Equipment & Techniques > Beginner's Questions

File organization help needed

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vanderloo:
Somebody throw me a rope.
My photography file organization is so poor I spend way too much time trying to find files, folders, etc.
Can someone please steer me to a good organization protocol. I edit in lightroom and photoshop. I have multiple .lrcat files, (don't ask me why). And everything is scattered across 2 computers and 3 different external hard drives.
I need to- structure a hierarchy for organizing .dng's, photos edited for web, Hi res .tiffs, and .psd files.
Any help will be so appreciated.
Thank You

PeterAit:

--- Quote from: vanderloo on January 22, 2022, 03:49:11 pm ---Somebody throw me a rope.
My photography file organization is so poor I spend way too much time trying to find files, folders, etc.
Can someone please steer me to a good organization protocol. I edit in lightroom and photoshop. I have multiple .lrcat files, (don't ask me why). And everything is scattered across 2 computers and 3 different external hard drives.
I need to- structure a hierarchy for organizing .dng's, photos edited for web, Hi res .tiffs, and .psd files.
Any help will be so appreciated.
Thank You

--- End quote ---

I'll try to help. My first suggestion - and I cannot emphasize this too much - is to have a single LR catalog. Yes, go do it now! Seriously! You can have many tens of thousands of photos in a catalog and having them all in one place makes a big difference. If you're a pro you can have one cat for your pro work and another for personal but NO MORE!

And then make generous use of keywords. Applying KW during import is a great tool.

digitaldog:
Get a copy of The DAM Book.
Yes! One catalog.
Smart Collections are your friend.

David Eckels:
In addition to the above, I use a "date place" organization, for example 2022 Arizona or 2021 New Brunswick. These are separate folders in my main "Picture" directory. Within these folders you can set LR to save images by the date taken. Works well for me.

MDL_SD:
Yes, 1, or at most 2 catalogs.  I store my images by date (you can add a location or other identifier to the file name if you wish).  The crucial step to finding photos easily is to establish a useful keyword scheme.  I use three categories: Who, What, Where.  The Who and Where categories are nested so that I don't have to enter the entire string (e.g. North America, United States, California, San Diego).

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