New to Lightroom - collections- do I have this right (comparing to Flickr)

[STB]

I'm new to Lightroom and I'm about to start the daunting task of organizing (actually I'm looking forward to this) 40,000 photos. I'm hoping to clean house and toss a bunch and finally be able to find a lot of what I am looking for. I've got LR3 installed, I added all the photos in my top level folder to the catalog and imported them. I gave them all a unique keyword upon import so as I clean up I can remove that keyword and know I've finished with that photo.

I've been trying to work out my structure as much as I can ahead of time so that when I dive into the work of organizing and keywording I can just power through for the next few weeks/months/however long it takes.

I am going forward slowly so as to eliminate as much "do over" time as possible. I have a few questions that I'd like a sanity check on before I start.

First off, collections. In the past I've been using just folders on my computer, doing my PP in PSP and uploading the bet to Flickr. So I understand the Flickr organizing scheme and I want to make sure I understand the way Lightroom works before jumping in.

Flickr
upload to photostream (then I would keyword them)
photos go into sets
one photo can be in multiple sets
sets go into collections
one set can be in multiple collections
photos do not have to be in any set but can be found by keywords


If I apply that to what I think I understand about Lightroom I get this:

Flickr set = Lightroom collection
Flickr collections = Lightroom collection sets

Question #1
Is that correct assumption?


Moving on, my plan is to do a first pass using a few top level collections to sort my mess - people, family, garden, pets, nature, trips, events, etc - which will allow me to bin a lot of these and flag some to delete.(I know this is going to take multiple passes through the photos but better now than later after I have taken more photos with the new camera.)


Question #2
I read somewhere that I can flag photos as rejected and then choose to delete the rejected files all at once. When I do that, does it just delete them out of the LR catalog or can it be used to delete them all off my computer, which is what I want.


And finally (for now)
My priority project after that will be to sort through garden photos because I need to find certain photos for a website I'm designing so I figured I'd go through that set first and refine the collection with heavy keywording because I know that will stay with the photo when I move things around.


Question #3
Do I have to click a checkbox somewhere to make sure that LR writes the keyword to the metadata or is that automatic? I am working only in jpegs.


Thanks in advance for your help. If you have any additional suggestions for how to attack this massive project, I'm all ears.

[Tito87]

I don't use LR, but this might help you. If you have some time, see if you like it. If not, never mind.

Refining Your Image Workflow using Lightroom, Photoshop and Perfect Photo Suite with Brian Matiash - YouTube

[Doug Sundseth]

1) That is a correct assumption, but not the only possible organizational scheme. You could also use smart collections based on keyword and grading, organize by folder on your disk (I use a folder per year, a subfolder per month, and a sub-sub-folder per shoot at home), use colors for subjects (if you have few subjects), sort by number of stars, whatever. Lightroom supports many different organization schemes. If the one you lined out is one that meets your needs, definitely use it.

2) When you select a batch of photos, which can be your entire library, and press Ctrl-Backspace, you will be prompted about deleting rejected photos. You can choose to either remove them from LR only or remove and delete them from disk. If you make a backup on import, it will not affect the files on the backup volume (for good or ill).

3) You can choose to write to the original file in some formats or write to a metadata file in the same directory as the photo, or write only to the LR database. This is a choice you need to make in the Catalog Settings dialog, in the Metadata tab.

[STB]

Tito87 - thanks for the link to the video.

Doug - Thanks for letting me know I understood the collections concept. I will refine the system once I get rid of a lot of those photos. Due to poor housekeeping on my part I have a lot to toss before I can get the system to a useful fashion. Thanks, too, for the answers to the other questions and the addition info, very helpful.

[Hill Country Hack]

Wow! 40k photos to catalog. I just completed 10k. It took the better part of eight or so hours as I keyworded loosley the "family and pets" stuff. I was a bit more comprehensive with the rest of the images. I still need to go back and create sub folders for the family stuff (Holidays, birthdays, etc) and do another cull of the 2k pet photos. I need to do the cull while the wife is not looking as she thinks all the pet photos are precious. Even the multiples of the same shot.

[STB]

Yeah, 40K but I'm going to guess that I end up tossing over 10K of them. I managed to sort 11K yesterday and I am finding a lot of duplicates (which I knew I had and wanted to locate so I could toss) and a ton of photos that never should have been saved. Good thing when I got my first digital camera years ago I didn't take as many photos as I am now or I would be at double that amount.

The top level first pass sorting is working out really well. I'm flagging everything I think I'll toss as rejected so I can go back over those. I'm really looking for all my garden photos as we transformed the suburban yard to a wildlife habitat and I did some horrible things with file names that have made finding them difficult until now.

I have to say if any newbie is on the fence about Lightroom I am absolutely in love with the program after just spending a couple of days with it intensely. I'm not worrying about the post- processing part of it now, I'll devote time to learning that later, but for organizing massive messes like mine, this is a fantastic tool and well worth the $ (on sale now at Adobe.)