The RIGHT Way to Organize in Lightroom Classic
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 เม.ย. 2024
- If you've struggled to organize your Lightroom Classic catalog, you're in the right place. In this video, you'll learn how to efficiently and effectively organize your Lightroom Catalog, including how to use things like collections, smart collections, and even how to import your photos into Lightroom Classic.
Link to the portable SSD I use: amzn.to/48sn80K
Introduction - 0:00
How Lightroom Works - 0:48
Catalog - 1:12
Missing Photos - 1:46
Organizing On Your Hard Drive - 3:06
Importing Photos - 4:40
The Problem with Folders - 6:25
Collections - 7:43
Creating New Collections - 10:28
Smart Collections - 12:10
Deleting Photos - 13:33
Final Thoughts - 16:08 - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
I still organize my photos in folders - clients, travel, family, other - with dated subfolders under each. I'll import from my camera card to one of these folders, and then go into LRC and add that folder. After that, I organize everything in the LRC catalog using collections. I find the folder structure in the OS to be a good way to find files without having to open LRC. It also doesn't leave me completely tied to Lightroom should I decide to move on to something else in the future.
That works too as long as you stay super organized!
Thank you Austin! You explain things well and in a calm voice.
My pleasure!
Thanks for this excellent video, concise and to the point. Very useful.
Glad you enjoyed!
Very well presented and helped me immensely. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful!
Righteous bro thanks for the knowledge
You bet!
Great video to get me started with organizing several collections of photos
Glad it was helpful!
thanks for perfect informations
Most welcome
Great video thank you!
Glad you liked it!
When I first started using LR, I setup it up based on an article that I found which recommended importing them into folders by date, such as you have them. I've used this ever since. I've seen Scott Kelby and others saying to setup a file structure according to subject matter and such. This just doesn't make sense to me as it's easy to have several subjects on the card before I get it back to my computer. I've sparingly used collections through the years, but I'm getting to the point that I'm better understanding the power of collections, especially smart collections. I still have a ways to go to be as organized as I would like, but overall I'm content with what I have.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing your experience. Everyone will find what works best for them!
I'm sort of the same. I sort by year, month and day folders but then sort to collections later by subject. So if I've been out on a day trip that's involves forest, waterfall and wildlife, the original RAW files all go in a folder with that day under a folder of that month under a folder of that year. Then when I've rejected (and deleted) all the ones I'll never use, I'll process the best ones into a separate drive of finalised images and separate folders for jpeg exports etc.. I then make collections of the finalised images which in this case would be a collection of waterfalls, collection of woodland and collection of wildlife etc....
Then ALL that is backed up on an external drive.
Every time I see other people's filing methods I see great ideas and logic but I've been doing it this way for years and it's just part of my workflow now.
Hi Austin James: I liked this video. With respects to deleting images, I use a Smart Collection where the Pick Flag indicator is set to "Rejected". Then I simply highlight all and delete as per our steps. Cheers, Keith
That is such a great idea, and so obvious to me now that you mention it! Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this. Thank you!!
Austin’s approach is dependent on moving photos from collection to collection. Curious why he doesn’t use Smart collections.
I do the same. It's often tempting to uncheck certain photos when importing, but I'll just import them all and then go through and reject+delete rejected from disk as I'm culling.
Watched all 16 and a half minutes. Thanks for sharing the way you organize photos! I am working to being more organization to my catalog and recently adopted year folders on my hard drive, although I don't import into date folders.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the utility of keywords? I've recently started using them for genres (portrait, landscape, etc) and certain common subjects, but I'm not convinced yet that it's worth my effort to keep up long-term.
Thanks for checking it out, and glad it sounds like it was helpful. I don't personally use keywords, it just seems like a lot of work. Yes, you can use automated software to generate them but I still find this way to be sufficient enough for me.
thank you! I just came from your other Lightroom organization tutorial, and this video came just in time to clarify things! Also, which portable hard drive did you use (I can't find the link you mentioned)?
Here it is: amzn.to/48sn80K
Thanks for watching!
Thanks!
Thanks so much for that! I appreciate it!
Hi thanks for great video. On the importing part in the beginning: does Lightroom use the date at which image was hot or date you import the photos to create the folder name?
The date at which is was shot! Which is recorded in the metadata of the image as long as the date is correct on your camera!
thanks
informative video
Glad you think so!
Ahh, thanks mah dude. You are a real life-saver. TBH, I am not really good at organizing stuff and I want to make this a good essential habit :)
Glad I could help!
This young man understands database management.
Haha! Thanks!
Great video! Since you're so geography-based I'm surprised you didn't mention using GPS coordinates more for filtering and smart collections. This wasn't such a thing back in the day because not all cameras had GPS. But they do now, and since a few years ago LR auto-populates fields like City based on the GPS coords. You can then use that data for sorting.
Yeah, I’ll have to give that a try at some point!
To delete rejects you can select the top folder, then click Photos and select delete rejected photos.
Good to know! Thanks.
I've never used collections, only folders before, and your process seems much better, but in trying your method, when I import cr2 images and they show in 'previous import' my LRC won't allow me to drag them into my 'editing to do' collection. Any tips or ideas?
Hmm, that’s odd. I’m always able to drag mine out of the previous import area. There could be a variety of different problems and it’s hard for me to say without seeing it. You can try reaching out to Adobe Support!
Thanks, yes I'll do that@@AustinJamesJackson
The biggest lesson to learn in terms of organizing your photos in Lightroom is NEVER delete your photos from within the Explorer app on your particular OS. Always do it from within Lightroom. Otherwise you're going to run into that missing photos dialog box that Austin showed in this video. In terms of how I personally organize my photos, I am a big fan of collections myself. It's much better than going down the folder route myself, because then you can rename it whatever you want to, so you know what happened on a particular day on a particular shoot.
Very well said!
You can rename folders all day within Lightroom as well. Anything done within Lightroom will translate to the finder/explorer level as well. I operate my folders this way yyyymmdd-shoot-name that way I can go back 20 years and find any photo within a few minutes
Great overview! it was very helpful!
Glad it was helpful!
CTRL+Backspace in Library module (Windows) removes X-flaged photos
Thanks for that info!!
After I set an image to be deleted, I press Command-Delete (on a Mac), which then opens the "Remove from Lightroom" or "Delete from Disk" dialog box.
Perfect! I usually delete from disk.
Folders + Tags + Collections / Collection Sets, coves pretty much all you need
True!
How can I sort it when it is already a mess, I saw this video months too late.....
It is a huge pain to fix once it’s gone wrong unfortunately.
Why on earth do you go to the trouble of auto creating folders by date on import and then admit you you cannot remember the date of a visit and you then create collections of place names? seems a bit mad to me when you can import to folders name with the places you visit. You then avoid the chore of adding the images to a vast array of collections.. I just use collections for specific tasks, like choosing photos for an exhibition or a competition etc
Running through all the folders to find the import spot would take a ton of time. Since LR automatically creates them, I don’t have to spend any time messing with it. You can put them in to your drive however you want, I just do it the easiest way that takes the least effort.
I use collection only for a specific task, not for organizing photos, because collection doesn't organize photos but only labels photos. I keep LR folder structure as organized as possible. I name photos starting with year-month-day-location, because I often need to sort the photos on the date take in a folder and upload in that order to certain online site.
I add location to the file name, and add keywords of location to the photo in LR. So I can filter the photo by location I need, and I can search the photo on my hard drive without LR@@AustinJamesJackson
I don't import photos directly from card. I copy the whole folder from card to hard drive, rename it and drag the whole folder to LR to import. Going through the folder and use X to mark the photos being rejected, may use 1,2,3 to give stars so I can go back to edit those stared, and ctrl+backspace (windows) to delete all rejected photos.
Everybody who thinks seriously about how they will find photos efficiently ends up using keywords as their fundamental organizing mechanism. All the professional organizations -- agencies, museums, image archives etc. -- do it with keywords.
Let's say you take a picture in Zion of beech trees in fall color with a stream running through the composition. If you put that picture in your "Zion" collection, you have no way to find it when you want to see all your fall color images, or all your beech tree images, or all your images with streams in them. Every photograph has multiple subjects or potential uses, and keywords are by far the easiest way to tag a photo with all of them. When you realize that keywords are necessary and you're going to be doing them anyway, then spending time on other methods of cataloging photos becomes moot.
Also, if they adhere to IPTC standards (any decent catalog program will), keywords are transportable, meaning that if you switch to a different cataloging program, you can automatically transfer your keywords and never lose all your cataloging work.
Lightroom has powerful keywording features for exactly this reason.
Yeah, key wording is excellent in Lightroom, but takes a little more time to set up. If you’re willing to put in the effort, it’s a great way to do it too.
when you spent that much time to setup collection, it's not that much more time to make those collection as smart collection, then enter keywords to the photos, let LR sort them into your collection. In the future, just enter the key words, don't have to drag new photos into that collection. And using filter is another good way to work with keywords.@@AustinJamesJackson
I have never struggled with catalogues, because I have never used them.
👍
you are not fully using the power of lightroom if you are not renaming on import and not setting meta date on import
You can certainly do that too!
Brutal organization method. Collections are great but the hierarchy method you employ may work for you but extremely unnecessarily complicated. bye forever as this was my first visit to the channel
No worries, sorry it didn’t work for you.
Stopped at 13 seconds. You should change the title of this video to "The way I do something and that many other photographers disagree with" .
Thanks for watching 13 seconds!
If you had continued watching, you would have heard him say several times that this is his way and that he's open to hearing alternatives in the comments.
How rude and inaccurate. He makes it very clear that this is his own preference. If you had listened more than 13 seconds you would have found that out.
I would have appreciated a few words that described what is a better way, in your opinion. I’m new to this subject so am looking for various methods.