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hdomke

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File Structure with LR2 - Time to put everything i
« on: September 25, 2008, 02:57:05 pm »

I used to keep track of my digital files with folder management. Lots of carefully thought out folders and subfolders. It was a lot of work.

Now with LR2 can I abandon that as I switch to metadata management?  Could I dump everything into one big folder? It would sure be a lot less work!

Thoughts, comments and suggestions on how others are dealing with this issue would help.

If it makes any difference, I am a professional photographer and have 62,000 files in my LR2 database.
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Mike Guilbault

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File Structure with LR2 - Time to put everything i
« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2008, 06:59:18 am »

I thought the same way, but quickly found that it was much more difficult to backup and archive my images if they were all in one folder.  By breaking it down into folders and subfolders, you can create manageable 'chunks' of images.  Well thought out folder structure is, and always will be, paramount for any system.

Take a look a "The DAM Book" for more insight and information on structuring your images and folders.
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Mike Guilbault

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File Structure with LR2 - Time to put everything i
« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2008, 11:29:10 pm »

There's a 1,000 ways to do it but here is what I personally set up after speaking to a lot of people and attending one of Scott Kelby's Lightroom Tours.

All photos are under one directory, called:

Lightroom.  No individual picture files are in that folder though, its only a top level folder for additional folders which are numbered for each year, like 2007 and 2008
So you have:

Lightroom
   2007
   2008

and under each year there is a sub-folder called Miscelaneous, for just that.  Each "shoot" or somhow some kind of logical grouping gets its own folder such as Miami-08 if I was in Miami or so on. the folder name tells me a one or two word description of the event or "shoot" and I put the year at the end of the name so that folder name tells me what or perhaps where and when, at least to the level of which year for the when.

So  you might have

LIGHTROOM
  2008
    MIAMI-08

There is plentyh of metadata associated with each file. I tend to put very broad global metadata on ALL of the picure files and then add more detailed captions and titles, additional key words and more specific lcationn info for only the "keepers"

I have a few favorite themes, such as "Doors and Windows", "Boats" or "Sea-Scapes" and so on.  Photos that have a theme or keyword of inerest can be automaticaly included in Smart Folders (on a Mac at least, not sure if smart folders are on PCs? and I can always set up and add in photos to "Collections" for any favorite theme or particular interest that I may have.

So, in the folder labeled Miami, I may have a shot of "Doors  & Windows" and a photo of a nice sea scape or of a boat. I can search on Miami or FFL in the locaton fields, search by keyword and have things already keyed up in collections and smart collections.  If for some reason I ever need to move the entire body of work, all I need to do is to pick up the top levvel directory which I have called LIGHTROOM".

Based on Mr. Kelby's advice and my own deliberation/study, the photos are all on an external hard drive. Not one to overly trust hardware or my own fat fingers at 1:30 am and so on, the external drive has RAID capability (redundancy) and a backup scheme as well.

I'm not a professional and I don't have a relatively large collection of photos but I kind of think this is a good scheme because I have them sorted on directories by date and by subject and I have all the meta data management options available to me as well.  I can tell you that applying metadata is time consuming but I have learned a bunch of ways to do batch processing and to avoid wasted steps while still applying what I think is a lot of metadata. There are people who will apply 10 - 12 or more key words to a photo. For me 2, 3 maybe as many as  4 key words is about as far as it normally goes.  That is of course on top of location metadata, captions and titles.

Keywords are selected from a specific list, its called a "controlled vocablary" in library & information science circles, which is where I borrowed some of these concepts from.

What is best for you?  I can't say, but having 2 different angles on solving the same general problem seems generally prudent to me.  

Enjoy!



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giles

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File Structure with LR2 - Time to put everything i
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2008, 06:48:14 pm »

Quote from: hdomke
I used to keep track of my digital files with folder management. Lots of carefully thought out folders and subfolders. It was a lot of work.

Now with LR2 can I abandon that as I switch to metadata management?  Could I dump everything into one big folder? It would sure be a lot less work!

Thoughts, comments and suggestions on how others are dealing with this issue would help.

If it makes any difference, I am a professional photographer and have 62,000 files in my LR2 database.
62,000 files will start to stress the operating system's file system code.  I'd keep my folders down to a few hundred (maybe few thousand these days) files, just for performance reasons.

Metadata management might mean you can pay less attention to the directory layout; I don't know.  For historical reasons I tend to use a directory per year, with a date based directory per "shoot" (e.g. 2008-10-12--phillip-island) under each of those directories.  (I'm flexible about what a "shoot" is; there might be multiple per day, or one might (rarely) cover multiple days.)

You'll conjecture correctly at this point that I've never had a "shoot" generate thousands of files; I'd probably use subdirectories for those one way or another.

Fair warning: my background is IT: I find managing data and such is much easier than this Photography thing!

Giles
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jjj

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File Structure with LR2 - Time to put everything i
« Reply #4 on: October 17, 2008, 07:24:54 pm »

Method One
Arrange folders by date [LR can even sort by date into folders for you] and add a short description per date, For example of heirachy 2008/2008-10-October/2008-10-14 Malham Cove and then once they are sorted by date and nothing wrong with having more than one folder per day, you should then add metadata specifics to individual files or en masse depending on shoot.
The benefit of this filing is that it is very robust, it will work with any OS, any software and also means you can find things fairly easily even if using a Filebrowser such as Finder or Explorer. Plus even if you don't have time to add metadata [a horribly time consuming job] finding files is still possible.

Sorting images into [real] folders by subject is a complete waste of time in my opinion as it much better to use metadata and as mentioned above have smart collections for things you want to collect thematically.
How you label your folders and name files is also very important, I always use 2008-10-14 for folder and then description, same for naming 2008-10-14 Malham Cove 001.CR2. There is a very good reason for this - they will now sort consistently when doing doing so by name, if name comes befor date, it can get very confusing I have found.

Method Two
If you are a professional, then sometimes a different method makes more sense for work filing. A wedding photography may be better served by filing by name of couple, then date,  as name is how it images will be asked for, rather than by date of wedding. This also makes sense as each event is discrete and complete in itself, whereas if you do repeat jobs as I do which last several weeks at a time then filing by date is something I find easier and also as things tend to happen on certain days of week, then date sorting is useful there.
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