In Lightroom 5, I have all my photos in a single folder. I use collections to group my photos (such as "Railway", "Terrace", etc).
Within each of these collections, I order my photos in a way that makes logical sense, or tells a story. Lightroom calls this "User order". So far, so good.
In addition to these collections, I have a smart collection called Uncategorized, which matches photos that are not in any collection. I would like to order my Uncategorized photos, for example, to put all the shots of my building at night together [1].
Unfortunately, Lightroom doesn't let me drag photos around in a smart collection [2] [3]. How do I get around this limitation?
I can think of a couple of approaches:
I can make "Uncategorized" a plain collection instead of a smart collection, and define another smart collection called "Move to Uncategorized" that matches things that are not in any collection. Whenever I see a photo in "Move to Uncategorized", I drag it to Uncategorized. This is a ugly hack.
I can stop using collections entirely, and use folders to group my photos. With a folder for Uncategorized photos, I can drag the photos around and arrange them in a sensible order, which I can't do if Uncategorized were a smart collection. This does mean I give up the flexibility of having a photo that belongs to multiple collections.
Should I try the second option? Or is there a different way of ordering my photos?
Foot notes:
[1] I have only a few, so creating a collection doesn't make sense.
[2] Neither do smart collections reflect the order of the photos in the underlying folder. Grrr. Ideally, when I drag photos around in the underlying folder, it would reflect that order in the smart collection, and vice-versa.
[3] ... or in All Photographs, which seems to be another arbitrary restriction.