Please can you help with importing before I mess up.

[sanfairyanne]

I visited the States a while back and each day of shooting I uploaded about 4 gb of shots to Bridge after 6 months I had about 200 folders. Realising Bridge was a bid dated I got Lightroom 3 and individually uploaded each folder into a COLLECTION keeping those 200 collections in a different SET. This seemed fine except I made the error of deleting images from the COLLECTION and not from the external drive where I store my images.

Over the last few days I've exported all the images from the COLLECTIONS and dumped them on my desktop. Now I need to decide, do I upload each one again or do I just upload them all as one big collection. The obvious disadvantage in doing the latter is that I will not see each individual shoot as before when I had 200 COLLECTIONS.

Can anyone suggest what they would do before I make a massive mess of it all.

Thanks I'll check my computer as often as I can to answer any questions.

[NikoJorj]

I'm not sure to understand well the situation, but imho the easier way to work would be to keep the 1-folder-a-day structure : import into LR with the "add" option without moving files.

[Steve Weldon]

When first starting a lightroom catalog.. I first manually move my folders to the location I desire trying to keep a logic to the folder structure which stands alone from lightroom to make manual tasks easier.  Everyone has different needs, but I start with a folder named Images, then Year, then Location, then Date.  Lightroom on import, builds the indexes and previews fairly quickly (much depends on the speed of your machine and the drives) so I wouldn't hesitate to start clean.  Even importing 100,000 images might only take a few hours..

Lightroom is fully capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of images in the same catalog, though there is a point where you'll want to dedicate a fast drive just for the index/preview images.

[wolfnowl]

What you might do is to import them and have Lightroom assign subfolders based on date.  That would at least give you an organizational starting point.  You could then create a smart collection or collections using a specific date range if you want them in one collection or a set of collections.

Mike

[howardm]

I'd agree w/ Mike.  I think the natural organizational unit is the day and you might be well off to have LR create a time based folder hierarchy upon import.  You could then create whatever collections you want if desired.  Let LR do the work for you.

I personally use something like year/year-month/year-month-date structure (and rename the images to YYMMDD_frame# too) but a lot of guys include their initials and/or some location (or job) info (I prefer to do that via keywording).  IMO, making  <N> collections, one for each day isn't really scalable or uses the Library module well.  Many ways to skin this particular cat