Setting up an organizational system in Lightroom

The power of a digital search is what makes the computer so helpful in dealing with image files. You can find photos faster than you ever could with a physical filing system.

However, the analogy of the physical system is very much applicable here. If you did not put your slides, for example, into the "right” folders (that is, ones with names you could readily use), you would never find those images. You might have the world's greatest photo of an American eagle catching a fish in the river, but if it is filed in the Travel cabinet in the Mississippi River folder and not in some bird folder, it might be difficult to find. The same thing happens in Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom™. You might have a stunning photo of a young soccer player, but if it is filed under an obscure shoot, such as Trip to Cleveland, and is not included in a soccer collection or not connected to keywords such as soccer, youth, and goalkeeper, you might never find this photo again.

To avoid problems finding filed images and enable you to make best use of your photographs, you need to do some preplanning to decide on a consistent way to name your folders and collections, plus determine some conventions on how you will apply names, keywords, and captions to the photos. Use your personality, personal preferences, and past experiences with film to determine what and how much information to include in each area, but it is worth making some consistent choices to set up a system that works well for you.

It's important to be consistent because if you keep changing the way you name images, for example, you increase your work and complicate your workflow (because you have to figure out a new system every time) and make them harder to search and find successfully. Plus, if you don't have a consistent set of terms to use for keywords, the search process is frustrating: What do you search for? Baby, babies, newborns? Eagle, birds of prey, symbol of America? Sure, you could include all of these, but most people don't. You are best served with a list that you can use again and again, and to search images based on that list as well.

Keywords, folder names, and so forth are going to be personal, unique choices for each photographer. Photographers who work for a stock photo agency may find that the agency asks you use a specific list. Otherwise, you need to create a list of words that work for you and that you can use in a consistent way. For example, a nature photographer might have categories broken down like this:

Birds

• Specific categories of birds (shorebirds, hawks, owls, thrushes, etc.)
• Locations for birds (NE birds, SE birds, Midwest birds, etc.)

Flowers

• Specific categories of flowers (sunflower family, lily family, mint family, rose family, etc.)
• Timing of flowering (spring flowers, summer flowers, fall flowers, winter flowers)
• Locations for flowers (NE flowers, SE flowers, Midwest flowers, etc.)

And so on. It is important to remember that you need to find what kind of keywords work best for you, or if they even work with your workflow.

All this organization work might seem a bit overwhelming—after all, Lightroom offers a lot of power to do this—but I want to emphasize again that you need to choose and use what works for you and your image needs. To be honest, I often get a bit overwhelmed by the projects I am involved with and don't have time to follow all the ideas I discuss here. That doesn't make those ideas less valid; it's just that realistically, life sometimes gets in the way of optimum organization. Plus, some folks are more detail oriented than I am and can sit down for hours and fill in keywords, whereas I get tired of it long before that.

Still, it helps to envision an ideal way of working. I'm going to explain an approach that I use. It works, but I recognize it doesn't work for everyone. Use it to stimulate your own methods for using your computer and Lightroom to file and organize your images.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

None

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