LR Library

[HBassman]

I have been practicing with lightroom since the beta versions. When I was using CS2 I had a very structured filing system but I have become very sloppy and now have folders and pictures all over the place.  A lot of them are just practice and training photos but there are a few that I would like to keep. Does anyone have any suggestions to get everything in one place in the LR library so that I can see how to rearrange or throw away all the junk?

[stewstryker]

H,

I've only been using LR for a few weeks, but I think it's pretty easy to do what you're asking.  Tedious maybe, but easy.  

Scott Kelby's LR book has a lot of good suggestions in this area for how to organize your folders and I recommend it.  But basically I think you want to end up with all your photos in topical folders that are organized under one master folder.  Something like:

My Pictures
    \Holidays
    \Family
    \Nighttime
    \Work

I'd import all your photos, leaving the files in their original directories (an import option).  You may have to do this a few times depending on how spread out your files are.

Everything's done in the Library view.  

Assuming you'll follow my selected structure above...

First select all (or a few) of the holiday/vacation photos you want to move.

Open the Folders triangle if it's not already showing all your folders.

click on the My Pictures folder (assuming there is one).  

Then click the + sign next to Folders, enter the name of the new folder to create (e.g. Holidays) and make sure it's created as a child of My Pictures.  It will create an empty folder on your hard drive under My Pictures and show Holidays in this Lightroom view.

Finally, click and drag one of the selected photos onto the name of this new folder.  It should move all your selected shots there, both in LR and on your hard disk.

Repeat as necessary.

I hope that was clear!  I don't know if you're running Windows or Mac!

[madmanchan]

HBassman, one of the nice features of LR is that your actual physical folder layout on disk isn't that important. Since LR uses a database to point to your files, wherever they happen to be, you can find and organize your photos however you wish, regardless of how they happen to be distributed on your disk.

Example: you don't have to group your photos by topic or subject on disk, since by keywording in LR you can easily find all photos of a given subject. Let's say you photograph birds, and you want to find all of your Brown Pelican images. Well, even if you have Brown Pelican images strewn about all over your hard drive -- or perhaps multiple drives -- it doesn't matter as long as each image has a "Brown Pelican" (or similar) keyword tag. Once you're in LR, you just type in "Brown Pelican" into the Find box and suddenly they're all there in front of you.

Same thing goes for finding images by date, location, or just about any other criterion. The main point is to have your images diligently keyworded, so that you can find them quickly by subject or location. (Things like date and camera model are less important, since these are automatically tracked via the files' EXIF data.)

It doesn't hurt to have some system of organizing files on disk -- I use a simple date system, e.g.

  2007/2007-09/raw/MG_9185.CR2

(year, month, "raw" folder, files)

But the exact organization on disk is not so important if you're making full use of LR's built-in organization ability ...

[Nat Coalson]

Although Eric is right that the actual file/folder structure isn't as critical if you're managing all your images from within Lightroom, it is still better to keep your files organized on the hard drive as well. For example, what if you just want to find one folder of images and burn a disk from the desktop or another app? And keeping backups synchronized is MUCH easier if your directories are well organized.

If at this point you need to start moving things around, deleting empty folders, renaming etc. I'd strongly suggest doing it all from within Lightroom. Otherwise, you will have to update it all in Lightroom after-the-fact, which can be very tedious.

You can make a folder to use for temporary stuff "to be trashed", dump things in there and after you're all done sorting through your files delete the folders and files you no longer need.

just be careful!  

[seanmcfoto]

Nat is dead right here. Do all the file moving inside Lightroom. Lightroom will physically move files around the disk as you move them between folders in the Folder pane. Doing it outside will cause a world of pain that you probably don't really need!