Organizing Photos (Steps 1, 2 and 3)

After my occasional philosophic musings and rants about photography as an art form, back to something more down to earth. :)

Most recently a friend of mine let out a "semi-public sigh" :) why it is so frustrating to organize and edit photos. Of course it all depends a lot on personal preferences, and in this post I just want to share how I do certain things in my workflow. It's just a description, I'm not trying to sell my way of dealing with it as the ultimate truth. There are other ways to organize photos that work just as well, I'm pretty sure about that. But maybe there's something in here for someone out there that's useful. :) And I'm only looking at how I do things here with Lightroom and leave out Picasa entirely*.

Folder structure (Step 1)

When I first started organizing my photos, I had a folder structure that reflected some categories, like flowers, nature, travel, etc. - quite obviously, this is totally no good because it completely rips apart any timeline. Like, if you're on vacation and travel and make photos of nature and flowers, would the photos end up in three folders? That's nonsense, and I dropped the idea quickly.

To make a long story short: the only thing that really works for me on the hard disk is the organization by date. You can see what that looks like in the screenshot to the left.

I have a folder "Photos" and inside that folder are sub folders for the years. 2008, 2009, 2010, and so on. I make a lot of photos, so these folders contain subfolders for each month. 01, 02, 03, until 12 for December, obviously. The month folders contain subfolders for each day.

If you don't make a great many photos you can maybe skip the sub folders for month and day and make combined sub folders for those occasions where you make photos, like 2010/05-12 for photos you made on May 12th, that sort of thing.

I for one keep sub folders for each day. The great thing is: I don't have to do a thing to maintain that folder structure. When I import my photos, Lightroom takes care of all that for me.

Now if there's more than one "shoot" per day I like to keep these apart and have to do a little hand work. It can all be done inside of Lightroom so it's not a big deal: I create sub folders on the day level, like 12.1 for the first session on the 12th day of the month, 12.2 for the second session, and so on. Once that's done I add a little description to the folder on the day level. It just makes it easier to find things for me.

EDIT: just to make it clear. I access my photo collection only through Lightroom. I never use a file manager (like Windows Explorer, or Finder, or whatever floats your boat) to browse my photo collection. It makes no sense to me. I want everything to happen in one place, and that place is Lightroom.

First clean up after Import (Step 2)

The first thing to do after importing new photos to my computers hard disk with Lightroom is going through all of them one by one, marking "instant favorites" as (P)icks in Lightroom, and total failures (wrong focus etc.) as Rejected with (X). That can be done with the keyboard entirely in either the Library or Develop module, I don't have to use the mouse.

Lightroom has an automatic smart collection (for lack of a better word) that's called "Previous Import". I configured this special, virtual folder to show me only picks and unflagged photos. Rejected photos disappear from view entirely once I press X (if I accidentally press it, CTRL-Z brings it back.) Here's what the filter pane looks like to do that:

(the unflagged flag is not that visible because I had to scale down this screenshot a bit to make it fit into the blog width, sorry)

Once I'm done with that, I could go to Lightroom's "Photo" menu in the Library view and simply select "Delete Rejected Photos" near the very bottom of that menu - but it's a bit too automatic for me. So I set the Library Filter to show only the rejected photos to check once more. Only after that I mark all of the rejected photos with CTRL-A, and delete them (they'll go to the recycle bin of the operating system.)

Stacking (Step 3)

After the rejected photos are gone, it's time to create stacks for bracketed photos and/or sequences. In the Library module, I mark all photos with CTRL-A, and use either the right-click context menu or the "Photo" menu and selecting Stacking > Auto Stack by Exposure Time.

I keep all stacks expanded at this point until I have selected "the one" best photo from the stack and marked it with the pick flag. Once I have my personal favorite from a stack I move it to the top of the stack by simply clicking the number of the photo in the stack and collapse the stack with the "S" key (it is a toggle to collapse/expand stacks.)

That's it.

In the next parts I'll write a little bit about keywording, ratings, labels, and how they help me to keep my photos organized.

*) I do use Picasa, but not for my raw files. I use it for the JPEG snapshots and movies I make with my Android phone, and they go to a different folder structure too. I also use Picasa to catch the screenshots I make of Lightroom, cut them to size, and upload them to my (unpublic) Picasa Web Album that is the Blogger backend for the photos. It's very convenient for all that.