New start with LR - how to organise photos well from the ground up?

[EmyB]

I am nerdily excited to be doing a complete reformat of my computer and clean install of Windows 7 and Lightroom 3 (which I haven't used before).

I am a new hobby photographer and I had begun to find my disorganisation and clutter intolerable. I was previously organising my photos by event (e.g. Christmas 2010, 1st birthday party, Sydney trip, Moon photos) etc but this just becomes a monster of folders. Is there a better way of doing it?? Then I tried doing it month-by-month but this was very difficult to find certain photos again. I have heard lightroom helps a lot with this because of tagging and things....

I am really hoping to start off on my squeaky clean computer with a great system for labelling and organising my photos so that they don't end up in a difficult to navigate mess of folders.

Can anyone recommend the best way of going about this? How do you organise your photos as you take them?

Many thanks.

[Madog]

I recently did something similar. I found the tutorials on Adobe TV were helpful and informative. The folder structure should be something that makes sense for you.
I started with LR3 an empty 1 tb external hd and 15k pics scattered through 2 other hd and a handful of dvd's. The external drive has the catalog and a folder for pictures, all my pictures go in that folder. I used year, month, and special event (holidays, birthdays, trips) folders. 4 days later everything was imported, tagged, rated, and culled back to around 8k.
With the filtering options; keywords, date, camera, lens, and many, many others; it is very easy to skip right to the pic you want.
Good luck, and have fun
Don't forget to back everything up

[Liz Caldwell]

Here's an example of how I usually organize and name files (I took this from a wedding photographer)

Photos >2011 >Oct >Smiths 10-27-11 >SmithFamily001.jpg

That gives you a few ways to search and/or narrow down where a photo is located when you're looking for it ages later