How do you manage your catalog using collections

[john beardsworth]

It's a different slant on how to use collections and particularly smart collections. I do use collections in the ways people have described, to categorize and group pictures in a very ad hoc way, but there are times when I need to "progress chase" the processing of a big shoot. So the workflow smart collections were about picking up new images and making sure they all get worked on, and obviously not everyone needs that kind of discipline and control. Wedding shooters seem to like it, but those with smaller volumes have less need. In any case, I hope you'll get ideas about how to use smart collections*.

John

* and before you ask, hold down Alt/Option when you press + in the smart collection dialog box and you can nest criteria

[Alan Smallbone]

Thanks John, I use collections in a similar way as you do but not nearly as neatly or as sophisticated as your setup. I use it mostly because I never finish editing an image in one sitting and like to go back and revisit images as I learn new tricks and also to sit ponder the direction I am headed. Lots of good ideas in this thread, so thank everyone.

Alan

[Schewe]

In reply to jeff's post, i believe one cannot rename vc's , but one can set its copy name field, i may be wrong or it is a feature of lr4 perhaps.

Yep...sorry, that's what I meant. And on export you can set the naming to Copy Name as the exported file name.

[jjj]

I'll try again. Fifteen replies and I still haven't gotten a clear idea in practical terms how you all handle collections. Lot's of information about file naming. My question concerned setting up collections; when and how do you decide to make a collection, how do you structure the collection list and doesn't the number of collections and sets grow to a point that finding collections and items becomes difficult.
Jonathan

Basics of that was addressed in first reply.  
i.e. Fundamentally organise collections in a way that makes sense to you and bear in mind collections are primarily used for output of your work. How other do collections unfortunately may be of no relevance to you.

You can be more specific about organising physical folders and naming of files and folders because there is a general way that works well for virtually anyone and also in any OS/programme. With collections it completely depends on what you do with your photos once they are on your hard drive.
Dumb collections are good for simple collections and by simple I mean short term or temporary projects from one or two folders. Just drag the photos you need into each collection [or often the one collection] and then output when done.

Smart collections are really good for longer term projects from a large number of folder and this is where keywording, labelling and ratings can be very powerful. For example work to go on my website.
If I have say 10 portfolio categories, I would then use 20 smart collections to handle this. For images I want to go online, I would simply add keywords like 'website' and 'portrait' as I go through my work as I usually prefer do website stuff after finishing deadline work.
Once uploaded to website, I could then add keyword 'uploaded' to posted images and LR would then move photos to the uploaded portrait images smart collection. This way I can quickly see what images are online and what I may then add or decide to remove without having to organize online.
The website pending smart collections in this case would be set up to add photos if say 'website' and 'portrait' were keyworded and remove if 'uploaded' was then added. The website processed smart collections would be set up to add images if say 'website' and 'portrait' and 'uploaded' were in image keywords.
I could do a similar thing for print portfolio work or slideshows.
Other collection ideas
...'images that are not geotagged' to then work through in LR4.
...'needs keywording' collection which finds all files not yet keyworded.
...'cat photos' collection
...'cats and dogs' collection
...'daughter'
...'daughter on her own'
...'son and daughter'
and so on

You can nest collections in collection sets, which will stop them becoming too unwieldy. So I can have 5 websites each with ten categories with the dual options [100 in total] all nested in a single collection set called 'websites'. The smart collection example of a website I used was fairly basic, you can do more complex smart collection organising, which is something I do far more with my music collection as my Djing and music organising tends to be way more complex with smart collections built on contents of other smart collections.
But the main thing is to work out what your own specific needs are and then tailor your collections to suit them.