October 2008

Update (September 2009): I’ve changed my workflow fairly significantly from what is described here. Please see my new article, “How I Organize My Catalog and Why (2009 Edition).”

In this article, I talk about the way I use Lightroom’s folders panel to organize my photos on disk. I talk about how I made the choices I’ve made, and some of the alternatives I considered and why I rejected them.

In addition to my work on the Lightroom development team, I also like to teach Lightroom. I live in the Seattle area and, when my schedule permits, I assist in the teaching of Lightroom and Photoshop classes at Art Wolfe’s Digital Photography Center. When I do, I not only get to meet some amazing photographers (instructors and students both), but I also get to see first-hand where people get confused when they use Lightroom. (Side note: Rick Holt is the primary instructor for most of the LR and PS classes. If you’re not sure where to start with digital imaging and you’re looking for hands-on instruction, he’s great. He teaches both in Seattle and in his home state of Pennsylvania.)

One of the things we hear over and over again is: “My hard drive is a mess. I don’t know where anything is and I don’t know where I should put my files.” So, typically, the first half day or so of a workshop is spent talking through file organization. And that’s where I’ll start this article.

Where Do My Files Go?

Oh yes … one last disclaimer: I’m describing the way I like to organize my library. There are plenty of other good ways to organize a library, and I don’t mean to suggest that my way is the only legitimate way. If another way works well for you, by all means … stick with it! If you don’t like what you’re doing now, hopefully this article can help you find a new process that works for you.

When I designed my organizational system, I was trying to balance a couple of competing goals:

1. Every photo should have a single, unambiguous place where it belongs on my hard drive.
2. Related photos should be together as much as possible, while not violating goal #1.

A few years ago (before Lightroom), I organized primarily by subject matter: sunsets in one folder, winter landscapes in another, animals, people, etc. — you get the picture. This sort of helped me deal with the relative lack of good organizational tools at the time, but the system broke down fairly quickly after I got my first digital camera in 2003. Two problems:

1. I shot too much to make a photo-by-photo decision of where each photo should go. When I went to Hawaii in 2003 and shot several hundred photos each day, I quickly fell far behind.
2. Not every photo sorted cleanly into one of these bins. What should I do with a photo like this one, for example? There’s a person, there’s a bird, there’s a travel destination (Mykonos, Greece). Each of those was a top-level folder in my old system.

So, out of the frustration with that approach, I started looking for a new system. What I realized is that — as an outdoor photographer — there are two important pieces of metadata that never change for any of my photos: when and where it was captured.

And so those two bits of information became the centerpiece of my new filing system: I name every folder with the capture date followed by the location. The photo above is in a folder named “2005-09-25 Mykonos, Greece”, meaning it was captured on September 25, 2005, in that location.

The date is in yyyy-mm-dd format (including extra zeroes if necessary), so that when Lightroom or any other program (Mac Finder, Windows Explorer, etc.) lists the folders, they’ll come out in chronological order. Here’s how it looks in Lightroom:

A couple of nuances to add about this:

• I group all of the photos for each year in a top-level folder. This is basically a trick to keep from having too many top-level folders.
• When I go on a major trip, I group all of those folders together so I can quickly scan photos from that trip. I add a + sign to the date as a clue that there are more folders underneath that.
• When I shoot in multiple locations on the same day, I add a letter after the date so that the locations sort into the correct sequence. (See “2005-09-23b Delos, Greece” and “2005-09-23d Mykonos, Greece” in the screen shot.) If I later edit out all of the photos from one location (as I did for wherever I went between Delos and Mykonos), I don’t bother to go back and rename.

File Naming Pattern

If I were starting fresh today, I’d probably do something different, but I have a long history with my existing naming/numbering system and it would be pretty inconvenient to change over.

My file numbering system is a holdover from my film days. It’s a six-digit number: four digits are a “roll” counter and the last two digits are essentially a “frame” number. Each time I start a new download, I bump the roll counter to the first unused number, and the frame number starts over at 01. If there are more than 100 frames in a download, I just keep going (so after 096499 is 096500). I put my initials in front of the file name. (Thus, the pelican/man shot above is “es-096438.dng.”)

I used to include the photo title in the file name, but I no longer do. This is because a consistent file name helps keep traffic on my backup system to a minimum, and titles are subject to change. (See “Export Workflow” below for how I include the file name when exporting.)

I said something about “if I were starting fresh today.” I’d probably use a pattern something like year-month-day-counter (i.e. “es-20050925-0038.dng,” meaning the 38th photo captured on September 25, 2005). Lightroom can generate this pattern fairly easily; the pattern I use requires a bit more manual intervention.

Import Workflow

When I’m importing photos from my CF cards (and the occasional iPhone photo), my goal is to just get the photos onto the computer as quickly as possible. I used to invest a lot of effort into ensuring that I imported the cards in the sequence they were shot. I now consider that to be too cumbersome and error-prone. That model breaks down when I shoot with multiple cameras, as the contents of the cards will tend to overlap.

Here’s how the Import dialog typically looks when I use it:

The noteworthy things about this:

• I usually, but not always, convert to DNG immediately upon import. I prefer DNGs over RAW files because the metadata cannot be separated from the image data. (In other words, I don’t like the requirement that RAW files have a separate XMP “sidecar” file sitting next to them.) If I don’t do this conversion immediately, it’s because I’m in a hurry at that time. I always convert to DNG at some point in the workflow; the only question is when do I take the time hit.
• I import to a folder called “Just Imported” that is outside of the folder structure just described above. This is a temporary measure until I can rename the files to fit my naming scheme (see above). Once the renaming is done, I’ll determine the location for each batch of photos and rearrange the photos into the folder structure described earlier. The organization inside “Just Imported” is relatively unimportant since it won’t last.
• Since I might be importing from multiple cards in one batch, I don’t rename the files until I can (later) sort by capture date.
• I assign a simple metadata template that contains my copyright and contact information.
• If I’m in a big hurry to import (or my laptop battery is running low), I’ll turn off preview generation. Usually I do have Lightroom build out 1:1 previews right off the bat so I can make judgments about sharpness.

Once I have all of my cards imported, then I’ll rename my files as described above. I click on the “Just Imported” folder in Lightroom, sort by capture date, select all, and choose Library > Rename Photos. My renaming template is very simple:

Once the renaming is completed, I then fill in location metadata and move the photos to the folders by date and location. If I have my GPS track logs available, I’ll do my geocoding at this time as well. (See my article “Geocoding Your Photos with Lightroom and HoudahGeo” on the Lightroom Journal for a description of that process. That article was written for Lightroom 1.2, it is still relevant for Lightroom 2.x.)

Export Workflow: A Simple Trick

I mentioned earlier that I no longer like to put my photo’s title into the file name. This is partly driven by the notion that I like to have a single, unmoving place where every photo belongs. I often don’t assign a title to my photographs until weeks or even months after the fact, and I sometimes change them even after that. So including the title doesn’t help me keep the file in the same place.

When I send photos to other people, however, I do want the title included, so I use a different naming template in the Export dialog to ensure that the current title (if any) is applied to the file:

This appends the title of my photograph to the existing file name.

Don’t have a title for every photograph? Not to worry. Little known Lightroom feature: If a token (that’s the funny blue bubble in the dialog above) is empty, any punctuation or white space in front of that token is removed.

So the above photo would be exported as “es-128935.jpg” if it had no title.

In Closing

This turned out to be a lengthy article, and I hope it was helpful to you.

In future articles, I’ll talk about some more of the ways I use keywords and collections.

I certainly welcome your questions, comments, and corrections. Please let me know if there are ways I could make this article more helpful to you and future readers. And thanks for reading this far!

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