No more than Aperture does. Which can also reference files directly. The different names for the 'containers' of your pics is what confuses people. Don't think of it as two organisational systems but one set of photos with several ways of finding what you need, sometimes folders are easier to use, sometimes collections are, sometimes filtering is the best way.
I have a single LR catalogue in whatever location I want with images scattered across many different hard drives in their various folders. I can have a collection in LR with images from any, some or all of these locations. Catalogue gets backed up regularly.
In LR the folders are simply where files literally are on your HDs, in the folders that other software can see and use if need be. This is a perfectly useful way to access your images, albeit with some limitations. I use a Year/Month/Date-description system [see screengrab below], everything [work+personal] gets imported to LR by date and then I add a description to date. They are named the same way e.g. 2014-07-29 Jane's Portrait 001.CR2 On a busy day I may have several folders per day. This as the Aperture debacle has demonstrated is a useful starting point as it is a universal way of organising your images being recognised by different OSs and programmes - it is completely software agnostic. I can even find stuff by looking through my folders in Finder or Explorer should I want to.
To these shots you can add keywords for other types of organising such as in collections or any other form of metadata organising in any programme.
Collections in LR are made up of two kinds, smart and dumb. As well as collection sets, which are simply groups of collections. Images can be in as many collections as you want as they are all virtual.
Dumb Collections are simply Collections you drag images into or delete from. They can be heirachical, so you can nest them inside each other.
Smart Collections are where you set up rules so images get added automatically by whatever criteria you want. E.g. all models from Jamaica with blond hair [a small collection!], shots of your dog having a walk that are 3 stars + above, all shots of your family, all pictures taken in France that are not is Paris and so on.
The thing with using folders is that your images have to physically be somewhere, so you may as well make it organised, it takes next to no effort [unlike keywording, which is painfully hard work to be honest] and it will complement metadata organising very well. And for a lot of pics quite frankly that may be all the organising they need. In fact I can search for say bees in say July using the text filter on all the July photos and despite the fact I have not added any keywords or renamed the files the 3 images in the folder marked Lou's bees appear. They will also appear if I search entire photo collection along with other bee photos. I can even make a smart collection to find things inside folders which will save LR have to trawl database [see second screenshot]. Basically date-description folders give you even more flexibility and power if you like meta-data organisation and for less effort.
From an Aperture user: thanks for the description of how you organize, that is very helpful. In the vernacular of Aperture:
Catalog = Library
Collection = Album (smart and dumb)
Folder (place on disk) != Folder (means to organize projects, albums, etc)
Is there an analog in Lr to Aperture's Projects?
Not trying to start a flame war--just an honest question:
>> This as the Aperture debacle has demonstrated is a useful starting point as it is a universal way of organising your images being recognised by different OSs and programmes - it is completely software agnostic.
What debacle are you referring to?
I consider myself to be pretty organized and also interested in abstraction, should the need ever arise to switch applications. My Aperture photo workflow / organization goes like this:
* Import from camera to a designated "temp" import folder. Immediately run a rename script on the CR2s so that each file is named year-month-day_hour-minute-second[-sequenceNum].c2
* After renaming, I import to Aperture (my library is referenced)
* Immediately after import, I keyword, assign places, faces, and other metadata (which to be clear are stored in the Aperture library, but may be exported to XMP). I then delete the photos I don't want and empty the trash, which moves the original images to the "real" trash
* I then move all originals from the temp import folder to the appropriate "year" folder on my drive. I have a series of folders 1997 - 2014 (and counting)
* Aperture knows where these files were moved, because the link to the file is done by the filesystem node ID, which is independent of physical path
* If I ever need to relocate the originals, I use the appropriate command "Relocate Originals" or some such
* I create Smart Albums to create sets of images that contain all the images that meet certain criteria: keywords, adjustments, lens or camera type, etc...
I honestly don't see the need to have "direct access" to the original files as given in Lr. The layer of abstraction that Aperture provides is sufficient to ensure clarity (where the file resides, where to move it to if desired), but beyond that the "abstraction" serves to eliminate confusion (as evidenced by this thread), and lets you focus on the metadata "value" that you add: who the picture is of, what place it was taken, etc.
The thing I don't really like about Lr is how alternates of the "original" are treated. For example I have a picture of a fish that shows up in several different smart albums. In Aperture, if I edit the picture of the fish, all "references" to the fish photo reflect the changes I made to the original. OTOH, in Lr my experience has been that each reference to the fish photo may have it's own adjustments...which means I may have several different treatments of the fish photo, each in it's own container. I don't want this.
In Aperture, if I wanted different treatments of the fish I would make a new Version, and then include that Version in the fish in the album of my choice. In Lr Virtual Copies offer the same functionality. In both cases these alternates are explicitly created.
In Lr is there a way to prevent the creation of different alternates as described above?
thx much--
PP
