Setting up an organizational system in Lightroom
Organizing the images
Once the photos are on the hard drive, you have access to them in the computer, but only in a very generic sense. You need to be able to see them for editing, renaming, sorting, and so forth. You do all this in Lightroom.
I start by importing the folder or subfolders within a folder from the shoot I just downloaded to the hard drive. Simply go to the Import button or File > Import and browse to find the folder you need. If you put all of the images into one folder, this process is relatively simple. Choose a folder and select the button, Choose Selected. The Import Photos dialog box opens and you include whatever information you can, including copyright and basic keywords as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: The Import Photos dialog box.
Adding copyright information here can be very helpful in ensuring this is always included with your images. If your group of images has a consistent subject or location, you can add that information in the Keywords section and have that included on all of them. Then, when you click Import, you get a new entry listed in Folders with the same name as your file folder's name.
I recommend keeping Folders solidly grounded in how you file your images. Most of the time, Folders should reflect how your images are filed on your hard drive (grounded in how you file your images) — don't create some new naming system for Folders that does not reflect how your images are filed. That, in turn, is based on the way you photograph. Like most photographers, when I get certain shoots that don't fit the norm, I also create special Folders for them.
However, you can also use Folders as a way of organizing distinct groupings of your photography, such as client. You can create a folder directly in Lightroom that is a client name, and then import all jobs for that client into that folder, so each job shows up as a subset of the overriding Folder category. Do this by clicking the + button to the right of Folders. The Browse for Folder dialog box appears. Find the folder you want to create a subfolder within, and then click Make New Folder as shown in figure 5. This is just a way of keeping the Folder section a bit tighter when you have a lot of individual folders that still belong to a larger grouping.
Figure 5: Click Make New Folder to create a subfolder within another folder.
You could also use Collections for this purpose, but I don't find it as useful for tracking specific shoots, which goes back to the file cabinet analogy. I consider the Folders category as my file drawer and use the subfolder based on a shoot within it. I like to use Collections more for subject matter that cuts across folders.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, see the following:
