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.

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.

FWIW, I almost never assign keywords on import because the photos on a single card of mine are rarely of a single subject.

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.

Take care,
MSP

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