Organising with Lightroom

[Darth Marty]

Im about 3/4's of the way through sorting out my 25gb of photos, dating them, naming them, date order etc and was wondering whether, after completing this task, I should use lightroom as my organiser. I am pretty certain that I want to but have a few questions please.

Once I have imported them into lightroom does this mean I have duplicated the pictures i.e my 25gb is now 50gb?

When I edit or change pictures in Lightroom will these changes automatically save to the actual picture or will it create a new version of the picture, or do I have to actually save the changes and export?

Im pretty confused about the whole library and changes thing to be hinest.

Advice as always welcomed!

[Snowdust]

Lightroom is great for organizing, although the keyword function can be a little confusing at first. When you import, you can specify to only library, or copy into a folder you chose. I recommend you allow it to copy into your newly created lightroom photo folder, then once you have confirmed the files, delete them from the old location if you don't want duplicates. That way all you future imports from a card will be copied into this one main folder by sub-folder, and you won't have files scattered all over.

Lightroom edits are non-destructive to the original file. The changes you make are all stored in a LR database. You thing export the picture with the changes to a new file when you want, leaving your original intact.

I also think this book is great and makes learning LR very easy.

[Darth Marty]

Thank you, ill have a read before I do anything!

[AgBeard]

LR2 has some usefull organising features, BUT you only benefit from them if you are prepared to put the effort into maintaining keyword & location - best done on import when the info is fresh in the mind!

The collections are a very useful tool, especially for put together a slide show that uses photos from multiple folders. It provides a manual short facility - which you can use by selecting the sequence option during export. This means that the order will be maintained in third party slide show software. Collections do NOT take very much disk space as they are effectively virtual copies within the database/catalog.

[Bear]

I would recommend spending $25 over at Kelby Training for one month's membership and do the Lightroom 2 In-Depth training by Matt Kloskowski; I found it to be a great course and learnt a ton of stuff.

Part one deals with organising your images, and collections are really the way to go if you are going to use Lightroom as your library. Having watched Part 1, I completely re-organised all my images...

Of course, having spent $25 for a month of training, there is a bundle of other great stuff to learn on there too; Real World HDR (Matt Kloskowski), Digital Arsenal (Larry Becker), and Moose Peterson's Landscape Photography series are essential watching.

I got a month free after doing Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photo Walk this year, which was a great bonus, and I will definitely be buying a month of training again sometime soon to go back and do all the Photoshop courses.