Lightroom Setup Help (for want of a better title)

Wideload

Wideload

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I was unsure whether to put this in the beginner forum or here, but figure here made more sense. Apologies if it's a bit all over the place.

I have LR4 and think I have effectively been using it "wrong" for the last year. Currently I create a new catalogue for every shoot I do and save it to one folder on my C: drive. I then export chosen images to a separate folder, also on the C: drive. It doesn't make locating images particularly easy.

Having watched a video on Youtube recently, it suggested only have one catalogue for the whole year or at most a couple for sport, portraits etc.

Going forward, I wish to keep my catalogue(s) on my PC with all images being saved to a new 2tb external hard drive.

Sooooo.... could anyone please advise in an idiot proof sort of way the best way to organise my photos and additionally how to get the current catalogues and photos from my internal drive to the external drive, with the PC still being able to locate them?

Possibly clear as mud, but thank you in advance!
 
I have one catalog for all my photos. That's the whole point of LR.
I use folders and collections to manage them.

Year, month for all photos and any photos of a specific event gets its own collection.
 
Spend an hour on YouTube. Like Elliot said, Lightroom is primarily used for organising your images. I use one catalogue, making 12 folders within Lightroom and name the by month, then when I import images , I create sub folders within the month. I was like you, getting very confused, but after some research I've decided on a process and stuck with it.
 
One important thing to remember is that if you decide to move your images around - put them into different folders, etc., do that within LR not Windows Explorer (or whatever the Mac equivalent is) or you will lose all your editing for those images.
 
Bristolian said:
One important thing to remember is that if you decide to move your images around - put them into different folders, etc., do that within LR not Windows Explorer (or whatever the Mac equivalent is) or you will lose all your editing for those images.
Click to expand...

You won't loose you editing, but LR will loose track of where the raw images are stored. You would need to point LR to the new location but any edits would remain.
 
ecoleman said:
You won't loose you editing, but LR will loose track of where the raw images are stored. You would need to point LR to the new location but any edits would remain.
Click to expand...

Absolutely correct. I wasn't very complete in what I said :(
 
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Leroy4bz said:
Spend an hour on YouTube. Like Elliot said, Lightroom is primarily used for organising your images. I use one catalogue, making 12 folders within Lightroom and name the by month, then when I import images , I create sub folders within the month. I was like you, getting very confused, but after some research I've decided on a process and stuck with it.
Click to expand...
I do something similar, the folders are named year-month-day but Lightroom automatically creates the folders on import. I set it up this way around 5 years ago and haven't had a need to change it. As Lightroom only sorts the month folders alphabetically I add the number of that month after the month has finished so they are sorted as Jan-Feb-Mar-Apr...etc. The day folders are only set to number of the day. I rename these by adding a location next to the day number, it makes it easier to find a folder of images from a certain location if I'm scanning through the year/month folders. You can create several day folders by importing a selection of images, renaming the day folder then importing another selection of images from the same day. This works well if you have visited several locations in one day and don't want them in the same day folder. I sometimes do this if I've been somewhere different in the morning and somewhere else in the afternoon.

I can see the benefits of using several catalogues if you wanted to split image types up. An example would be personal images and imaged taken for a specific reason (hobby, business). I need to learn more about collections as they seem to be a great idea to organise images.
 
Catalogues are for organising your collections, so one for work, one for personal, maybe.
But I just have the one, with 130,000+ images in.
I have a ssd I import this years raws into, previous years raws go onto a separate raid drive.
Import into a folder by date, so I have say 2016 as a main folder, then us folders are the dates. Lightroom does this automatically.
Then in Lightroom use collections, so I have main titles of work, family, cars, then sub collection sets by year and event. I export jpg to the same format.

Import with keywords and then you can find images by event, or date, or keywords. Really powerful.
 
Thank you all for the info, spent a while on Youtube and think I have my head round it. Just importing some images at the moment and was pleased to see that my process matched Byker's above, so I think I've done it "right". Thanks all again.
 
Byker28i said:
Catalogues are for organising your collections, so one for work, one for personal, maybe.
But I just have the one, with 130,000+ images in.
I have a ssd I import this years raws into, previous years raws go onto a separate raid drive.
Import into a folder by date, so I have say 2016 as a main folder, then us folders are the dates. Lightroom does this automatically.
Then in Lightroom use collections, so I have main titles of work, family, cars, then sub collection sets by year and event. I export jpg to the same format.

Import with keywords and then you can find images by event, or date, or keywords. Really powerful.
Click to expand...
Excellent advice! And (as said earlier by Elliot), working within one catalogue is the whole point of LR.
 
Byker28i said:
Catalogues are for organising your collections, so one for work, one for personal, maybe.
But I just have the one, with 130,000+ images in.
I have a ssd I import this years raws into, previous years raws go onto a separate raid drive.
Import into a folder by date, so I have say 2016 as a main folder, then us folders are the dates. Lightroom does this automatically.
Then in Lightroom use collections, so I have main titles of work, family, cars, then sub collection sets by year and event. I export jpg to the same format.

Import with keywords and then you can find images by event, or date, or keywords. Really powerful.
Click to expand...

I don't want to hijack your thread @Wideload but I am finding it interesting because I am just in the process of getting to grips with LR.

@Byker28i , when you say you export the jpgs, do you store them outside of Lightroom? So, do you only have your RAWs in the catalogue? I was planning to import everything into LR and manage them from there. Surely, it is a bit of a pain to have two sets of files for the same thing?
 
[QUOTE="when you say you export the jpgs, do you store them outside of Lightroom? So, do you only have your RAWs in the catalogue? I was planning to import everything into LR and manage them from there. Surely, it is a bit of a pain to have two sets of files for the same thing?[/QUOTE]
When you use the "export" option, there is a tick box to to "Add to this catalogue". Hence you can choose if you wish to include the export destination folder for your jpgs in the catalogue. Therefore you can continue to manage exported images in LR, no matter where they are exported to.
When you export a jpg using a raw file as the original, you create a new, separate image file, so it is not a duplicate, as it applies to the jpg whatever LR edits etc you may have performed on the raw file. The raw file remains unchanged. It is helpful to remember that when you exit LR and choose to backup the catalogue, you are not backing up the images, only the catalogue of edits for the images. Backing up images is a separate process.
 
When you use the "export" option, there is a tick box to to "Add to this catalogue". Hence you can choose if you wish to include the export destination folder for your jpgs in the catalogue. Therefore you can continue to manage exported images in LR, no matter where they are exported to.
When you export a jpg using a raw file as the original, you create a new, separate image file, so it is not a duplicate, as it applies to the jpg whatever LR edits etc you may have performed on the raw file. The raw file remains unchanged. It is helpful to remember that when you exit LR and choose to backup the catalogue, you are not backing up the images, only the catalogue of edits for the images. Backing up images is a separate process.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much, Peter. That's exactly what I needed to know. I want to keep all my images, whether RAW or JPG, in the same file structure. That's how I have always worked and want to continue that when I set up my LR catalogue.
 
jennyb said:
Thanks very much, Peter. That's exactly what I needed to know. I want to keep all my images, whether RAW or JPG, in the same file structure. That's how I have always worked and want to continue that when I set up my LR catalogue.
Click to expand...
Just another comment, the LR catalogue reflects the folder structure you determine and does not dictate it. When you create a new folder, (as has already been highlighted by Steve and Elliott above #4, #7, but worth emphasising!) always do it within LR, otherwise LR will lose its reference to the new folder in the catalogue. Hope that helps.
 
jennyb said:
I don't want to hijack your thread @Wideload but I am finding it interesting because I am just in the process of getting to grips with LR.

@Byker28i , when you say you export the jpgs, do you store them outside of Lightroom? So, do you only have your RAWs in the catalogue? I was planning to import everything into LR and manage them from there. Surely, it is a bit of a pain to have two sets of files for the same thing?
Click to expand...

A lot of my images are put onto the web, therefore only get exported in 800x600 resolution and watermarked, so these get exported into a similar folder structure the same as my Collections naming. Full res images when required would be exported into a subfolder called full. I don't reimport back into lightroom, don't see the need. If I needed another copy I make a virtual copy, but the master, plus changes (metadata) is stored in lightroom, which is where I generally go if I need to find an image.
 
jennyb said:
when you say you export the jpgs, do you store them outside of Lightroom? So, do you only have your RAWs in the catalogue? I was planning to import everything into LR and manage them from there. Surely, it is a bit of a pain to have two sets of files for the same thing?
Click to expand...
Personally I only have Raw's in my catalog and export to jpg as and when they are needed these jpgs then get deleted once they've been delivered to the client, if I need them again I just re export from the Raw, don't see the point in having a fixed jpg sitting around clogging up the system when I can just re export the Raw to whatever output settings are needed.
 
Just one catalogue here. Then sorted in to years, then folders named Scotland, Home, Yorkshire Dales etc....then more folders with the date and area it was taken, or the subject.

I don't export and save JPEGS unless they're for the internet.
 
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