I use Bridge instead of lightroom, but I have mine organized almost that
way. I let Bridge do the import & it automagically creates folders by
date and sorts the images into them. All I usually have to do is add a
descriptor to the folder name. "YYYYMMDD" becomes "YYYYMMDD-descriptor".
I don't have the "month" folders, because there have been times when I
didn't get to pick the camera up for a whole month and what use is there
having an empty "November" folder?
I have year folders and within that are dated folders annotated with a
job name or descriptor. I find that useful if I have more than one "job"
on a given day or when a "job" reoccurs over several days.
2015
- 20150101_New_Years_Day
- 20150102_Some_Job-Day1 (or location)
- 20150102_Some_Job-Day2
- 20150103-1_First_Job_of_the_Day
- 20150103-2_Second_Job_of_the_Day
...
Since I'm a Windoze user, the "YYYYMMDD-descriptor" format keeps the
folders in chronological order and I usually have a fairly good idea of
the time frame I would have taken certain photos and the descriptors
fill in the blanks. Fall Color isn't likely to be any earlier than
September, nor later than November in any given year.
And if they aren't where I think they should be, I could still do a
keyword search.
On 11/12/2015 7:26 PM, Stanley Halpin wrote:
For me, subject-based folder organization is a nuisance at best and a major
pain at worst. I still have several handfuls of folders from my first Optio,
with names like Fall Colors or Ste Marteen. Which would be fine if that fall of
2003 was the only time I ever shot fall colors, or if the spring of 2004 was to
be my only visit ever to Ste Marteen. But when I revisit those subjects, do I
throw those new images in the folders with the old? To me that doesn’t feel
right.
Since those very early days as I became overwhelmed with the proliferation of
folders and sub folders, I have switched to a calendar based system. Every year has
a folder with twelve subfolders. Period. If all else fails, I can look at the
September & October subfolder if I want to find color. The images themselves
are named with a date prefix in a format that is compatible with my computer’s way
of thinking about dates. So if I ever for some reason needed to look at my images
when not in LR,I can just sort my image files by Date and they will be in
chronological order.
When I import to LR, I always not sometimes not occasionally but always apply
broad keywords to the entire set I am importing. Always including the general
area/region and often the town name.Time permitting after importing, and it
usually does, I will go back through and key word subgroups of images with a
bit more precision. I.e., not just Venice, but also Duosodoro.
As I work on a set of images, from a trip or a time frame, I create a
Collection or two to hold subsets of the images. Sometimes Smart Collections
(e.g., all images shot between 9-18-2015 and 10-05-2015 with a rating of 2
Stars or higher), sometimes subject based collections which I load by
dragging-dropping selected images.
All of this isn’t that much work, even for legacy images freshly imported. With
scanned images, I name them according to the date they were taken. Or my best
guess to that date.
So I have LR in front of me. If I want fall colors, I look at my set of
Collections. Nope, haven’t done that one yet. OK, I’ll do a keyword search.
Maybe narrow it down by looking for fall colors shots near home and those in
Michigan’s U.P. I see I am getting mostly October shots; I’ll check September
and November for a few years, just do a quick scroll through to see if there
are some groupings of fall colors I didn’t properly keyword because I was
paying more attention to some detail rather than to the overall context. If I
see some, I quickly keyword them, redo the search. All of this is very quick
and easy and requires only a) a general sense of what events occurred when on
the calendar, and b) a good but not necessarily compulsive keywording process.
stan
On Nov 12, 2015, at 10:07 AM, Eric Weir <eew...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
On Nov 11, 2015, at 2:57 PM, Bob W-PDML <p...@web-options.com> wrote:
On 11 Nov 2015, at 12:50, Malcolm Smith <rrve...@virginmedia.com> wrote:
Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
Sorry if this doesn't answer your questions directly. Unraveling a
slightly mucked up Lightroom catalog database takes time and
persistence. You need to look at a lot of things, one at a time, to
determine what the state of a particular catalog is and what files it
is looking at. Always look from catalog to file system, and then the
other way, to determine issues that need to be fixed.
It's so important to get Lightroom to set the catalogue database right from the
start. I thought I understood that, and I also thought that at least the images
I had from DSLRs were in a logical order.
[...]
For someone organised, starting with Lightroom should be a big help, but if you
don't know what it is you want until you start, you have to live with and
correct the errors that you make!
My view, which I implemented from v0.n beta of LR because it is a sound general
principle, is that you should not confuse the physical organisation (i.e. on
the disk) and the logical organisation, in the catalogue. Therefore I have a
completely flat unstructured set of photographs on disk, in one folder (but see
below), and I use LR to catalogue it. That's the point of a catalogue - to make
multiple independent groups independently of the physical organisation, so that
they are easy to find and to view in different ways. Folder structures on disk
are a 2nd-rate attempt to do something similar - you don't really need two ways
to do it. Occam's law applies.
However, my installation of LR itself does create subfolders on the disk whose
name is based on the file date, but I suspect I set it up this way while I was
drunk, or perhaps it was the default setting, when I first got LR. It's
unnecessary, but quieta non movere trumps Occam.
Listening to Malcolm and Bob, I realized that in fact I do have an organized
catalog, which I arrived at with the help of folks here, after I’d acquired
Lightroom but before I started using. It is exactly what Bob described.
Lightroom assigns images to date-based folders when they are imported. I always
add a short descriptive phrase after the date so that later I have a rough
sense of what’s in each folder just by looking at the name. As Bob points out
this results in an identical structuring of image files in the file system
outside Lightroom.
I was intrigued by Bob’s comment that the point of the catalogue is "to make
multiple independent groups independently of the physical organisation, so that they
are easy to find and to view in different ways.” My first reaction was to wonder
what else he was talking about. Then it occurred to me that there are a couple other
things I do that might qualify: I make q quick pass through the folder, flagging
images not worth saving. Then I make a more careful pass, assigning a one-star
rating to images I want to work with and use that to create a collection of those
images. I then do my editing from within the collection. In the process anywhere
from a few to several images get deleted from the collection.
I have yet to find tagging helpful. At some point I may do so. If I do, I feel
certain the tagging system will evolve organically, over time, in the process
of tagging. I can’t imagine developing one in the abstract, in advance of using
it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Weir
Decatur, GA USA
eew...@bellsouth.net
"Our world is a human world."
- Hilary Putnam
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