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I'm using Lightroom mostly to organize pictures. Mainly they are so divided into Lightroom (and so on disk):

  • Root Folder
    • 2014
      • Event01
      • Event02
    • 2015
      • Event01
      • Event02
    • 2016
      • Event01
      • (...)

Until here I'm happy with that. Now, based on your experiences, what about pictures taken i.e. by the phone and not related to an event but daily taken? Do you create an event per year called in example "Mix" with sub folder on main arguments or similar but not related to a specific year?

Example 1:

  • 2015
    • Event01
    • Event02
    • MIX
      • Parties
      • Food
      • Car
  • 2016
    • Event01
    • Event02
    • MIX
      • Parties
      • Food
      • Car

Example 2:

  • 2015
    • Event01
    • Event02
  • 2016
    • Event01
    • Event02
  • MIX
    • Parties
    • Food
    • Car

Or whatever? What do you suggest based on your experiences?

Thanks a lot!

Simon

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2 Answers 2

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Lightroom is strongest in VIRTUAL organization. You have numerous choices, among them (and not mutually exclusive):

  • You can physically (on disk) organize in any way convenient; I personally prefer by date shot

  • Photos can be given keywords, such as "Soccer" or "Picnic". Those
    could actually be a specific event "Family Reunion 2016" but
    generally these are best if a bit more generic. A photo can have any number of keywords, and those can be hierarchical if desired.

  • Photos can be tagged with people's names (either manually or with face recognition); these can be special keywords, or regular ones (if you do it by hand).

  • In addition to keywords, Photos can be tagged with large amounts of other metadata such as titles (usually short, like an event), captions (longer, contents of the shot), and a ton of other information. GPS coordinates can be included as well.

  • You can build collections of images manually, e.g. when you do a
    shoot, make a collection and put all photos from that event in a
    manual collection like "XYQ Baseball Game 05/25/2016". These could then have very descriptive names.

  • Related to the above, if you are publishing to a web site and use
    Lightroom, you automatically get an implicit "Published collection" with each such grouping, which may prevent the need of building a separate collection for the event.

  • You can also build smart collections, automatically, by rules built
    around such data as keywords, titles, etc. For example you can build an automatic collection 'All photos with Keywords "Soccer" and "Big High School'. Because collections are virtual, a photo can be in any number of collections (including none).

Trying to use on-disk directory structure for the primary (or worse only) organization is an exercise in frustration as it does not meet all needs. With collections and other metadata based groupings you can vary by those needs.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thank you @Linwood. Based on you suggestions, I'll point on solution in Example 2. Explicit events could be archived in dedicated directories under his referred year. The othe pictures are all together on a top level. I can filter / serach / organize them directly from Lightroom using keywords / metadata. Thanks :-) \$\endgroup\$
    – Simon
    Nov 3, 2016 at 10:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ Excellent answer. @Simon I strongly recommend that you use collections. \$\endgroup\$
    – crunch
    Nov 3, 2016 at 11:04
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Yes, I use "mix" folders as you call them, physically on my hard drive, filed under each calendar year. That's where I mainly place pictures taken by Phone, or small numbers of DSLR images that do not warrant a separate "event" folder in the chronology. For instance, each year I make a folder for skies & clouds which I can't help taking pictures of regularly, and a folder for concert snapshots.

For specific events, I usually make these subfolders, if applicable:

  1. DSLR Photos -- sub events (like day trips on a vacation) --- HDR sets (multishots) --- Panorama sets (multishots)

  2. DSLR Videos

  3. Phone Photos
  4. Phone Videos
  5. Instagram, Swarm, etc. posts from this event

I use the classification and color labels in Lightroom mainly to ease my workstream, selecting and grouping images during postprocessing and uploading photos to Flickr.

I don't spend too much time labeling photos so I can find everything containing, I don't know, a red car, or birds, or person A or B. I use the "label" function on Flickr for that, for the images I actually upload.

I'm a bit weary of spending a lot of time on labelling in Lightroom and then, I don't know, next year the appplication or my library crashes. Even if I still have my photo files (because obviously I make backups like a good boy), that would mean that all my labelling work is lost.

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