help_outline Skip to main content
Monthly Newsletter  |  Monthly Meetings  |  Join the Club
   
Photographer: Ann LeFevre
Clouds Over Goat Island
HomeBlogsRead Post

Ray Roper's Blog

Lightroom Image Organization
By Ray Roper
Posted: 2018-03-26T23:02:00Z

Since my last post I seem to have been unwittingly tagged as a Lightroom guru. Oh ye of very overblown faith.

As a consequence, a couple of questions have come to me recently about the use of LR to organize photo images. One might presume that is a topic for beginners or the very inexperienced. But since it
is one of the core functions of LR and also one of the primary reasons that most people use the software, and, because it is a surprisingly complex subject when you start to dig below the surface basics, I concluded it might not be a complete waste of time to provide an overview of the subject from my own perspective.


This is decidedly not the last and definitive word on the matter. In fact, I'm sure that many of the more experienced members of the club have long-established procedures of their own that may differ significantly from mine. Those who do, please, avail yourselves of the opportunity to respond to this post in the comments below with your own ideas. All of us will benefit, and quite a few, me included, might learn something new.


(An aside here: blog comments here are restricted to paid club members. If you don’t fit in that category, I’ll post a link to this page on the club’s Facebook page, so feel welcome to comment there. I would point out, however, that Facebook posts have the unfortunate tendency to disappear completely after a day or two never to be found again, while comments here remain easily accessible pretty much forever. Club membership is just $35 per year. That’s less than ten cents per day, folks. Heck, you probably spend more than that on downtown parking meters!)


The screenshot below shows the basic LR display with the Library module selected (top arrow). The first thing that needs to be done to work with images in LR is to “Import” them. More on that shortly. The bottom arrow shows the Import button that will be used to start that process. Note that I'm using Lightroom Classic CC, but this information will apply to any non-mobile version of Lightroom.




Before we go any further, a little background information needs to be understood.


Unlike Photoshop or other pure editing software, LR does not open image files directly. In order to edit, organize, move, delete, or otherwise manipulate images in any way, they must first be imported into the LR “Catalog.” That Catalog, which behind the scenes is simply a remarkably flexible database, does not contain any image files itself, but simply stores a pointer to the file’s location in your computer’s storage system—and a lengthy list of metadata about each file. The metadata includes all the information captured about the image by your camera, such as camera settings, make and model, lens, date, time, etc., and all the editing changes that you make in LR itself, along with a “preview” image that allows you to see those changes.


That structure provides two major benefits: First, all editing changes are non-destructive; LR never touches the original file, but simply processes those changes into a preview image that you see displayed on-screen. You always have the option of switching the view back to the original image, or going back any number of editing steps to see what the image looked like at that point.


The second big benefit of the LR Catalog paradigm is that your actual image files may reside literally anywhere in your computer’s electronic environment, including external drives or network locations. So the answer to the first question, “where should I store my files?,” is absolutely anywhere you like. It doesn’t matter if they are scattered around in various locations; once they are imported in the LR Catalog, it has the pointer to the right location and will go get the file there as needed.


That methodology does lead to a couple of important caveats. If you move original image files it should be done inside of LR itself. If they are moved with your computer’s file manager, the Catalog location pointer will no longer be valid and LR will not be able to find the file. That scenario is relatively easy to fix, once you know how, but it’s a whole lot easier to do the move in LR so that it “knows” where the file is located. In addition, the Catalog itself cannot be stored in a network location. It can be on any local drive (even external) but for performance considerations I’d recommend putting it on your fastest drive, such as an SSD (solid state) drive, if you have one. It will default to the “Pictures” folder (“My Pictures” in older versions of Windows) in a “Lightroom” subfolder. That’s usually a pretty good place to leave it.


There’s a whole lot more to the Catalog concept, of course, and if you’re curious about more of the details of how it all works, this Adobe tutorial is very informative (be sure to scroll down to the “Best Practices” section). 

But for our purposes, that’s enough background to get started on what needs to be done in the LR Import process to get your images organized.


Once you've clicked the Import button in the screenshot above, the Import display below will appear. If it is the first time you've used LR or if you want to import image files that are already in your computer's storage system (as opposed to camera or memory card), then the first step is to choose the source folder. In the example shown below, I've selected a folder path D:\Documents\Photography\PPC\Photos\Slide Show, as shown at arrow 1. That's just an example to illustrate the fact that you can look at any drive and folder available to your computer, including external drives.



Arrow 2 above indicates the important selection of how you want your files handled. Since these are images that already exist on my drive , the default is "Add." That will not move or alter the original image files in any way, but simply put them in the LR Catalog with pointers to their current location. For existing computer files, in most cases, I think this is what you would want. However, note the disabled (greyed out) choices there: "Copy as DNG," "Copy," and "Move." The first will copy your files to a new location on your drive and convert them to Adobe's universal RAW format, DNG (digital negative); the second simply copies your files, in their current format, to a new location, leaving the originals in place; and the third moves the files, again in their current format, to a new location. You must specify the new storage location in all three cases, so selecting any of the three will activate the Destination portion of the File Handling panel on the right side of the screen, shown expanded at right. We’ll refer to that again in a moment below.


Arrow 3 above  shows the selection of Preview type. I would recommend "Standard" here. The other choices get into details that are beyond the scope of this article. Below that check box are four additional check boxes. The “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” and “Make a Second Copy To” choices are largely self-explanatory. The latter can be useful in creating backup copies if you haven’t already done so. The other choices involve more complex topics that I’m going to leave for a subsequent post. For now it’s perfectly safe to leave them unchecked.


Arrow 4 above shows the "Check All" and "Uncheck All" buttons that can be used to facilitate selection of photos to be handled. Note in my illustration that all are checked. There might be a good reason to do them in smaller groups that I'll address shortly. Finally, arrow 5 indicates the Import button that will initiate the process once you've set all the parameters the way you want them.


The second possible scenario, and more likely one for all but your first import, is that you are bringing in new set of images from a camera or memory card. When that is the case, LR will show that option in the Source panel, as depicted below.


In this case, the Destination panel on the right side is always enabled, and you will need to choose a location on your computer’s storage devices where the camera files will be copied. In this illustration, I have chosen a “My Pictures” folder on my D: drive, which is not the primary drive. It is a large capacity drive I use for general file storage, and is separate from the C: drive where the LR Catalog is stored. That latter is a high speed SSD drive and improves LR performance considerably—remembering that once you’ve imported the image files, LR works almost entirely from the Catalog, not from the original file locations.


One other important feature to take note of here is that I’ve simply selected the parent “My Pictures” folder that I created on my D: drive. See the illustration at left with the “Into Subfolder” check box unchecked. If that is the case, and the “Organize By date” selection is made just below it, LR will automatically create a subfolder under that parent folder for each calendar year and subfolders under each yearly folder for each day, all based on the date and time stamp your camera has put on the image files. The date format can be selected there as well, but it is best to use the default YYYY-MM-DD format so that they will be alphabetized correctly by date. In this scenario, LR will automatically sort all of your files by date; each individual folder will contain only the images captured on that single day. If “Into Subfolder” is checked, you then must specify an existing folder on your drive. If you do not organize "By date," the only other choice is “Into One Folder”—which is not recommended unless you



like to hunt for needles in haystacks.


But, if you do choose to use the single folder option, you can avoid the hunting-for-needles problem by importing one group of photos at a time into a named folder of your choice. In this case, the option to select or unselect a specific set of images in the Import source grid view becomes critical in getting everything to go into the desired pigeonholes.


In both cases, importing from a hard drive, or importing from a camera or memory card, it’s important to remember that the Catalog view on the left side of the LR display will show the folder hierarchy as it exists on the hard drive. For files already in the computer’s storage system the folder names will remain unchanged in the Catalog. For files imported and copied from the camera, LR will create new disk drive folders based on year and day and display those accordingly in the Catalog view. In neither case are the original image files altered in any way.


At this point, once my files are in the LR Catalog, I like to modify the date-predicated folder names by appending a short phrase to each describing the subject matter. To do so, you simply right-click the folder name in the Catalog view on the left side and choose the "Rename" option in the popup menu. Before that step, the folder names will look like the right example below and afterward, something like the screenshot to the left of it. Once again, it's very important that you use LR to accomplish this task, not Explorer, Finder or other outside file manager.








I personally find this kind of organization to be sufficiently selective for my purposes, because LR also offers extremely powerful ways to search, sort, and filter images by any item of metadata that you can dream up. To keep this post from becoming even longer and more unwieldy than it already is, I’m going to discuss those features in more detail in an additional post in the near future.


But, if you do want to further separate images into subfolders by subject matter on a single day, which is perfectly legitimate and depends entirely on your shooting style, you should still proceed with the import process as described above. Then, in LR, right-click the folder name and select the option to “Create Subfolder Inside <current folder name>”. You can then select images in the parent folder and move them to the new subfolder name. In LR, that can be done by simply selecting and dragging images from the Library module grid display into the selected folder name in the Catalog “Folders” panel on the left side of the screen. When you do this, you have to drag from the middle of the image itself, not the frame around it in the grid display. Please do not try to do any of this outside of LR in Windows Explorer, or the Mac Finder. LR will then be unable to locate the files, and you will want to slap yourself silly when you find out how much work it is to fix that mess.


Another consideration in determining how complex you make the basic LR Catalog—and that mitigates the need to do so—is the fact that LR provides a feature called “Collections” that allows you to place photos by subject matter or any other criteria of your choice into separate named groups. Those groups are listed completely separately from the main catalog file structure and offer unlimited flexibility in organizing images in ways other than the initial import date-time structure. Placing a photo in a Collection does not duplicate it on the disk drive, nor does it create a separate preview image in the Catalog. It simply shows it in both groups—the original date-time folder and the Collection folder. It can be edited in either location and all changes will be applied in both. A single image may be added to as many different collections as you need.   


The last general consideration for your photos is what to do with the edited versions of them. Some folks get a bit carried away with that and create a whole new set of subfolders for each date where they store images that have been edited, published, or what-have-you. I find that to be unnecessary, and here’s why: LR gives you three separate ways to flag your photos and then in addition allows for keywords to be attached individually to each image. The three methods of flagging are star ratings, 1 to 5; color labeling, with five different colors; and “Flagging,” which adds or removes a flag icon to any individual image. The color labels, while meaningless on their own, can be given customized names to indicate anything that you choose.


Here’s the way I use these tools. This is highly personal, and it’s only one of an essentially infinite number of ways they could be used, but it will give an example of their usefulness.


When I’ve loaded up a new set of images, the first thing I do is an initial accept-reject edit. Those that are simply unusable, I delete. If I think they merit further editing, I give them a 1-star rating. I can then filter the set to all 1-star images and start the more extensive editing process. After I’ve edited an image, I rate it 3-stars if I think it might merit eventual publishing on social media. If it’s fully edited but not that wonderful, I set it to 2 stars. If I think an image might be good enough to produce a print, I set it to 4 stars. And finally, 5 stars is reserved for potential contest entrants or magazine print publication. Filters can be set to show any group or combination of (greater than or equal to) star ratings.


There is one very interesting exercise I’ve discoverd through using this star rating system. I can go back to a set of photos after a year or so and review the zero-star images that I initially rejected for editing. I invariably will find a few that are “hidden” gems that I can turn into something useful and sometimes something quite exceptional.


The LR color labels I use to keep track of what I’ve published. If an image has been posted on Facebook I set the color label to blue, for Instagram I set it to purple. Other colors can be used for Google +, Flickr, 500pix, and so forth. In using this system I hope to avoid boring you by posting the same image twice.


The LR “Flag” I use for ad-hoc selection for other purposes, such as adding to a collection or creating a slideshow. All these tagging methods operate within both the regular Catalog file list and in Collections and are copied automatically from one to the other. 

Image files that are then to be exported for use in social media, printing, or other publishing methods are easily located in the Catalog or its Collections using search, sort, and filter tools on image metadata or these flagging methods. Since exported files are, by definition, to be used outside of LR, I find no particular utility in including them in the LR Catalog system. I have a number of preset sets of export parameters for various purposes (such as social media, resizing for my own web site, printing, and so forth). Each of those export methods stores the exported files either in specific disk drive folders set up for the purpose, or in a subfolder below the original image file folder. They are thereby easily located for their intended purpose, and do not, in my opinion, need to be listed in the Catalog.


This article has gotten a whole lot more lengthy than I intended, so my aim is to take up a few of the more pertinent details in a future blog entry and stop here before I get too deep into the hole to dig my way out. But before I go, let’s acknowledge the obvious: mine is only one way of doing things, and certainly not necessarily the best. So below are links to videos or articles by other folks who, in some cases, have a decidedly different approach to the subject. Only you can be the judge of what works best for you personally.


Julieanne Kost, Adobe Lightroom Evangelist


Photography Life: How To Organize Photos in Lightroom


Layers Magazine: Getting Organized In Lightroom


Digital Photography School (mostly about Collections)


As always, feedback is solicited.



Copyright: This web site comprises and contains copyright materials. You may not distribute, copy, publish or use the images or any part of the images in any way whatsoever. You may not alter, manipulate, add to or delete an image or any part of an image. Copyright for all the images remains with Pocono Photo Club and its contributors.

External Link Disclaimer: Throughout our site you will find links to external websites. Although we make every effort to ensure these links are accurate, up to date and relevant, Pocono Photo Club cannot take responsibility for pages maintained by external providers. If you come across any external links that don't work, we would be grateful if you could report them to us. Please note that external links from this website may include material of an inappropriate nature and Pocono Photo Club takes no responsibility for information contained on external links from this website. Views expressed by other web sites are not necessarily those of Pocono Photo Club. Badges Copyright their respected organizations.