Advice on organising photos

J

jimmy83

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James
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Been meaning to sort out my photos...and since ive got Lightroom ive read that quite a few people use it to organise all their photos.

Ive got loads of old photos mostly for a P&S organised into various folders, but since ive had my DSLR ive hardly done and organising :o probably about 3 years or more.

Is there a fairly easy way to go about this in Lightroom? I dont mind spending time doing it. As it really needs to get done partly so I can back up and find photos easily!

Thanks all :)
 
I organise mine outside of LR, and inside (just in case LR isn't always my choice of editing/database program)

Outside LR;

Year -> Month -> Named folder (i.e. wedding of xx and xx - 1st June 2011)

Doesn't take two secs, and makes it easier to find. These folders are then replicated across another internal drive, onto an external hard drive and onto my NAS, so I have multiple copies of everything :)

Lightroom

Using LR, I then import all of the photos, then put them into one of several collections;

Set of all weddings, with each wedding seperated to a collection, then everything else is categorised by type, so Landscapes, Portraits etc.

Makes it easy for me to find stuff that I'm looking for, which is the name of the game!
 
I am sorting the photos in almost the same way.

First goes the year folder like 2010, 2011, etc ... and then inside I am keeping always the same template like:
2011-07-19_name_of_the_place_i_made_photos

(putting full date in form of yyyy-mm-dd ensures everything in folder is sorted by date the way it should be).

Also been using Lightroom for quite some time, but I still didn't mastered the way it imports the photos. Most of the time I just made a mess and had to re-organize... so nowadays, I'm always copying, creating folders outside Lightroom, and then (inside LR) I am simply selecting to synchronize folders and that seem to work fine, at least for me.
 
if you can get your folder structure nailed outside of LR then just import without moving files.

as for that structure, thats a bit of a marmite subject. yyyy-mm-dd is a good way to get them in the right order, i have 2 separate root folders for work and personal.
 
Mickwreay said:
Matt,

When do you make the extra copies? As in when you first put them on the pc or after the edit?

Mick
Click to expand...

A bit of both... Unedited raws get duplicated onto the external drive so I've always got a copy of them all off site, then another two copies insidebthe machine. Then the edited jpgs are stored on the NAS and on the local machine
 
neil_g said:
if you can get your folder structure nailed outside of LR then just import without moving files.

...............QUOTE]

That's exactly what I do, then I do the keywords in LR and Bob's yer Aunty!
Click to expand...
 
this is my setup:

For general photos

Year ->
originals (photos sooc)
high res (high res un-watermarked photos for pri9nting etc)
low res (800px images with a watermark on for uploading to web)


for specific types of photos (urbex trips for example):

name of trip/event ->
what # visit it was (i photograph events annually for work and visit derelict places numerous times) ->
originals
high res
low res


i will do occasional back-ups of all my photos, then delete the originals and high res files off my laptop to free up space. ill leave the low res files and refer to my back-ups if and when i need high res files.
 
Do you think I would be best of organising all photos into separate folders in windows rather than use LR?

All I want is a basic structure like, yyyy-mm-dd but was hoping LR could manage this for me and create folders if needed etc.
 
mattyh said:
A bit of both... Unedited raws get duplicated onto the external drive so I've always got a copy of them all off site, then another two copies insidebthe machine. Then the edited jpgs are stored on the NAS and on the local machine
Click to expand...

ON my phone so can't easily look up NAS?

Gonna look real stupid here no doubt!
 
NAS = Network Attached Storage. An enclosure with a small computer in it running a dedicated OS that serves disks that are in the enclosure to the network via some form of network share.
 
i just have my folders seperated into genre. such as... birds,landscape,zoos,weddings etc with sub folders inside with location ( if needed) edited and resized folders. then just update external hard drives every so often.. works for me.
 
arad85 said:
NAS = Network Attached Storage. An enclosure with a small computer in it running a dedicated OS that serves disks that are in the enclosure to the network via some form of network share.
Click to expand...

Cheers mate :thumbs:

I currently have 3x 500gb USB drives, I'm not in business so not too worried about speed. I'm just bad at organising my pics!

Mick
 
Agreed. Best to split into folders by dates. Then periodically i dump them on DVDs. DVDs are not forever, but possibility to loose entire hard drive scares me. You can also do 2x copies of hard drive and DVD.
Some time i build an index. Running scripts that build from all found on DVD images small 100x100 previews. Directory structure same: 2011-02-23, etc. Then i just can open all this images in windows explorer as small icons. There can be thousands, but browser can handle then it they small.
 
mangust said:
Agreed. Best to split into folders by dates. Then periodically i dump them on DVDs. DVDs are not forever, but possibility to loose entire hard drive scares me. You can also do 2x copies of hard drive and DVD.
Click to expand...

It's going a bit of topic, but worth mentioning: A cheap method of having two folders (or hard drives in sync) is by using one of the following programs:
- SyncToy (free)
- SyncBack (also free, bit more complicated but much more options to play with)
 
Do you guys keep the original RAW file aswell? (If you shoot in RAW)
 
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