Why Organize?
It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual photographer, a working professional or somewhere in between, sooner or later you’re going to want to find that picture you took four years ago. The first question is, did you even save it and if so, where? Did you put it on your old laptop; is it on an external drive that you lost track of?
Lightroom Classic provides four powerful tools for keeping track of your image files. And at the core of all these tools is the Lightroom catalog.
The Lightroom Catalog
If your image is not in the catalog, it’s not in Lightroom.
If your image is not in Lightroom, Lightroom can’t help you find it.
The only images Lightroom knows about are the ones in the catalog. The catalog does a lot of things for you but the most fundamental thing is keep track of where all your image files are.
How do image files find their way into the catalog? The most effective way is with the Lightroom Import feature. Among other things, you specify where you want Lightroom to put your files, on the internal hard drive, external drive or network attached storage device and Lightroom does the rest for you.
It’s worth mentioning that the hard drive where you choose to store your files should be large enough to hold all the files you want to keep track of, both of photographs you’ve taken in the past and ones you anticipate taking in the future. In general, external drives or storage devices attached to your network will give you the greatest flexibility.
With this as background, here’s an introduction to the four powerful tools that Lightroom provides. These tools will make it much easier for you to find the images you want.
1. Organize Your Hard Drive
Every computer comes with a built-in hard drive. The hard drive (also called a storage device) that comes with your computer is referred to as an ‘internal drive’. It contains, among other things, all the instructions and data your computer needs to run. There are other kinds of drives – external drives which are attached to your computer and storage devices attached to your network.
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Internal Drive |
External Drive |
Network Attached Storage |
The internal drive pictured above has its case removed so you can see the metal disk that spins and on which the data is stored. It also shows the read/write head that moves back and forth to write and read the data to and from the disk. The reason these are called hard drives is because of the metal disk. The external drive also contains a spinning disk but is connected to your computer via a USB cable, making it portable. The network attached storage device contains multiple drives similar to the internal drive in your computer. The example, above photo shows a device with five drives. Network attached storage capacity can be expanded by replacing smaller drives with larger ones. Your computer accesses the data via your home or office network.
These storage devices store data as files of which there are many kinds – the ones your computer needs in order to run, files apps like Lightroom and Photoshop need for them to run, and your music, pictures, videos and documents. It’s not uncommon for a computer’s internal hard drive to have hundreds of thousands of files.
How is it possible to keep track of them all? By organizing the files into folders. The files related to making your computer and your applications run are in folders that you don’t need to concern yourself with. However, your music, photo, videos and document files can be organized in folders that you have control over. Even files you put on your Desktop are stored in a folder of that name.
Folders are organized into hierarchies similar to a family tree; that is, a parent folder can have one or more child folders. A child folder can only have one parent folder, but it can be a parent to other child folders.
The best way to organize your image files is to store them in folders under a single parent folder. This has two big advantages – files are easier to find and, perhaps even more importantly, they are easier to back up.
Lightroom has a default parent folder on both Windows and Mac computers – Pictures. This folder is automatically created when you created your user account on your computer. When you use Lightroom to import your image files they will be organized in folders under the Pictures folder. The only drawback is that the Pictures folder is on the internal hard drive, so your image files compete for space with everything else on that drive.
A better option is to create a parent folder on an external or network attached drive, one with plenty of space. You can call it Pictures, Lightroom Pictures or something else, it’s up to you. Then as you import files you can create folders under this parent folder.
Organize by Folder Name
Lightroom gives you two options for organizing your folders. The first lets you select the parent folder that you created and specify a sub-folder. Lightroom will create the sub-folder for you. The name of the sub-folder is up to you but using a standard format that meets your needs will make finding files a lot easier.
Let’s run through a hypothetical example. Suppose you do event photography consisting of weddings and youth sport teams. You can begin the folder name with the event category – Wedding, Soccer, Little League, etc. Next, you may find it helpful to identify the year and month when you did the shoot. And finally, you may identify the group or event. Some sample sub-folder names might be:
· Soccer-2018-10-Yorba-Linda-Panthers
· Soccer-2018-10-Yorba-Linda-Pirates
· Wedding-2018-02-Nelson
· Wedding-2018-04-Langner
You get the idea.
Organize by Date
The other option is to organize your files by the date the image was captured. (Lightroom knows the image capture date from the metadata stored in the image file.) In this option you select your parent folder and specify the date format. Lightroom will create the date folders. One option is to create different folders for year, month and date. Here’s how that would look.
Lightroom Pictures
2018
03
01
02
03
04
15
20
This option works well if you’re not shooting specific jobs but shoot random destinations and personal events for your own pleasure. It also works well if you lead photography workshops and are always in a particular location in a given month, such as, always in Death Valley in February.
You may be thinking that by storing image files by date you lose important information about the shoot. And that would be true if it wasn’t for this next Lightroom tool.
2. Rename Files when Importing
Lightroom gives you the option of renaming files when you use its Import feature. Lightroom provides a number of canned options or you can customize your own.
One option that is especially useful involves specifying a ‘shoot name’ that is incorporated into the file name. There are other renaming options that include camera and other information.
The two ‘shoot’ options that Lightroom offers are Shoot Name – Sequence Number or Shoot Name – Original File Name. In some instances, you may want more than the shoot name. A useful custom setting is Shoot Name – Date – Sequence Number. This also gives you the date the image was captured.
An example might be: ‘Yosemite-180512-0001’.
The ‘shoot name’ approach allows you to quickly locate all of the images associated with a specific shoot, even if they’re scattered in different folders. The next Lightroom tool makes this easy.
3. Create Collections
Lightroom provides Collections. This is where image files in disparate locations can be collected together. There are two types of collections – the ones you manually create by creating the collection and dragging images into it. The other is a Smart Collection that automatically adds images based on the criteria that you specify.
There is a lot of flexibility in creating smart collections such as the camera the image was shot with, the ISO, the lens used to just to name a few.
When you rename your files with a shoot name, you can create a smart collection based on the shoot name. Using the example above, you can create a Yosemite smart collection by defining the condition:
FileName Starts with ‘Yosemite’
Any file name that starts with ‘Yosemite’ that is anywhere within the catalog will be added to this collection. That could include files you shot during your vacation this year and the files you shot four years ago.
4. Add Keywords
Keywords are the ultimate way of finding your images. With a well-thought-out keyword strategy, you have everything at your fingertips that you need to find your photos.
All too often, however, keywords are added to images in an ad hoc manner. Over time you may use different names for the same thing. For example, you use ‘Yosemite’ at one time, ‘Yosemite National Park’ another and ‘Yosemite NP’ still another.
But there’s a way to organize your keywords similar to the way you organize the folders on your storage device. It’s starts by creating broad categories under which you can create child categories that are more specific and detailed.
One broad category that is very useful is ‘Where.’ This contains location information for all of your images. You can create a hierarchy of keywords just like you create a hierarchy of folders. Let’s explore a hierarchy for ‘Where.’
If your photography is confined to local areas, you can start by naming your state as a child of Where. Within state you can add cities and other locations. As an example, the hierarchy could look like this:
Where
California
Anaheim
Disneyland
Los Angeles
Dodger Stadium
LACMA
San Francisco
Golden Gate Park
Japanese Tea Garden
de Young Museum
As you continue to photograph California, the sub-categories grow.
You can use this hierarchy to find images at specific locations such as the Japanese Tea Garden, or all Golden Gate Park images or all San Francisco images. It is very flexible.
Perhaps you expand your photographic excursions into Oregon. The hierarchy is then expanded to look like this:
Where
California
[California sub keywords]
Oregon
Bandon Beach
Crater Lake
You could even go international by adding continent and country parent categories:
Were
Europe
Ireland
Norway
North America
United States
California
Oregon
Another sub-category under Where could be Parks. Parks could be organized by National Parks, State Parks, etc., with specific parks in each sub-sub-category.
Where
Continents
Europe
North America
Parks
National Parks
Yosemite NP
Regional Parks
State Parks
New keywords can be added at any time and individual keywords or branches of the hierarchy can be moved around by dragging and dropping. All of this is done in the Keyword List section in the right panel of the Library module.
Other broad categories can be
· Who in which you identify images of your kids, friends, family, clients, etc.
· What which can contain broad categories such as Events, Foliage, Landscapes, Night Photography, Seascapes, Street Photography, Water, each with its own hierarchy of sub-categories.
· When could contain Season, Time of Day, Year.
· How is important to me as an educator in that I can find images by the compositional rules I used, light conditions and challenges, and the sharpness and exposure decisions I made.
The important thing to remember is the broad categories you choose and the hierarchies you build under them help you to quickly find your images. Everyone’s needs are different so the solution you design will meet your specific needs.
If you are developing a keyword approach from scratch, the job of implementing is is much easier. You can apply keywords each time you import images. But if you already have an ad hoc keyword approach, bringing order out of chaos is harder but not impossible. In this case you can always get started by defining the categories discussed above and adding new images to it. Then as time permits you can bring older images into the new structure.
Another advantage of having a structure is you can systematically apply all of the appropriate keywords when you import your images.
There are several strategies for migrating from an ad hoc to a structured keyword system that are beyond the scope of this article.
Hopefully, this gives you an idea of the things you can do to organize your images and easily find images that may have been taken years ago. Good luck.
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