Organising in Lightroom and your HardDrive: photography strategies for beginners and pros

[@piyushgadkari162]

Great video, quality useful stuff as usual

[@OBPhotography695]

This was so helpful. I have such a disorderly catalog and filing system but now I really like the rule based approach that you can set and forget essentially. Then the use of collections is new to me but looks like it does an excellent job and keeping things managable on the wide variety of images I make. Thank you so much

[@davidligon6088]

Excellent organization. I do something similar, but much flatter. I like your hierarchy. You showed the templates, and described what you did with them, but did not demonstrate how you use them in Lightroom as part of your workflow - like you did the Collections.

[@oneeyedphotographer]

LrC and Bridge (I think) have a stack feature, different from Ps. Think of a stack as like a comection. You can specify the interval between frames, I commonly choose a short image for my in-camera focus brackets, a longer interval captures time-lapses, you could also use it to separate different locations in one day, or whole days. Then move the stacks into place and unstack.

[@jethrostebbings]

mate, you sound like you have this down to a science. It should be you creating these videos! :)

[@oneeyedphotographer]

@@jethrostebbings I found it in LrC by finding people like you who've described it. I've seen it in Bridge because I know it exists. Bridge also does collections, but so far I have not found a good way to make virtual copies or something equivalent.

[@mavericklesmana9593]

as google photos been doing

[@VeryImportantPepe]

How do I organize

[@ROBBBBBBY]

I like hierarchy, but worry that having so many many folders identically named could lead to disaster. As an example, if you have two folders from different years opened, then you have two lists of identical months in front of you. It may be idiotic, but if you or someone else were to drag 08 (August) from one year to the other you will get the message asking if you want to replace 08 with 08. If you inadvertently agree, you just wiped out August from one year with another. This is not to mention that there are numerous drive cataloging software utilities that may say that you have X number of folders with the same name, ‘so let’s clean them up’, and mayhem ensues. All the various check summing that is supposedly done is worthless if the user is not well versed with their tools, and thinks that there is no need for a decade of 08s (Augusts) when one will do. I may be looking at this from an idiotic perspective, but most of us have been looking at directories of thousands of files on little to no sleep. That is when the brightest of us becomes idiotic. To me the date hierarchy is a start for unique file and folder names, but it just that. They each need to be unique to protect oneself from the sleepless and ignorant idiot in the room.

[@jethrostebbings]

You can easily name your dates better if you are worried. Problem solved. 29-08-2023. :)

[@oneeyedphotographer]

@@jethrostebbings I go for 2023-08-29 for better sorting, so 2023\08\ 2023-08-29. Bridge, and I expect LrC can make a similar structure, but for years I used my own script (bash in Cygwin), that would work well on MacOS X too.