I think you are missing the point with regard to what I'm saying where physical folders that are organised by subject where circumstance change and thus outgrow your original organising idea.
If in the simplest form I've described their use they do, you simply add more folders or refine the name as I illustrated by adding the name
Cat to the Dog folder or adding a
Cat subfolder.
Photos of your own dogs is quite manageable by your system, but if you became a pro shooter of dogs then suddenly all dog photos in one place would be a bit like the Kelby suggestion you do not like.
Not at all! First, all the other folders besides Dog are still useful in finding items in those folders outside the DAM. 2nd, that isn't at all like Kelby suggesting one folder for all images and then finding them solely in the DAM (using proprietary dumb collections too).
Having your primary organisation done in a way where you would never need to redo it such as dates is better than one such as subject where it could become unwieldy.
Who said anything about primary but you? You don't seem to understand the simple role of naming and organizing folders outside the DAM. It's far from primary.
Metadata is much better for organising subjects. As illustrated by this reply.
Who here has suggested otherwise?
But if you have a physical folder dedicated to dogs as well as one dedicated to places then where do you put the dog photo?
I told you, I'll tell you again, it doesn't matter. Put them where it makes most sense to you. For me, the answer would be, in the dog folder.
Organise physical folders by dates and then use metadata to do the subject organising as a lot of images can be of many subjects.
Dates are meaningless to me. If they are meaningful to you, please do so. Separating dogs into different folders by date would make finding the images outside the DAM nearly impossible for
me while having them all in one folder makes it very easy for
me.
For example - a photo of your pet dog with your girlfriend in Swansea, so is the picture in the Swansea folder, a dog folder or girlfriend folder? Dated folders make for less work and no need to worry where things go when importing. Add keywords at your leisure which can then feed into smart collections.
Not on my system, my dog would go into the dog folder. A number of keywords could define Swansea or girlfriend. If outside the DAM I needed to find a picture of my dog, it's going to be in the dog folder. Pretty simple.
I originally used to do folders by subject myself, but realised how terribly limiting and time consuming it was and moved to date folders+metadata.
So you modified a system that didn't work for you with one that does. Your system isn't going to work for me. It might not work for Bob.
There's nothing you've stated thus far that doesn't support my way of working for me, if a single folder named Dog doesn't have sufficient granularity, very easy to create a new folder in LR and call it
Border Collie, Whippet, Huskey and move existing images there or just start placing those breeds into sub folders. The same images would still have keywords describing those breeds. But if I needed to find a photo of a dog, I know what folder to look in outside the DAM. I don't see how you miss that this is both simple, flexible and most importantly, a system that works for me and has since before LR shipped.
