content from the first to second, mirroring, and ignores any files that are already there that haven't been edited, this is the major advantage over copy/paste as the mirror (/mir) command will check if files have been edited before copying and skip them if they are the same - it will even delete files that no longer exist, so no more searching for that pesky file, hurrah!

 

[PistolPete]

I just name my folders yyyy-mm-dd (or just yyyy-mm is it's multi day such as a a holiday) then what it is ie

2011-12 Christmas at home
2012-01-02 My town
2012-02-19 Day trip to Auntie Pats
2012-03-12 My town
2012-06-01 Trip to London Zoo
2012-06-11 My town

Then in Lightroom I created a collection for each year, then if it's a one off event I'd create a new collection inside the relevant year collection and give it the same name as the folder:

2011
- 2011-12 Christmas at home
2012
- 2012-02-19 Day trip to Auntie Pats
- 2012-06-01 Trip to London Zoo

And if there is any recurring theme - my this example My Town, I just add them all to the same collection

- 2012 My Town


I only shoot RAW and I don't create JPEG's unless I need them and I dont store them, I use them for what I need and thats it.
It sounds a lot more complication than it really is :-/

 

[RoosterC]

I have backup for each year, with a directory for each month within that folder. I store JPGs and not RAW. If I do have special photos in RAW, they get backed up to an external HDD.

Now with Lightroom 4, I take all my photos in RAW, edit and keep the generated JPGs.

 

[edgedemon]

Is it possible to run lightroom entirely off the external drive that I use for photo storage?
Im asking as last night I wanted to have a play, but the kids were on the PC and I thought it would be great if I could just plug my drive into my laptop and work on some photo's.
Im guessing it would be slower, but for the increased functionality it might be worth it?

 

[Devrij]

Is it possible to run lightroom entirely off the external drive that I use for photo storage?
Im asking as last night I wanted to have a play, but the kids were on the PC and I thought it would be great if I could just plug my drive into my laptop and work on some photo's.
Im guessing it would be slower, but for the increased functionality it might be worth it?

You could, but it would be so slow. Really slow. Unless it is a fast usb3 drive (of which there are very few, because most externals are 5200rpm anyway), you'll instantly regret it.

You could always copy over the folder you're working on and then move it back, but it's a bit fiddly.