This is an update to the existing “How to Organize Pictures in Lightroom 2” article that I wrote a while ago for beginner-photographers who are getting started in Lightroom and are looking for a good way to organize their photos and photo catalogs. If you are looking for a generic guide on how to organize pictures without any third party photo software like Lightroom, then please read my “how to organize pictures” article instead. If you do not currently own a copy of Lightroom, I highly recommend purchasing one from B&H or other resellers.
Lightroom 3 has certainly become a very essential part of my workflow. I cannot imagine managing my photo catalog without Lightroom and I use it every day for my Photography needs. In fact, 95-98% of my post-processing work is done in Lightroom and I rarely use Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, which not only simplifies my workflow, but also decreases the amount of time I spend on post-processing. The below process of folder structures and organization within Lightroom 3 is my personal way of storing pictures and working with them for my home and professional use.
1) Where do you store your pictures and how?
The first question is, where and how do you currently store your pictures? I used to store all of my photographs in various subfolders of my hard drive (commonly in “My Pictures” or “My Documents”), but after I got into photography, I decided that it is best to keep all of my photographs in the root folder of my PC’s hard drive that I use solely for storing photos and small family videos. Hard drives are dirt cheap nowadays and you can snatch an external 2 Terabyte drive for under $150. I highly recommend getting a fault-redundant external drive like the Western Digital Studio Edition II though (two hard drives in RAID 1 Mirror configuration). If you shoot RAW like me and have a lot of photographs, the best and the most inexpensive solution that I know of is “Drobo“, which allows you to use up to five 2 TB drives together in a fault-tolerant configuration, allowing a single drive failure. If a drive fails, the system continues to run, but prompts you to replace the faulted drive as soon as possible. Once you replace the drive, the system goes back to regular operational mode.
2) Folder structure and organization
Now that you have figured out where you will be storing your pictures, it is time to figure out what your folder structure will be. There are many ways to do this and everyone does it differently. I will show you what works for me and will leave it up to you to decide whether you want to adopt it or create your own. Here is my current structure:
In the root of my hard drive, I have one folder called “Photos”, where I store all of my pictures. Inside “Photos”, I create one folder per year. Then inside each year, I store photographs by events. For example, Omar’s birthday in 2008 is stored in “Photos2008Omar’s Birthday”, while our trip to Denver Zoo in 2009 is stored in “Photos2009Denver Zoo”. If you shoot professionally, you might want to have two separate folders under “Photos” – one for your personal pictures and one for your professional work. In that case, simply add another level of folders underneath “Photos” and your structure would look like “PhotosPersonal2008My Event” or “PhotosProfessional2008My Event”.
Go ahead and create the first top level folder “Photos” and if you want to separate your personal and professional work, also create the two folders underneath. Do NOT create any more folders underneath and do NOT move or add any photos yet.
3) Create a new Lightroom catalog
Once you define and create your initial structure, it is now time to create a Lightroom catalog. Start off with a new Lightroom catalog by going to File->New Catalog. For performance reasons, I prefer to store my catalog along with image previews in my primary “C:” drive while storing the pictures on an external dedicated volume, but you might want to keep it all in the same drive for simplicity purpose. If you have under 10,000 pictures, you can store them all in a single catalog without much impact on Lightroom performance. If you have over 10,000 pictures, then I recommend creating one Lightroom catalog per year. Just create one folder in the root folder called “Lightroom” and store all of your catalogs there.
4) Modify Lightroom Preferences
For every new catalog I create, I slightly modify the default settings to fit my needs. Although you can do this later, it is probably best to do it in the beginning, as you might forget to take care of it later. The first thing I make sure is set up right (you only need to do it once) is Lightroom Preferences. Go to Edit->Preferences and under the “General” tab, set similar settings as shown below:
There are two settings that I changed here. I modified “Default Catalog” option where I set it to “Prompt me when starting Lightroom” – this basically makes Lightroom prompt which catalog I want to load up when I start up Lightroom, which is convenient if you use multiple catalogs. If you only have a single catalog, there is no need to change the default setting. The second option is “Show import dialog when a memory card is detected”, which simply tells Lightroom to automatically fire up the import screen when you insert your memory card.
The next tab is “Presets”, where I typically leave everything by default. The only thing that is worth mentioning on this page is the “Location” where you can check or uncheck “Store Presets with Catalog”. Lightroom allows storing your user presets (such as default import settings, file naming convention, copyright information, etc.) either in a general folder that is used for all of your catalogs, or in each of your Lightroom catalogs where you can set different presets depending on the catalog. I personally use one preset for all of my Lightroom catalogs and recommend leaving this option unchecked as seen below.
The next tab called “External Editing” allows you to specify the default File Format and Color Space for use in external applications such as Adobe Photoshop. If you use RAW format for your images, you should always edit images in Photoshop with the best format that preserves all image details and the color space that uses largest number of colors. I use TIFF format (default) for files and ProPhoto RGB (default) for color space for this reason. Bit Depth should obviously be 16 bits and I leave the resolution at 240 (default), with ZIP as the compression method:
Let’s now move to the “File Handling” tab. This particular tab is very important, because it controls the way your pictures are imported into the catalog. Here is how I have my File Handling tab set:
Pay attention to the “Import DNG Creation” settings on this page. I set “File Extension” to “DNG”, “Compatibility” to the latest Camera Raw version available, “JPEG Preview” to “Medium Size” and left “Embed Original Raw File” unchecked. The important settings here are “JPEG Preview” and “Embed Original Raw File” that control the total size of your DNG files (read more about the DNG format here). By default, every RAW image contains a full size JPEG image inside that is stored as a “Preview” (the “Preview” image is what you see on the back of your camera when you take a picture). By setting the “JPEG Preview” option to “Medium Size”, you are telling Lightroom to generate a smaller version of a preview inside DNG files, which will save you up to 15-20% of space per file. While you might think that it is not such a big deal, it does a make a huge difference when you have tens of thousands of pictures. The only penalty is the fact that the image opens slightly slower when you try to open a full version of it in Lightroom later, simply because it has to generate a full size version from the RAW image. The checkbox “Embed Original Raw File” is something I would always recommend to leave unchecked, because if you check it, your DNG files will actually be much larger than the original RAW file, which is not something you want to do.
The last “Interface” tab should be left at its default settings.
5) Modify Lightroom Catalog Settings
The next thing we need to modify, is your Lightroom Catalog Settings. You will have to do this once for each of the catalogs that you create. Go to Edit->Catalog Settings to bring up the “Catalog Settings” window. I leave everything to default values in “General” and “File Handling” tabs. The most important tab for me is the “Metadata” tab, where I can specify what data is written into my images by Lightroom:
The first two options “Offer suggestions from recently entered values” and “Include Develop settings in metadata inside JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files” are checked by default and I do not touch them. The last option “Automatically write changes into XMP” is unchecked by default. This is the one I highly recommend to turn on, because it makes Lightroom write your changes right into the DNG files (or XMP sidecar files that go with your RAW files) as you work on them. Why is it important? Because if your Lightroom catalog was to fail and you lost all of your catalog data, the image file would keep all of your changes that you’ve made in Lightroom! It is also very useful if you happen to open that same file in Photoshop or other Adobe applications, because all changes will be immediately visible as you work on the file. Another plus of leaving this option checked, is that Adobe does not provide an upgrade path from one version of Lightroom to another. Therefore, if you were to upgrade from Lightroom 3 to Lightroom 4 when it is available, you could do so with ease and not worry about re-processing every single image again.
Some photographers say that it creates unnecessary overhead and that you could manually write this metadata to files when needed. But why bother? I leave this option on and I never have to worry about going back and manually updating anything…
6) Import your photos into the Lightroom catalog
Your preferences and catalogs settings have now been modified. Let’s start importing your pictures! Fire up the photo import catalog by going to “File”->”Import Photos…” or press CTRL+SHIFT+I on your keyboard. Once the import screen comes up, it will look like the following:
The entire import screen is organized very similarly to Lightroom 3 itself, the left side being the location where you will be grabbing the files from, while the right side serves as the destination side, along with import settings. The middle section shows all images to be imported. The “From” section has been redesigned completely, with Lightroom being able to differentiate between permanent storage and your device or card reader. The nice thing is, the import screen is dynamic, meaning whatever changes happen in the system, the screen gets updated in real time. For example, if you open the import screen and then disconnect your camera from the PC, the device will simply disappear from the screen. Reconnecting the camera will add the device back into the screen.
Since I use DNG format, I always leave “Copy as DNG” selected in the top middle section.
The right import menu consists of several sections: File Handling, File Renaming, Apply During Import and Destination. Let’s take a look at the first two sections – File Handling and File Renaming:
6.1) File Handling Section
The File Handling section consists of three choices – “Render Previews”, “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” and “Make a Second Copy To”. I leave the render previews on “Minimal” to save time and leave both fields checked, with the backup location being my external drive that I use for storing backups. As you can see from the above screenshot, my photo backup folder is located in “G:Photos_BackupImports”. When the “Make a Second Copy” field is checked, the system will copy files into two separate locations, which means that the files will be duplicated for backup purposes in multiple locations.
6.2) File Renaming Section
The File Renaming section consists of variables that are used for renaming you files. I always rename my files to the following format: “YYYYMMDD-Custom Text-Sequence Number.DNG”. The first part is the file date, for example “20100916″, which stands for September 16, 2010. Then a dash is followed with a custom text that I type during each import, which is then followed by an incremented sequence number. I like renaming my photos, because I do not like to keep photo names like “DSC_1000.DNG” that mean nothing and get duplicated over time. By renaming the photos, I know that I could simply take all images from all folders and put them all into a single folder without running into duplicate file names. I highly recommend taking the same or a similar approach and uniquely identify every image you import.
If you have not already created a rename template, take a look at the following:
Create a similar template, then save it as a Preset and click “Done”. Then simply select your preset under the “Template” dropdown.
The next field under “File Renaming” is Custom Text – the text you can type to identify images. For this example, I used “Botanic Gardens” as custom text, which means that my first file will be named like “20100916-Botanic Gardens-001.DNG”. The “Start Number” field lets you type the first number that the system will use, so if you type “500″, your first file name will have a sequence number of 500 and all consecutive numbers will be incremented by one. This is very useful during multiple imports into the same folder structure – I simply look at the total number of photographs in my memory card and put the number in that field. I always leave the extension in Uppercase.
6.3) Apply During Import Section
This section is another important one, since it lets you choose an import preset with your Lightroom settings, write Metadata and Keywords into each image as it gets imported. I have already made some changes to the way I import files and being able to choose what you want before the import process starts is a great idea, because it saves tons of time for me during the image editing process. Once you make changes to an image and save the preset, it will immediately show up on this screen.
The next field is called “Metadata” and it is used for writing additional data into each imported file. For example, if I wanted to include my copyright text in every image (do not confuse this with a watermark), I would need to create a new Metadata preset and make some changes:
I wouldn’t waste time by filling out every single field and only pay closer attention to IPTC Copyright and IPTC Creator fields, where you can provide your name and contact information.
The last field is Keywords and I always type two keywords on every import – the year when the image was taken and the name of the event (for sorting purposes). For example, for the above example I used “2010, Botanic Gardens”, which adds these keywords to each file and Lightroom database.
6.4) Destination Section
The last section identifies the location of where the import process will store files. The first field is called “Into Subfolder”, which I always leave checked, since I do want Lightroom to create subfolders for me. The next field is a drop-down with two options: Organize by Date and Organize Into one Folder. If you select “Organize by Date”, you will get an additional field called “Date Format”, where you can specify the format of the subfolders that will be created by Lightroom. Since I already have a folder for each year and my file names already contain the full date, I do not feel the need to create subfolders for year, month and day. Instead, I like to keep everything simple and organized, instead of having many different subfolders in the system. Therefore, I always choose “Organize Into one Folder” and then type the name of the subfolder:
Since I store all of my images in a master folder called “Photos” and then subfolders by year, I simply select the year under “Photos”, as shown below:
As you can see, the system is set to create a folder under “D:Photos2010″ called “Botanic Gardens”, where I store all images related to Botanic Gardens. If I pay another visit to Botanic Gardens, I will choose the same folder and the system will create files with a different date, so I won’t ever run into any problems with duplicate file names.
I always sort my import images by “Capture Time” under “Sort” drop-down. Once you choose the destination folder, simply click the “Import” button to start importing your images. The import window will go away and you will start seeing the images popping up in your Lightroom catalog.
7) Post-import check
Now that you know how to import your images with custom templates, go ahead and import all of your pictures into Lightroom and make sure that everything gets transitioned correctly. Do not forget to change the folder names along with “Custom Text” and “Keywords” fields upon each new import in the “Import Photos” screen going forward. Otherwise, you will end up with a bunch of unwanted folders and incorrect file names and keywords. If you accidentally imported your pictures with wrong settings, it is not a problem. Just select the imported pictures, then change the keywords under “Keywording” section in the “Library” module, then rename the folder to the correct event name and press “F2″ or go to “Library”->”Rename Photo” to mass rename your pictures. If your pictures go out of sequence for whatever reason (for example your sequence numbers are repeated, but with a different name), then simply select all pictures and batch-rename them all by pressing “F2″ on your keyboard. Give it a new sequence number and it will start renaming them based on the age of the image or your selection criteria.
8) Perform full backup
By now, you have done a lot of work to re-organize your photographs and you have completed importing all of your pictures into Lightroom. It is definitely a good time to perform a full backup of both your Lightroom catalog and your pictures. Many people assume that the backup functionality in Lightroom backs up their photographs too. That’s a very wrong assumption! Lightroom does NOT backup your photos – it only backs up your Lightroom catalog, which is useless without your images. You can afford losing a Lightroom database, but you cannot afford losing your pictures. Therefore, you should always backup your photographs first, then worry about Lightroom.
Here is how to perform a full backup:
- Close out of Lightroom.
- Get your external backup drive ready, plug it into your computer and turn it on.
- Go to the root folder where you are keeping your photos. In my computer it is “D:Photos”. Select all yearly folders and drag and drop them into the backup drive’s “Photos_backup” folder or something similar, which should start the backup process.
- Wait until all pictures are backed up. Make sure that you do not have any errors and the copy process is completed 100% successfully.
- Now backup your Lightroom catalog. Locate the Lightroom catalog file in your hard drive (which should have an extension “lrcat”) and also copy it to the external drive.
The above process could be easily automated by special backup programs such as “Norton Ghost” or with some built-in tools within your operating system. I highly recommend to set up an automated job that backs up your computer as often as possible. I also recommend backing up your data to at least two different locations every time.
I hope this basic guide will help you to keep your pictures organized in Lightroom 3. Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below.
About Nasim Mansurov
Hi Nasim, do you have any kind of tutorial on how to properly use built-in or external camera flashes? Have you already taken a look at the new SB-700? I’m wiling to buy an external flash to my D5000 but I would like first to know a bit o how to use it.
Thanks, Eduardo.
Eduardo, can you tell me what you are trying to do first? The built-in camera flash is very weak and cannot really do much – I personally do not use it. If you want to use off-camera flash, the best setup would be at least a single flash like Nikon SB-900 together with two PocketWizard Plus II flash triggers. Now the above setup might be expensive, but it is well worth the money, since you can use it in the future for professional work.
There is a cheaper way to do this via Nikon’s CLS, but your D5000 does not have the built-in function to control other slave flashes, so you cannot do it. If you are simply looking for a single flash that goes on top of your D5000, the Nikon SB-700 will suffice. However, it would certainly be limiting in terms of what you could do with it. If you are taking pictures of your kids indoors and have a white ceiling, you could point your SB-700 on the ceiling and get some great shots. But if you wanted to take your flash off-camera and use it with an umbrella or softbox, you would not be able to do it…
Hope this helps.
Nasin, thanks for replying. The first setup is really expensive and it is really professional. As I am just starting taking my first DSLR pictures it is not what I need at the moment. Here in Brazil an SB-900 costs aprox 900 USD, the goverment here takes almost 100% in taxes… :(
I’m just looking for a single flash to put on the top of my D5000. You are right when you say that the built-in flash is very weak. When I shoot indoors I have to use ISO at least 800+ to take reasonable shots even using the flash.
A friend of mine is about to travel to the US and I’ll ask him to bring me an SB-700. Thanks for the ceiling tip… :)
I know that you are really busy but when you have time write us a post with more flash tips and technics.
Regards,
Eduardo
Eduardo, the Nikon SB-700 is going to be much better than using the built-in camera flash…
I will certainly be posting some flash photography articles soon, just need a little more time!
Nasim, do you have any recommendation of a book on on-camera flash photography?
Eduardo, not sure how I missed your comment, but I have recently published a few articles on using on-camera and off-camera flash. I opened a whole new section on “Flash Photography Tips“.
Hi Nasim…
Its been five days I discovered your website and I just can’t take my eyes of it… I have spent my whole weekend reading your articles on your website.. The website was down for sometime on Saturday evening and you won’t believe how many times i checked to see if its back :) I even participated in the recent giveaway no. 13 :) Can’t wait for Nov 31st. I just love what you are doing.. Thank you to you and Lola. I started photography just 3-4 months back and kept researching a lot on the internet.. I even thought of taking up a class… but after discovering your site I don’t think I need a class :D You are providing the best of the best especially for the beginners like me!
I have a question. Where can I download full version of Lightroom 3 for free. Do you know any website that can be trusted & can be downloaded?
Thank you Nasim and Lola..!
Thank you for your feedback Shwetha!
Yes, the site was temporarily down on Saturday for maintenance – for about 4-5 hours. In terms of downloading Lightroom 3, you can download a full working demo of the software that will work for 30 days. If you are looking for an illegal copy, I cannot help you there. I do not encourage using pirated software through my website…
Hi,
I read with interest your tutorial on Organizing pictures in LR3. I tried to use external drive for storage, while the program was on my Laptop. The problem is, I cannot use it if I am out of town as my drive stays at home. I dont have that many pictures. Do you suggest I store my pictures on Laptop, and then do periodic back ups, or there is another way to work this out.
Dennis, your best bet would be to store images on your laptop and then back them up to an external drive on a regular basis…
Very useful workflow for LR starters.. Would be nice to have that a few years ago.. :)
Thank you Martins!
This is just a quick note to let you know that I have recently read 5 or 6 of your articles on such subjects as DNG and Raw vs JPG. They are extremely well done, much appreciated, and have an impact on how I will do my photography in the future.
Thanks.
Thank you for your feedback Peter!
I read with great interest your article on organizing pictures in Lightroom 3. Although I have been shooting digital for the past 14 years after using film for the previous 30+ years, I have only recently begun to shoot RAW. Therefore, using Lightroom is a new experience.
I can see immediately the many advantages of using the great cataloging capabilities offered by Lightroom 3, but I am somewhat perplexed as to how I should incorporate my existing filing structure and how to carry on into the future. I have been categorizing my pictures using windows file structure, i.e. “Pictures” with sub-folders such as “Animals” with sub-folders such as “Birds”, “Fish”, “Insects”, etc. This has let me find the images i want with relatively little hassle, but I would like to over time go back and get everything tagged and in Lightroom catalogs. In the process of moving to new computers, file dates have become screwed up, but I believe EXIF data is pretty much intact. I know I will have to convert my earliest pictures which are in the proprietary Kodak .kdc format, probably to .tif.
Please give me your thoughts as to how I proceed in bringing my image collection into the 21st century.
Steve, importing your images to Lightroom is super easy. And you can certainly tag all different images in Lightroom, using the same names such as “Animals”, “Birds”, etc. Start off by making a backup of your existing images, then start importing the images one catalog at a time and tag them during the import process. For example, import “Birds” first and create a “Birds” tag so that all imported images are tagged with the word “Birds”. Then do the same with everything else, using the same structure I have in the article. Over time, you will find the date/folder organization to be quite useful and the tags and labels will help you find your images quickly.
Hope this helps.
Hi Nasim,
I have used Photoshop CS4 for downloading and retouch process.
I tired Lightroom3 for the first time following your direction.
At the end of importing, retouching in LR, editing in CS4,, I realized my file type was ‘tiff’, and I didn’t know how it got to be.
While saving the edited file, I tired to change it to jpeg, but, there was no jpeg in the given option of file type.
How can I keep all the files to be jpeg after retouching the RAW file?
Pauline,
Whenever you take images out of Lightroom into Photoshop and then save them in Photoshop, a duplicate copy of the same image will appear in Lightroom in TIFF format. This is quite normal, since Photoshop/Lightroom want to preserve the highest amount of details when you make changes to your images. If you want to convert your TIFF image to a JPEG image, you would have to export your image in JPEG format, then import it back to your Lightroom catalog and then delete the TIFF image. I don’t bother doing this and I keep my modified images in TIFF format. Sure they take up a lot of space, but then I know that I am preserving all details that are needed for print and further processing in the future.
I’ve been using Lightroom for a while, but I lacked a consistent and organized workflow. With your article, I’ve managed to finally re-organize all my existing photo’s properly and to develop my own consistent workflow for new pictures. Thanks very much for the guide, it contains helpful information and tips.
You are most welcome Adam! I’m glad you found the guide to be useful for your workflow.
Hi Nasim,
I was wondering what would be the best way to share my RAW photo’s that I have edited in Lightroom 3. After I edit them, I usually convert them to JPEG so I can upload them to specific sites, this is where my first choice is made. Where should I keep the JPEGs? Same folder? external drive? I don’t want to eat up so much space on my build in drive and I would hate to see duplicates in Lightroom.
Second, should I keep the RAW files, do you think there is a need? Or just keep the final JEPG? What do you suggest.
Thanks for the tutorial, helps a lot.
Paul
Paul, the best way is to export images out of Lightroom to a folder on your computer (I typically use a folder on my desktop). Once you are done uploading them to an external site, just delete them afterwards. You don’t need to keep copies of JPEG files, since you already have the original RAW files and you can extract more JPEG images later :)
I personally recommend keeping RAW files, even if they take a lot of space. Once you convert an image to a JPEG file, there is no going back. I used to delete my JPEG images in the beginning. Now my post-processing skills are much better, but I cannot go back and edit those images anymore…
Hi, I just found out about your website when I was browsing on how to organize photos in Lightroom3. I’m really learning lot from your website and I thank you very much for that.
While I was trying to organize and rename my photos, I didn’t know what I pressed but some albums was already in my computer trash. When I try to import it back to LR the picture size was smaller (600 x 240) instead of 4288 x something . How can I import the photos back to LR3 and make the size back to the original bigger size. Thanks
Irena, not sure what you did during the import process, but I would search for the original files instead of trying to restore the small versions of the files. They are probably somewhere on your PC, in a subfolder somewhere…
Hi, and thanks for the great organizational article. I’m just starting new with Lightroom 3. The question I have is about file structure. The way all my photos are currently saved is…Photos/the year/the month/the event. To use your file structure would I need to do a lot of re-arranging before I import in to L3. Basically it looks like I need to do away with the month folders to get the Photos/the year/the event, file structure. Am I understanding this correctly or am I making too much extra work for myself.
Jerry, don’t re-arrange anything before you import. Just import the files with the same structure you have now and then you can re-organize the folders once you are in Lightroom. The nice thing about Lightroom, is that it allows you to select images based on dates, camera type/lens type and much more. Once you import your main folder into Lightroom, create event folders under year (in the same folder where you keep months) and then simply drag and drop your pictures from various months into those folders. Another thing you can do, is preserve your folder structure and simply tag images with event names by using Keywords. There are many ways to organize images in Lightroom! :)
Nasim,
I just came across your website, and the material that you have on here is fantastic. Thank you very much for such an exhaustive and well-explained instructional on organizing photos in Lightroom. I have become an avid photographer over the past year and will be establishing an organizational structure for my photos using your tips and techniques. I will definitely continue on to the rest of your site.
Thanks again!
Thank you for your feedback Josh, glad you found the article useful ;-)
Thanks for the informative website. I have had LR for a while now and still have not taken the whole plunge yet! But I will. On e question or option request – I take pics in raw-NEF with my D300. On a Nikon course they advised me to retain the pics in NEF and not convert to DNG – not surprisingly. I noticed you convert to DNG – may I ask why and what your thoughts are on saving as NEF or DNG? Thanks.
I should have delved further into your website! http://photographylife.com/dng-vs-raw So I see where you lean – now I have to stop vacillating and make the call. Thanks again.
Martin, glad you found the DNG vs RAW article :) In summary, DNG is a more compatible format than NEF and you can make the files smaller by reducing the size of the preview JPEG embedded into the DNG file.
Nasim, I like your suggestions for organizing files within Lightroom 3. However, as a new person to LR3 I have a question. While the structure of: photos– year– event makes sense, I would also like to use the ‘smart tag’ feature in LR3 where I can create folders on “windows/doors”, “nature shots”, etc. Are these two approaches compatible and if so, how could I use both systems? Thansk. Steve
Stephen, Lightroom give you many options to sort and categorize your images. While storing photos by year and event name is simply an easy way to store images in your filesystem, you can categorize and index images in many ways inside Lightroom. I personally use both keywords and smart tags to categorize my images, so that I can quickly find them from my Lightroom catalog…
I must say that it was so elaborate and helpful to me as a beginner LR3 user
Thanks so much for the article
I am going to get LR 3. This has been such great info. I am getting to the point where I can’t find photos anymore. I have PS Elements. A pro photographer told me that all I needed was Lightroom and Elements. And I am more inclined to have good SOOC shots to begin with. What do you think? I thought that one the big issues was that Elements can’t convert to CYMD. Yet he prints large beautiful photos!
Thank you for your thoughts!
Lightroom is a very good way to improve your workflow and organize photos. I agree with what pro photographer told you…
Great guide. I use a similar folder structure. Except under each year I put “Event Name (Year-Month)”. So for example, in the 2011 folder I have “Everglades (2011-01)”. However, I like the simplicity of yours in which you just put the event under each year. I was wondering what you do if you have the same event twice within the same year. For example, if you went to the zoo twice, do you put “Denver Zoo 1″ and “Denver Zoo 2″ or do you just combine all of the photos into the same “Denver Zoo” folder for that year?
Any chance of putting together another guide that covers how you organize, flag, tag, and rate your photos, once you have imported them into lightroom? I’d be interested in knowing your setup for that. Thanks!
Nasim,
Your article has answered questions that I have been trying to piece together, finding it one place is greatly appreciated. Two questions, what is the DNG file and is compatable with with Nix Software and CS5? Two, you mentioned routinging to the C drive and then going to your other auxillary dirve or going to the aux dive direct. How would I path to the C drive and then to the Aux drive?
I just started using LR and tried following your procedure listed above. The first import went as it should have. The second worked just as well with one exception. That is, all the file names in the second copy folder do not match the file names given to the primary destination files. Instead of the format of Date (YYYYMMDD)-Custom TextSequence # (1), they are listed as DSC_0719.NEF and up. My questions are; 1. Is this a problem? 2. Can I correct it, and if so, how? 3. How do I prevent it from happening again? Thanks for your help.
Hi
I started in photography in 1970 with a Nikon F Photomic and Tri X 400 ASA film. Walked into a campus darkroom for the first time and with a few instructions from someone processed my roll, dried and made my first 8×10 B/W prints. In 4 hours. 13 years later i gave it up and 3 1/2 years ago I bought a digital Nikon and a 1/2 year later bought my first computer. I have been studying computer tech, viruses & spyware, computer crashes and how to recover from a million different problems. Pixels, DPI, formats and file extensions, conversions, so many editing programs, lossy versus losless, layers, curves etc etc etc etc. 3 1/2 years of studying, through nights sometimes, and it’s not finished. If I ever get to the end of this confusion it will take a few more years to learn printing. Which after calculating how much ink is in a cartridge calculates it seems to a few thousand dollars a gallon. My only wish is that I live long enough to make my 1st print
Just my 2¢ ☺
Jim
Hi, Nasim, I should have read this article earlier before I left comment on the other post. My questions are:
When you have your internal disk full, say D:, and insert a new disk, do you setup a new catalog file or do you use the previous one?
When you have multiple full disks and you want to find some photos, you have to insert every disk into your computer to finish the search, right? Do you have a better way to deal with this?
You mentioned in the other post that you have a large catalog file (close to 1G), does such large catalog make the whole system lag? If not, would you like to share some infomation about you haredware setup? I’m finding a gauge to upgrade my desktop, but don’t have in-the-field experience so far. I’m considering to upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7, with RAM up to 12G or 16G to the maximum my motherboard supports, one or two SSDs or one SSD+RAID. Could you pls give me some hints on this?
Thanks.
I was wondering if there was a way to “tag” (for lack of a better word) photos so for example i want to find all my “tree” photos> how would i go about 1. tagging them all trees ( i get that that would most likely manually done at import) but then how do i “search” all the files afterword for the key words or “tags” in adobe elements i know that when you import them you can then tag them. (so i hear) ?
can you do the key word tagging on this program?
thanks
j
I am having a problem currently which I did not have previously so I am wondering what I did wrong.
I cannot drag a photo from my library into a folder or collection. All that happens when I make the attempt is that the photo opens in an enlarged size and I cannot move it at all. This is in LR3
Any help would be appreciated for I have tried everything I know of and all to no avail.
Many thanks
Bob
While this is a very good article For ‘setting up’ LR3 the difficulty I am having is understanding how to organise photos from two cameras that have been used on a shoot into one library. Unless, you have to put them into a common file first on the MAC and then import into the LR3 Library and sort them out by time under Metadata.
At the moment I can’t fathom out a solution to do it directly in LR3.
Does anyone have any alternative ideas on this?
Good morning Nasim,
I have been searching for quite sometime on how to organize digital photos on a computer, thanks for your complete step by step process. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this article until I had already try using LR3. My previous structure before using LR3 was “Photos / year / month&date” ex: Photos/2011/2-14-11. I then used LR3 thinking I knew what I was doing…NOT… :( and now it created another folder by default: Photos/2011/2011/2011-11-14. How can I fix this problem? Or is it safe to indicate I must start from Scratch and begin the folder structure setup as you indicated in your other articles: Photos/year/event name/20110214-eventname-sequence#?
Any guidance or suggestions you can provide will be extremely greatful.
I am new to photography, although I have taken many pics with my point & shoot type camera & iPhone, but I now wanted to take better pictures of family, friends & events for personal keepsake and sharing. I just recently purchased the Nikon D5100 with the 18-55mm lens and extra 55-300mm lens so that I can get good quality pics.
Thank you very much for your time and support on this…
Best Regards,
Eddie
Eddie, since your library is probably not very big yet, why don’t you just simply reorganize it? You can right click on folders inside Lightroom and create subfolders and you can select your images by pressing CTRL+A and move them to a different folder structure. If this is too painful, just go to the root folder, select all pictures, then press CTRL+S. Start a new catalog and reimport your images to a different location with a new structure. It will take some time to do this, but once you get a consistent structure and workflow, it will make your life easier in the future!
Nasim,
Thank you very much for taking the time to read and reply to my inquiry, really appreciate it very much. I will do was you suggest this week and I am sure it will all work out, thanks again for your guidance…
Best regards,
Eddie
You are most welcome Eddie!
Hi Nasim,
Many thanks for your very informative article but I was hoping you might be able to clear something up for me.
I have just imported all of my photos into LR3 which have been stored (not particularly well structured) on an external hard drive. My question is if I make a change to any of the images in LR3 how can these changes be reflected in the original file stored in the external hard drive?
At present all of the images I have stored are JPEGs as I have been deleting the RAW files after processing and just storing the completed JPEGs (this is a habit I intend to change).
Any advice would be well appreciated.
Many thanks,
Matt
Matt, when you imported the images, the import box should have given you the choice to either move, copy or simply add the files. If you chose to move or copy, your images should have been relocated to a different folder (probably in “my documents/pictures” folder). If you chose to simply add, then your images are still residing on the external drive and any file changes within Lightroom will impact those images on the external drive. For example, if you were to move or delete a photo, it would perform that file operation on the external drive. My preference is to keep all images in a local hard drive (preferably a separate drive from your operating system) and keep backups on an external drive/network storage. I always “copy” files while importing and keep my folder structure organized on my internal hard drive.
As for deleting JPEG images after processing RAWs – you definitely have to stop doing that. A couple of years from now, when your post-processing skills are better (and they will get better), you will have no option to change those JPEG images. If you keep the RAW files, you can go back and edit your images as many times as you want, however you want.
Hi Nasim, Many thanks for your response but im still having a few issues with LR3. I definitely selected to add the photo’s when importing yet when I make a change to one of the images (for example changing one from colour to mono) and then open that file on the external hard drive to preview it the change has not been reflected. Am I missing a step, do I have to save it after editing or something?
Regards
Matt
Great tutorial–I’m just changing over from Adobe Bridge to Lightroom 3 and this is just what I needed to know. Thanks.
Has anyone else had problems with Lightroom 3 crashing Windows 7? I have the latest versions of both programs but have had crashes or freezes on import and in development mode.
Hi Nasim, thanks for this excellently detailed guide, and also for responding so well to our comments after the fact. I have a question:
Can you point me towards any documentation that can shed some light on how to RE-organize my folder structures? I only have about 6,000 photos in LR3, most of which I have made multiple adjustments to, etc etc. Point is, is there a way to restructure my files & folders (I’d like to organize them by date) without deleting my catalog and reimporting?
Thanks!
~P
Hi. I have read your helpful guide on organising images but have an issue that you may have come across that is not covered.
Is there anyway of copying the time/date meta data from images as they are exported? I am a landscape architect and my client would like this information from 5000 coastal photographs. It would be great if there was a automated solution to this problem.
Regards
Hugh Forsyth
I need help. I have 70,000 images and only 15,000 are usable. How do I delete them from
Lightroom 3 and from my external hard drive or internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro.
I can’t find out any information on deleting only importing. Please advise
Danny
Thanks a lot for sharing this valuable information! Your website is one great resource, oh and your photo’s rock too ;-)
Thank you for your tutorial. Awesome! I’m brand new to LR3 and can see the benefits of using it…just organization alone will be of great help! Where I’m getting confused as a new user is how to organize my scanned images vs. those imported from digital camera. I keep my digital photos by year, month, etc…as these are mostly of my immediate family. The scanned images are for genealogy ie scrapbooks, photo albums, etc.
What would be your recommendation for organizing these? The images are scanned at 600 dpi jpeg.
I look forward to any help you might be able to offer!
Thanks
Bernard, why don’t you just create a separate folder for scans – something like “Scanned Images” maybe? You can do this very quickly in Lightroom.
Nasim:
Thanks for your excellent tutorial. I’m a long-time PhotoShop user, but very new to Lightroom. I’ve taken a course and viewed lots of tutorials and videos, and pestered tech support, but still have questions. For one thing, I like the idea of customizing my photos by adding the “Shoot” as well as a descriptive text, date and number. I can see where to change the Text, but cannot figure out how to change the “shoot” on photos I’ve already taken. Do I need to import them into a new folder to access that?
Thanks,
Carolyn
I am considering Lightroom as an alternative to Iphoto, Aperture.
I am really looking for something that I can view and edit pictures very simply. I am looking to move away from Iphoto and organize pictures on my Mac by my own folders, arrange by subfolders into years, and then months, similar to what you have done.
I do have one question, once I import and create a catalog with those folders, I want to make sure I can edit the pictures without creating an additional copy, unless I otherwise specify. In other words, I want to be able to edit from Lightroom and when I save the edited copy, I would like that to replace the actual file in the picture folder…Can that be done with Lightroom.
Also, I have 16,000 photos, I think I will create couple of catalogs. Pre and Post 2008 perhaps.
Hi!
This was the best guide I ever read on the whole internet. It was exactly what I needed. Thanks alot!
Two questions:
1. If I start storing the images on my laptop but later want to move them to an external hard drive, are the data, tags and such going to be kept? Will Lightroom find the pictures?
2. If I start out with one single catalog but then want to have the one-catalog-per-year-structure, is that possible to change?
Thanks again for great info!
Best wishes,
Emma (Sweden)
Just what I was looking for. Starting a new year and I wanted to start organizing in a more professional manner. Your article was a huge help.
Thanks!
Karen
Hello Nasim,
I am just starting to use Lightroom 3. Can I get the thumbnails to full screen to check for sharpness before importing? (I am trying to weed out the “misses” before importing and backing up.) When I double click (or hit “E”), the thumbnail not only doesn’t become full screen, the image I get is actually smaller than the thumbnail. When I move the slider to the right, the images is extremely pixelated. The image never gets to “full screen”.
Thank you.
Pat
I meant the images ARE extremely pixelated!
Pat, I do not think there is a way to preview images in the import screen. While I very much hope for Adobe to give us this ability in the upcoming version of Lightroom, I personally use a different viewer (ACDSee) to sort through images before importing them into Lightroom… it is painful, but I do not know of any other way!
Nasim – I recently found your website and in particular your article on organizing with LR3 and agree with all the others.. your article is the best I have ever found on the web. I would be very interested in learning abit more about how you use ACDSee. Can you shed alittle more light on how you use ACDSee in your workflow. I note you mentioned above that you use it to view/sort thru the images before you import them into LRoom. Do you download from your cards with ACDSee, then use it to select the “keepers” and then import those “keepers” into LR for processing, etc? Since I began with LRoom a few yrs ago I have continued to use ACDSee, but more at the back end, for long term storage and organization of my finished images (output from LR as jpegs) and occassionally to do some final editing (I find the healing and clone tools in ACDSee Pro 5 better in some instances). Any elaboration you can share with how you use ACDSee in your overall workflow, in addition to what you have shared in this article would be most appreciated ( I noted on the forth panel under folder structure and organization that the screen shot shows the images as ACDSee pro 3 jpegs.) THANK YOU so much for this and your other excellent articles!
I too would like to know how you use Acdsee in your workflow. I was thinking about using ACDSee for organization, because LR seems very cumbersome in that regard but I want to do a majority of the editing in LR. Thanks so much!
Thanks for your excellent tutorial. I’m a long-time PhotoShop user, but new to Lightroom. Relly gerat blog, thanks for your advices!
Thanks a lot Nasim. Tutorial was real nice and greatly presented. I must admit the look of your website is real inviting.
I have a question,can you please help. Yesterday I imported ( by moving ) all my photos using LR from my Laptop to another external drive ( NAS ). It imported everything perfectly well and no issues there. But later that day, when i tried opening the photos ( my external drive was attached and accessible ) I got the message that photos are unavailable or offline. So I had to manually add the folders again. Can’t LR automatically add folders which are imported and added already. I hope my question is clear. Many many thanks in advance.
Shrikant, all you had to do was right click the missing folder, then click “Locate”, then point to the new folder – no need for a re-import. I constantly move my files around and use this feature quite a bit.
Thank you Nasim.
Sorry, what i meant earlier was, i did click “Locate” and enabled the folder again. I didn’t re-import the folder…..
Hence the question came into my mind, can’t Lightroon automatically “Locate” the folder ? As in my case I never moved the folder, it was at the same location ( as when i imported to ). So every time i unplug the external drive and plug back again later, do i have to locate the folder every time ?
Thank you very much for this excellent guide. I have just got into photography and this will really help with my organisation.
I just want to pick up on a point you made in the guide about adding further photos to the Botanic Gardens folder. If you were to do this, would you restart the sequence from 1 (as it has a new month so there will be no duplicates) or would you continue the sequence from where you finished on your previous visit?
I hope this makes sense and you can help me out with that.
Jonathan, I personally would continue the sequence instead of starting from 1, but it is totally your choice!
Hi Nasin
I’ve lost the catalog link to a set of existing images (29,000+) located in a drobo. The adobe tutorial indicates I can create a catalog from existing photos in Lightroom by selecting the photos and exporting them as a new catalog as listed in the below three steps. Can you please be so kind to explain the first step to me. How do I select from LR3 these 30,000 images distributed in about 50 folders?
1. Select the photos you want to add to the new catalog.
2. Choose File > Export As Catalog.
3. Specify the name and location of the catalog.
4. Indicate whether you want to export the negative files and previews, and then click Save (Windows) or Export Catalog (Mac OS).
5. “Negative files” refers to the original files that were imported into Lightroom.
The new catalog contains the selected photos and their information. You must open the new catalog to view it.
jerry
Jerry, did you lose the link to files in the catalog, or the catalog itself? If you lost the link to files, you can simply right click the missing folder and then click “Locate Missing Folder”, then point to the new location. That will take care of the issue. If you completely lost the catalog and need to rebuild everything from scratch, then you will have to import images by folder, one by one. It would be a very painful process and you will obviously lose all changes to your images, especially if you did not save metadata to those images before losing the catalog.
Hi Nasin
Thanks very much for an informative article on Organizing Photos in Lightroom. I recently purchased Lightroom 3 after using Camera Raw / Photoshop CS3. Most of my photos are taken in Raw and processed in Camera Raw and Photoshop. I end up with two files – the original NEF file and an XMP file. If I import the NEF file into lightroom as a DNG will it incorporate all the changes/information from the XMP file as well or will it just take the NEF file and convert to DNG. In other words will my processing recorded in the XMP file be lost on import and conversion to DNG.
Thanks
Murray
Murray, that’s correct – DNG file will contain all metadata/changes made in Lightroom, so you will only have one file, not two. That’s one of the great advantages of using DNG vs NEF. I personally use DNG, because I make them smaller while converting (change thumb size to medium instead of full).
Great tutorial! Just starting with LR3 so this definitely helped.
I have an issue though, eventually (after 3 months), I transfer my older photos to external storage as my laptop has very little HDD space. Does Lightroom have some sort of “Data Move” feature that would let me do this? I want to preserve the HDD space on my laptop to the best of my abilities.
Also, after editing a photo in Lightroom, how do you propagate the changes to the actual photo file (in my case JPEG)?
Thanks!
I agree – greatly helpful tutorial. Thanks!
What software is best for sorting my shoot images in the order that I want them BEFORE making a slideshow or uploading to the web as individual images – NOT in a slideshow but in the order I want them (not by the automatic choices)?
I liked Windows XL drag & drop images feature where I could rename images and they would stay in that order, but I can not find a similar option on Windows 7 or on my software programs (I have Lightroom 3 – which I am just learning, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3, and Photoshop Elements 10. I also downloaded & tried “Visual Slideshow” and even altered my registry to allow drag & drop, but didn’t like what it did to my other folders!
All of the programs make “slideshows” but do not retain the image re-order in a file folder for use in other programs, or rename my photos in the order I want to manually select, as far as I can tell. Suggestions or links to information will be appreciated.
Hi nasim, thanks for the information, the best i have ever seen it. But i have a question about the back up, you tick the xmp (catalogue setting), i saw it the backup file but how to launch it? Hopefully you understand what i mean. Once again thanks abundently and GOD bless.
Hi Nasim, Im still trying to get my head around organizing my photos in L3. Is it possibly to move catalogs into a new location after you have imported them into a catalog. For example – I have mistakenly imported photos into the same location as a previous catalog import. Now I have photos that belong to different catalogs but in the same folder. Problem is – these two shoots are of different nature, so I dont want to keep them in the same folder.
This would be very helpful as I have other catalogs that i would like to relocate and re-organize.
Failing that, Im thinking I just start all over again and re-import the lot.
Thank you in advance.
TX.
Hi Nasin,
First off thanks for the detailed tutorial…really helpful! One question I have is if you’re in a catalog and you choose to delete from disk all your rejected photos, does it also delete it from the back-up you made?
Thanks again!
Stephanie
Nasin,
I just bought my first DSLR and I was terrified of the thought of what to do with all the great photos I was taking. Your tutorial was so great! Thank you so much for taking the time to help us novices. Now that I understand the process, it doesn’t scare me anymore. Thanks again.
Dennis
Great article and really helpful. I hope you don’t mind me asking a few questions? I am using LR 4 and I wanted to create a family archive of around 10 yrs worth of files. They were on drives and DVDs and I created a unique family catalogue but now I want to move them since my internal drive on my MBP is getting full. I was going to drag and drop the folders in LR to a removable drive but here is my dilemma. I have had LR organize the photos by year/date and but I still have photos that need to be imported and I may have more photos that are part of the same date. What will happen when I drag and drop them into the removable drive down the road? Will they seamlessly merge or do I run the risk of overwriting my photos?
Hope you can help and I appreciate your time,
Cliff
Great site! Will have to take a few days off to read up on all the tips.
I currently use Picasa to organize around 11,000+ photos and was introduced to LR by a colleague. The way Picasa used to store edits is to copy the originals that need to be modified to the .picasaoriginals folder. This way the main folder always has the EDITED files and the .picasaoriginals subfolder has the original files for only the subset that was edited and saved. Is there any way to import such a structure in LR?
Thanks
Raj
Another related question. You mentioned your file organization method does not tag the year in the folder name, which is fine at the computer. However, when viewing the photo output through the web or other devices (Roku/Apple TV), the ordering becomes alphabetical. What are your thoughts about alternatives to your foldering structure i.e. would the following be ok?
D:\Photos\
..\2011\
..\2012\
..\2012\2012-03-31 An Event\
..\2012\2012-03-31 An Event\An Event 001.jpg
Any other suggestions for sorting the folders under the year?
Thanks!
MY “SORT” INCON SEEMS TO BE MISSING (I WANT TO SORT PICS IN ORDER IN WHICH THEY WERE TAKEN)
ABOVE THE FILM STRIP NEXT THE LOCAATION/ NAME OF MY PICTURE IT SAYS filter WITH THE FLAGS, IN THE SPACE IN BETWEEN WHERE THE az AND SORTING IS IS BLANK, HOW DO i GET IT BACK/??
THANKS
Hello,
In Lightroom 4, in the Library Mode – Grid, I simply want to move one photo, say from position 3 in the grid to position 2. How do I do this? I simply can not click on the photo and drag it to the position I would like. When I try and do this a pop-up tells me I can not do this function. This is such a simple thing I’m trying to do but I can’t figure it out. Please help? Thank you.
I very useful LR discussion. I always shied away from LR but this will add order and assist in saving time with my workflow.
Thank you
Nasim, thanks for this useful article. I’ve bookmarked it. I shoot with two D700′s and want the LR ‘film strip’ to organise my photos in a time line. I’ve syncronised the camera’s clocks…. will LR organise on time and date taken?
Thank you so much for this informative article! I had been searching for something like this!
I am an amateur photographer, with two grand children and sometimes travel for work related purposes.
I have been using Lightroom 3 for sometime now for importing my photos, but did not have a file naming process. Almost all of my previous imports are done by year, month, day format.
I may have overlooked this question in the comments section and I’m sorry if I did.
Is there a way to move my previous pictures (easily)?
I didn’t place keywords or tags, etc. on the previous imports.
Thanks.
Nasim,
I read and tried to follow your same set up but am confused of where MegaZ came from in the File renaming? Also cant seem to figure out how to get the same format as yours: “YYYYMMDD-Custom Text-Sequence Number.DNG” It is driving me crazy……
Any help you can give me would be awesome!!
Thanks,
Dustin
P.s. just found your website and cant seem to get enough of it……i cant stop reading article after article….Thanks again so much
Hello and thank you for the articles,
This part at the very beginning does not make sense to me. Can you please explain:
‘I decided that it is best to keep all of my photographs in the root folder of my PC’s hard drive that I use solely for storing photos and small family videos. Hard drives are dirt cheap nowadays and you can snatch an external 2 Terabyte drive for under $150.’
You talk about keeping all of your images on your pc’s hard-drive, but then in the next sentence, you say an external drive.
thanks
Read more: http://photographylife.com/how-to-organize-pictures-in-lightroom-3#ixzz2EH7yZmdX
Hallo,
Questions, please:
1. If I have an image that happens to have been shot as a jpg, then when I import it into Photoshop, I always save it as a TIFF, so it at least doesnt lose the info that it does contain when I work on it. I do not see that as being an option in Lightroom. Do I have to go into Photoshop, and save the image as a TIFF before I can import it into LR as a TIFF?
2. In Photoshop, I always set my images at 16bit to work on them, then back to 8bit to save them – I was taught to do this to save on file size. But if I import the image into LR (as a TIFF), then I dont see how I can change the bit-size. Is this possible? Do I have to import it into LR as a 16bit file?
thanks!,
e.
This is a very useful article, thank you. My big question about Lightroom is this though: does it copy all of your images into a separate location when you first set it up, or does it just catalog everything you have on your hard drive without making an extra copy? The reason I ask is because I owned a piece of photo organizing software that wanted to make copies of every photo I had, which I just did not have the hard drive space for (I have more than 80,000 images). Thank you!