Need Advice on Organizing Archives Prior to Import

[BradSmith]

I'm a LR beginner and need advice. I have about 3000 tiff and psd images - about 75Gb, archived on CD and DVD in pretty random order. They aren't on my hard drives. I've kept track of them through iView. Now I want to bring them into Lightroom and use it rather than iView for keeping track of them. I'm also coming to recognize that keeping them online on an external HD is probably a good thing also.

I'm thinking I should get an external HD (250Gb or so) and copy from CD/DVD back to that device. Then organize them into folders in some way that makes sense. Then once I've done that, import them into LR and tag them with keywords. Then split out further into collections.

Does this make sense? I'd appreciate your thoughts and experiences.
Thanks
Brad

[theophilus]

I use the solution for folder structure that Uwe suggested on outbackphoto.com, I think I saw it in his "Lightroom 1.0 Preview" essay.

I keep each "DVD" folder under 4GB, easy to backup to DVD.
Then under that [year][month][day]_[camera]_[description]
Then under that for the filenames I rename to [year][month][camera]_[originalnumber].cr2


I:\Raw_Photos_In
--->2007
--------->DVD_2007_007
---------------->20070325_5D_soccer
---------------------------->2007035D_7617.cr2

[roine]

hello

I can’t understand that the Year is so important.

I use the location/issue as main part of the map name:

Travel-->
.................Cyprus, 2003
.................Cyprus, 2004
.................Spain, Barcelona, 2006
.................Spain, Teneriffe, 2005
.................Thailand, 2004
.................Taihland, 2005
.................Thailand, 2006

Models---> name o th model
.................------------------> Fashion session 2005-03-23
.................------------------> Bikini session 2005-04-27
     
           

Customers
                     same structure as in models

This way I get a fast and issue related sorting at highest level and in all sublevels in the file menu in LR and all other program.

So the year and date has a less important role in my system. In travel pictures I have no sublevel bellow the country and year, i have to sort them by keywords due to it is impossible to cats that level as I travel to different places during a trip.

But for the rest, customers and models, it is easy due to the session is often on a given subject.

Roine

[DaHen]

hello

I can’t understand that the Year is so important.

I use the location/issue as main part of the map name:


So the year and date has a less important role in my system. In travel pictures I have no sublevel bellow the country and year, i have to sort them by keywords due to it is impossible to cats that level as I travel to different places during a trip.

But for the rest, customers and models, it is easy due to the session is often on a given subject.

Roine
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Where as the good old "month" folder inside of a "year" folder works for me.

Only wish I traveled as much. lol.  


The keyword feature in LR is a great plus to get images organized.

[Monito]

Yes, use an external hard drive.

Keep it simple.  Organize them into folders by YYYY/MM/DD.  Then annotate a text file with the date and a brief line describing the shoot with keywords.  That way you can search the file for any topic instantly and efficiently.

Use DIM 4, http://www.alanlight.com/dim/Dim.htm to automagically rename the files according to YYYYMMDD-hhmmss.  It will pick that up from the creation date of the file, so I hope your CD writer hasn't reset the creation date (most don't).  DIM will also create the folders and can also automatically and simultaneously back up to your external drive will downloading from your CF card.  It is highly configurable and flexible.

If you rename files YYYYMMDD-hhmmss you can track them in your workflow at any point.  It also makes it painless to merge images from two cameras.  Just set the time on them to be the same.