Lightroom Organizational Structure

[rickp1]

I consider myself pretty good at organizing my files and folders.
Now that the number of images in my system is starting to grow I invested in Lightroom in hopes that I can organize my images with even more efficiency.

Right now the way I have my images organized is mainly by location or event/trip. For example for family trips I have a folder named "trips" then inside that I'll have the different places we've been to and when. If we have multiple trips to the same location, like Disney for example, I'll break it down by date, year then month. As for my file naming. Simple, I name it whatever the parent directory is named. This way i know where an image always goes.

What I'm looking for is some recommendations on how to organize my pictures in such a way that I'm using the full potential of Lightroom. Does that make sense?

Thanks
R.

[zona5101]

this is going to be different for different people - it kind of depends on how you think and if your collection is personal or professional.

For example, I remember stuff best in time sequence. I can remember if something happened before or after a particular point in time. Also many of the events that I have pictures for are date specfic (birthdays holifdays etc.) so I import all my images into one folder and name it with the date and a description scuh as "05-25-2010 Jadi Baseball". "Jadi" and "Baseball" will also be in my metadata tags on import.

If I was trying to organize a database of images that I was trying to market it would be completely different as I would need the ability to locate a particular type of image ...a red sports car for example. My folder structure would be by category of subject and I would rely heavily on metadata tags.

All of the images you import will have a date, date searches are essentially built in. The key to locating a single image will be diligent use of metadata tags.

[rickp1]

Good points.

Thanks for the feedback.

R.

[sk66]

I've given up on trying to force lightroom to think like I do. I now use the default date import setting and keyword images. I can then find anything I want based upon keyword i.e. animals/wildlife/birds/egret or animals/domestic/cat/syrah (my cat).

[kirbinster]

I do the same. I let Lightroom put the images into folders based on date, and then key word the images so I can search for things later. The next thing I do is delete bad shots. Then anything that I edit is tagged in blue. Anything that I actual export as a jpeg to my export directory is tagged yellow.

[Nicole]

I'm so trying to get my LR stuff organised and put into something cohesive that I can move between computers. How likely that is is probably another story.

In any case, I'm pretty decent at remembering around when I took photos, so I'm quite happy to leave the folders organised by date. However, what I'm trying to do now is go back through the archives and add keywords and remove things that don't need to be there, and generally just organise. I like Kirbinster's idea of using the colour labels, I've just never really managed to do that consistently.