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:
- Every photo should have a single, unambiguous place where it belongs on my hard drive.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
Update (January 2009): So this system works pretty well, except for one thing: I often wind up with too many top-level folders under the year folder. In 2008, I had so many different folders that they don’t even fit on the screen of my 17˝ MacBook Pro.
So, for 2009, I’m trying a slight variation on this pattern: I’m adding top-level folders for each month (named “2009-01″ for January, etc.) and also top-level folders for locations where I shoot frequently (i.e. my home).
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!
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting story.
What I don’t understand is why you would use the folder structure to classify your images. Why not use ‘where’, ‘what’ and ‘who’ keywords (with hierarchy underneath) within Lightroom to store this information?
This makes the import a quick one (just import to hierarchical date folders, same as you do now) and sorting through your images in Lightroom to attach the right place, person, event, etc. Date and time is already available in EXIF.
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Good stuff for Ligthroom users. I Agree with Eric van der Knaap; but rather use the location fields (location, city, state, country) in LR to store this information?
I do also use the IPTC fields and (to a lesser extent) keywords for location, but I find the use of folder naming serves a couple of valuable purposes for me:
First, it makes the folders panel into a sort of visible chronology or timeline of where I’ve been in a way that keywords might not. (Typically, keywords — at least the kind of keywords that you would want to share with the public — would separate the “where” and “when” aspects of the timeline. I like having a place where those concepts live together.)
Second, there are often nuances to location that don’t fit neatly into the standard IPTC fields. For instance, if I’m in a rural area outside of any town, what do I list? I often use a folder name like “S of Pinedale, WY” to mean that I’m somewhere south of the community of Pinedale, Wyoming. In that case, I’ll enter “Pinedale” for city, but there isn’t really a way to express “south of” in IPTC … at least that I know of. (Please correct me if I’m missing a standard practice!)
I’ll often put information about the location that I don’t want to share with the public in the folder name. For instance, a folder name might be something like “Smith Residence, Minneapolis, MN”, but I’ll omit the “Smith Residence” portion in the IPTC metadata.
As for “who” is in the photo, I agree. That’s rarely in the folder name and almost always in keywords.
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My system is similar, except that my folders are simply – Keyword(s), under a subfolder for each year, under the parent folder Images. Then each image is renamed on ingestion to the date/time stamp from the exif. This way each filename is unique and can be re-generated easily if it gets renamed accidently or on purpose etc.
Great article. I read it because I have written another article with the same subject. I do prefer to use the “year” folder on level two though, because after 5 years I don’t remember which year I went to France or Italy etc. But I know that if I look in my “Travel” folder I find a minimum of “Year” folders that are easy to click through and it only contains photos related to “Travel”. This is my article about the subject
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This is very useful for me! I have loads of photos that were poorly organized; now, with this system, they are so easy to find! Thanks very much!
Thanks, Eric, for talking about an issue that IMO doesn’t get enough “airtime”. But I also don’t understand why you go through the trouble of creating/naming folders by date-location when LR’s keywording works so well for that. And how do you decide at “what level” to name a shoot’s location. E.g., should a folder holding a shoot in the Caribbean be by island (St. Croix), group of islands (U.S. Virgins or British Virgins or Virgins), area (Caribbean), etc. LR’s keywording easily supports a hierarchy so that you can have it all, and not have to pick an arbitrary “level” of location. IMO, if you use IPTC keywording, how you name your disk folders can (and should) be completely arbitrary and just driven by making it as brain-dead simple as possible (e.g., minimize decisions). To that end, here’s what I do …
Since cameras already uniquely themselves and (almost uniquely) the images they take, I just put my images into a folder tree whose first level is camera ID and then by image name. For example, for two Canon cameras the file folder hierarchy might look like:
Pictures
_B9O
_B9O0002.CR2
_B9O0009.CR2
_B9O0012.CR2
:
4C4T
4C4T0007.TIF
4C4T0009.TIF
4C4T0010.TIF
:
Of course, this doesn’t quite work since the image names are not unique — they eventually “rollover”. For Canon SLRs that happens after every 9999 shots/camera. So, my actual file folder hierarchy looks something like:
Pictures
_B9O
0000-9999
_B9O0002.CR2
_B9O0009.CR2
_B9O0012.CR2
:
10000-19999
:
4C4T
0000-9999
4C4T0007.TIF
4C4T0009.TIF
4C4T0010.TIF
:
10000-19999
:
But you’ll find that having thousands of images in one folder can cause some LR performance slowness. So, one last modification — I finally group pictures into folders holding up to 300 images (YMMV):
Pictures
_B9O
0000-9999
0001-0300
_B9O0002.CR2
_B9O0009.CR2
_B9O0012.CR2
:
0301-0600
:
10000-19999
:
4C4T
0000-9999
0001-0300
4C4T0007.TIF
4C4T0009.TIF
4C4T0010.TIF
:
0301-0600
:
10000-19999
:
I actually use LR to import my images into working folders, culled out the rejects, and then use LR to copy the remaining images into the above folder hierarchy. This is the only step that takes a little work (but very little thinking) — in LR, while viewing a working folder sorted by filename, you have to select 200 image ranges and drag&drop those images into the above hierarchy.
And to save myself from having to manually create a new set of folders each time a camera does a 9999 rollover, I set up a empty template folder hierarchy once:
Template
0001-0300
0301-0600
:
Just duplicate these empty folders under a camera and you’re ready to go for another 9999 shots.
Unfortunately the indentations in my above post were stripped out. Here a more readable version: http://www.samcos.com/LRfileNaming.txt
Although I fully understand the logic behind this way of organizing folders inside LR, I personally don’t organize or rename folders or files at all. I organize everything using “Collections” (which I consider as a kind of virtual folders) inside LR.
I’d like to hear if I’m missing an important point about the reason behind renaming folders and files after import into LR. Until now I’ve only found one reason why using “Collections” instead of folder/file organization/renaming could be a bad option: switching to another program instead of LR.
My system is as follows:
1. My folder structure has yyyy (year) as top level, and then – during import – all photos are copied into a subfolder: yyyy-mm-dd. This is AFAIK the default naming and importing procedure in LR. As soon as I import the first shoot of the new year, a new top level folder (yyyy) is created, automatically, by LR.
2. After each import, I select (flag) the photos I want to keep and edit.
3. All selected (flagged) photos are “copied” into a new “Collection”. I can name that Collection using a standardized system like the one described in the above article. Or change that naming system at any given time later on, without ever “touching” the original folder and file names.
4. Only at this point I start editing the photos in LR, from inside their respective collections only.
The whole point is: I’m never actually changing any names of files or folders. I’m doing all the organizing in a virtual (non-destructive) way – using Collections, with the same versatility and functionality.
Comments much appreciated.
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@Rick: Glad you enjoyed the article. Ultimately, the way we organize our libraries comes down to a matter of personal taste. Here are a couple of things I think about when I look at it: What value is there in the filename given to each photo by your camera? (Or, put another way, what useful information is conveyed by “_B9O” or “4C4T”?) Why propagate that information into the folder structure? Also, it seems like the work you do to respond to rollover (when the counter flips past 9999) is non-trivial. (That said, others in this comment thread have rightly pointed to ways in which my workflow has its own cumbersome points.
)
@Patrick: You’ve hit on one of the key reasons why I do use meaningful folder names. I do use other applications (gasp!) occasionally to look at my photo collection. Mostly that’s the Finder, but I find it helpful to have a bit of information readily available. Also, as I noted in the original article, I only move and rename photos at import time. Once they’re properly arranged by date and location, they never move again. As for collections, I’ve been meaning to write an article about how I use collections and keywords in my workflow. The short version is that collections are largely about tracking how and where my photos are displayed or have been submitted for stock or publication. Keywords are largely for describing the subject matter (i.e. who or what is visible in the photo).
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Hi, Eric, I’m glad to see that your stategy is more or less the same I use and I teach to beginners : a simple folder structure, using ISO dates (in France, the standard is DD-MM-YYYY but it is obviously easier to stick to YYYY-MM-DD) and a concise description as the folder title. It is important to keep a simple folder hierarchy if you get into troubles or need to relocate them in the catalog.
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This method is very similar to the one I use, which I read in The DAM Book. My file names are composed of my initials, the date and the number part of the original file name, eg jb_081212_4865.cr2. They stay like this until after I’ve created other formats, eg master TIFs, web-sized JPGs or files sized specifically for the press. I colour-code my files so I know which are which (red for original files, yellow for web versions etc). Once I’m done, I filter by colour label then amend the file names by putting “_press” etc onto the end, ie jb_081212_4865_press.jpg.
I’d not thought (or read) of using a “+” sign or appending letters onto file names to distinguish between shoots on the same day, so that’s one idea I’ll definitely be implementing – thanks!
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What a great article—thanks.
Noticing a weird behaviour I can’t explain: When I split photos from one folder up into two subfolders, the enclosing folder, when clicked on, only shows some of the photos (9) in Grid mode. It can “see” the correct number of photos (i.e., it shows 37 because the two subfolders contain 10 and 27 respectively). the filter bar is set to “none” and no other filtering I know of is engaged. What’s going on?
You know, this is an ephemeral problem. If I quit LR 2.1 and relaunch it, problem solved.
Hello Eric,
One question why can we not sort the folder list in Lightroom. Most of the time I work with the my photo that I took a couple of days ago.
I already submitted a Request for Change @ Adobe. But perhabs you know why it was not added as a feature.
Richard
Great article! I consider my Lightroom indexing to be very good, but I’ve added a couple of your ideas to make it even better. I just found your blog via a post at “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips”, you’re in my RSS feed now
Take care,
MSP
Interesting as I use a similar approach on my folder organization. Yet I use a different approach on my file naming and export naming. As I shoot primarily people for for fashion, beauty or fine art, doing both commercial and personal photo shoots, I tend to use the persons name, rather than the place in both my file as my folder naming structure. Also I tend to shoot at least 400 pictures per shoot, bringing the amount of pictures in my catalog above 30.000 in a few months. 30.000 seemed to be the limit my Lightroom 1.4 could handle on my 1.25 Gb RAM Windows XP laptop. While I moved to a 64 bit Vista machine and LR 2.1 now I still am not sure whether it can handle more than 30.000 images in a catalogue very well. So I tend to have one or more catalogs for each year and am not using the year as a top level folder as you are doing.
1. Catalog naming
My catalogs will be named yyyy-X, where X is the sequence number stating at 0 for the amount of catalogs I have from a certain year.
2. Folder structure
My files are either imported directly into LR from my CF cards or directly from the camera when shooting tethered in the studio. In both cases my files end automatically into folders that are named yyyy-mm-dd, clientname-jobname. If the shoot is personal I might fore go the jobname part. As such my folders are named something like 2007-10-27, FALCON ADVERTISING – Digicel Launch.
3.File naming
My files are renamed automatically during the import process and will be either clientname-xxx or jobname-xxx, where xxx is the automatically assigned 3 number sequence starting with 001 for each shoot.
4. Export naming
4.a.My files can be exported for different uses. All exports are done in LR. As such Unedited proofs send to the client can be either on CD or on the web in a LR created gallery in a 600×400px format. No special renaming is done in this case.
4.b.After the client selection images will be extensively post processed and send for approval over the web or email, these images will be exported in a 900×600 format with the text “-proof” appended to it.
4.c.Hi res files can be siend either as TIFF or JPG to the client, depending on their requierement and will have “-hires” appended to them and so forth.
4.d.Images exported for my portfolio or for use on the internet will have either “-portfolio” appended to them, or in the case of special formatting for specific website the website name or acronym appended to it. The last may seem trivial but some of the websites where I submit my images to will apply automatich sharpening to them in that case my export will have less sharpening on output. Others require special sizes and so on.
I ended up writing a comment almost as long as your article
I guess that you can see that I am truly inspired by your article. But that is also because I believe that a structured folder approach is a good start to some organisation of your images.
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Is there any way to keyword photos that you failed to do on import?
I have many earlier photos that I failed to keyword and also photos in folders that do not have the correct keywords?!
@Jack, you can use the Keyword List and Keywording panels on the right side of the Library module to add or remove keywords after import.
FWIW, I almost never assign keywords on import because the photos on a single card of mine are rarely of a single subject.
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Since I started shooting digital in 1997 and DAM didn’t really exist back then, I started the chronological+description method and has stuck with it ever since.
People criticize this method saying “use the catalog” for descriptions – but what happens if you lose your catalog? What happens if a couple years down the road there’s something better than Lightroom for organizing? You’re probably screwed either way.
It has to be intuitive and searchable and chronological at the folder-structure level. You can still group by category and do all the keywording in LR but relying entirely on catalog-based organization is a mistake IMO.
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Hello,
I have looked everywhere and I can’t seem to figure out how to make my copyright visible on my photos. I’m using Lightroom 2. Can you help?
Thank you for any help you can give.
Jessica
I’m getting ready to import 7 years of digital files into Lightroom.
I used to work in a pro photo lab back in the film days and we kept negatives on file for photographers so they could just call us up and place an order. Negatives were filed by roll name and date. We were always taught the files stay chronological. Sort your proof sheets accordingly. I have found this to be prudent for digital files as well.
I’ve worked several jobs over the years where I was involved in image database organization and I’ve found that usually naming images by anything but date / sequence usually breaks down eventually. For this reason I name my negs yymmdd_0001. Folder structure is Year/Month/Day. I have had creation dates get corrupted in the past, so I do like to have the date in the permanent name.
I’ve usually felt like the actual image files should be very strict and static with the keywording taking place in the database software. As I’m new to Lightroom and want to start new, I’m wondering if this is still the best system. For instance, I often do extensive manipulation to images. Where should these collections live in the folder structure? Should final portfolios be in separate folders? I also take a lot of personal photos.
I’m new to Lightroom. I used to use Canto’s Cumulus, which I loved, but wasn’t happy with them after OSX came out. I used to have several databases and I could easily drag an image from one database to the other. For instance, If I imported a day’s photos that had 100 photos of flowers but also a couple of shots of my dog and my husband, I could just drag the personal photos over to the personal database. The actual file stayed in the same place. Will this work in Lightroom? Also, Cumulus had keyword hierarchies, does Lightroom? I’m watching online classes on KelbyTraining right now, so I’ve seen the collections idea, Just not sure yet how it relates to how Cumulus did it.
Thanks for any thoughts.
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For some reason, when I make adjustments in the Develop mode of LR 1.4 and return to my library…and try to export these changed images into a folder on my desktop; the original set of images exports rather than the images with changes? What am I doing wrong? I can see the changed (cropped, lightened etc.) images that I’ve selected to export but, they don’t export changed? Thanks for your help. -Steph
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I’m just starting up with Lightroom and organized my photos in the Collections section, not the Folders section. Is this a problem? Which is better and why?
Thanks.
I wouldn’t say there’s a better way; just that they serve different purposes. The Folders panel reflects how your photos are organized on disk; Collections reflect any other organization system you wish. Photos can be in only one folder, they may be in as many collections as you wish.
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