5 Lightroom Organizing Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

Simple filename based on date and time. Will always be unique.

Folder for each date. Add description to folder name (e.g., “20060506 Robert Plant Concert Austin Texas”.

Keyword photos on Lightroom import.

Not using date and time to impose order on your file library is a terrible idea.

Interesting. After reading this, I’m convinced it is better to never bother with Lightroom than get tied to using it. I’ve added it to this machine with great hope of using it to work with images, but the strong emphasis on collections turned me off. I can open a photo in Photoshop and work with it. I know where the photo is (all quite organised) and that is my preference here – just let me open a photo and work with it.

Matt

I entered a little late into this discussion but I am new in LR.

Matt with all due respect I think there are many valid aspects commented in this post and I think you as a instructor and expert in the subject should honored and analyzed.

I will mention something though as a new LR user. The Collection facility is something to take care of, even though it is a great facility I think that naming conventions and organization has also to do with documentation and recovery. The technology is moving fast and you will never know what options will be available not in the distant but in the near future. After spending time analyzing this feature, I’d prefer to minimize its use and maybe using it for specific important portfolios. I think, and it is my opinion, that is better to use folder and subfolder structures to create your organization strategy using the correct naming conventions that can easily be used in the event of transferring to another product or even to view outside of LR.

So metadata is critical but if you use some key metadata in your file names or folder structure that will make sense for me, it is my approach it does mean that the others are wrong.

I don’t use date in my folder structure, I prefix all my folders/subfoders with a symbol that has a meaning to me it will also be nicely sorted at first sorted in the library view. I rename all my file and tag the custom text-date-sequence E.g:

Prefixes
@ – Digital Shots
# – Portfolio or projects (it is my collections folders)
& – Film or analogs (Scanned Shots)
> – Subfolder

so here are a couple of examples of my folder tree

Folder – Subfolder

@NewYork
>dng
>MasterEdited
>Print

@Phylly
>dng
>MasterEdited
>Print

These has to be combined with keywords to ease the search mechanisms within LR.

My method helps me to exploit LR features and at the same time has a mean to understand what is on my hard drive for portability reasons, and even though I am adopting LR I’d prefer to think this way

Matt thanks this is a great space for discussion and learning

Cheers
Alfredo Perez

Hi Matt,

Thanks for a very illuminating post. As I am starting off on Lightroom (and other apps), I found the post very timely though I know you ave written it almost a year ago. I hope you wont mind responding to my query so late.

I am an amateur photographer and use my camera in family event and functions and personal vacations. I have been an iPhoto user for ages -almost 10 years – when I finally decided the software was getting too slow and difficult to manage. I have about 30000 photos in my library and it took me a good amount of time to just get all my photos (and their data) out of iPhoto into a hard drive. I organized my photos in a year-month-event fashion. I see you have advocated against it – but well.. I saw this too late. Another reason was also that I could rely on the software to help in keeping my photos organized. I dont think I will ever navigate through Finder or Windows Explorer to locate my photos. I would use the software 99.9% of the time. I am hence not too worried about the folder structure.

What I am concerned about and what I would like to know from you – how to best keep family photo collection as mine organized in Lightroom. For me, the photos are all about the people and events that happen in my life. I liked iPhoto in this regard – its face recognition feature combined with Events tagging helped a lot. But it got out of hand because iPhoto mandated that every photo be tied to an event. That rather diluted the whole purpose of events and made it a mess. Is there a best practice to be followed for keeping yourself organized well in Lightroom so that I can easily jump to say, the photo having me and wife taken at Florence in 2007?

Thanks.

This discussion has become quite old already but am surprised it was resurrected again in my inbox this morning. (^J^)

My opinion, as subjective as it is, as every one else’s, is that collections is just an alternative way to define hierarchy. Except you want to call them collections rather then folders. It is still dependent on an A,B,C sequential hierarchy, and further, accumulate to many of them collections and you begin to create ‘collection sets’ (i.e., Lightroom’s definition for ‘folders’) I use a defined hierarchical folder structure to import original data into my system from 5 different sources.

Then, I apply keywords and collections within Lightroom based on that hierarchical ‘folder’ structure that was imported through LR.

Here tagging (keywords) come is important, assuming if one is faithfully consistent about defining / managing digital assets.

Any systematic approach to large amounts of data is the same…. looking up a book in a public library, finding a phone number in a telephone directory. Thus so is it the same for your media data. We as humans, always remember something about something or somebody. That’s just the way the human brain functions. Thus, a hybrid combination of both are really essential to define, find, and locate. The hybrid combination works best for me.

Matt here on this blog also has his own subjective ‘what is best’ for organization and location of data files. Bottom line is, there is no one real right way or wrong way. This is a very subjective process for each individual in their approach to data management. In my way, the hybrid system works best. A chronologically sequenced folder structure on initial import is the first part of my work flow. Then, I refine my media management from within Lightroom. One of the reasons I hate iPhoto is because of your ‘shoe box’ example. All the shoes gets thrown into one ‘shoebox (library container file) which increasingly gets larger and larger as you add 100s of photos to it throughout the course of a year. I really hate that concept. So, no matter how polished iPhoto might be in editting, it’s a disqualifier based on how it deals with media. Been using LR since it’s inception. At least LR gives you the choice to use folders. It is obviously important or they would not include the folder structure in the left hand pane. It’s why I don’t use iPhoto, and also why I discontinued using their once-upon-a-time, now defunct iDVD. They would not even allow you to pull in your own index.html file and /or organize one’s web sites as one saw fit.

If Adobe decides to go cloud with LR like all their other products, then I will have to reconsider then life beyond Lightroom then…. Aperture or whatever works best next.

Anyway, good luck with using only collections and keywords. Just remember, collections also require some hierarchical organization based on how you define those collections. 😉

I worked for a photographer who insisted that I organised her several hundred thousand photo portfolio by description. For example countries > africa > game reserves > name of game reserve. Sounds easy enough until you have an animals > giraffe/lion/elephants etc folder tree and you end up with duplicates.

What I mean to say is that in my experience descriptive folder names lead to thousands of duplicates and headaches, and become a nightmare to backup.

Now I am organising another photographers portfolio (and my own) with the filename format of “yyyy.mm.dd – shoot description”, I am having no problems whatsoever.
I work through each set of photos by shoot. I flag my best shots, keyword the set as a whole and then individually if needed. At the moment I prefer to 4 or 5 star my top photos.

To me the dates themselves aren’t important, that’s just a way to keep the files sitting nicely on my harddrive and to keep my portfolio duplicate free.

If I want to find my my best shark from south africa I will search the entire catalogue for the keyword “shark” and “south africa” and find the one with the best star rating, maybe also checking metadata for camera model and megapixels if needed.

I personally only use collections to organise photo requests so I can collect and review a group of photos together before export, or if I am finding photos to submit to image libraries.

Each to their own.

I am just beginning to organize and I just discovered that the Exif “creation date” and “modified date” are all wrong for most of my photos. This is because I made copies over the years. So, now I cannot rely on this Exif data to be dependable for sorting by year. This leads me to feel the only way around this is to create folders by date in future.

Whatever your opinion is on it, don’t give him crap for it! Personally I organize my photos by year->month and then i name my files yyyymmdd_nnn. But after reading this I realize that organizing it by the way he says might not be that bad of an idea! I think I might try it! However one question: What if I take landscape pictures on my travel (vacation) to australia for exampel? Do I put that in travel because it was taken at a travel, or do i put it landscapes because it’s a landscape photo?

I do the opposite of about everything suggested.

IMO the reasons for storing by date or in any other way are different. Photography is about memory, and we remember things, people and places from the past when we find them in our timeline. If you use your photos professionally time may be relevant to a subject alone, but not to your intent to produce those images. Political facts for instance are important for a journalist, but landscaping maybe not that much. Since LR has already the dates on the files you can easily retrieve whatever date you want even when the file is not organized that way. I totally see and agree with Matt’s point.

I understand there has been a lot of debate about this article.
I too use the date method and you are correct, there is no chance in hell that I could find anything using that method. I do how ever use the date method for backing up as it keeps the folder structure in a logical order, which is vital – always year/month/day. I then backup using blu ray and a second hardrive.
I then organise my photos using keywords for batches of images eg family or client name and also giving final/chosen images a colour label. That way you can very quickly find the images I need.
If you automatically write changes to XMP and use DNG then you can open the images in other software and it will keep all the metadata you have entered.

Organizing by date is wrong? There is no wrong, there is no right, there is only different.

I started organizing by date in 1975, when everything was shot on film, and the only thing the word “computer” conjured up was an image of a room the size of a basketball court full of vacuum tubes.

I needed a way for clients (yes, clients) to tell me which frames they wanted printed, either original prints or reprints. The easiest way was with numbers. There were too many repeat customers and too many people/companies with similar names to use any other method. Because there were no personal computers, everything was entered by had in a 3 ring binder. Soon there were several binders.

By using a numbering system based on date, I could reference each and every frame, and find a specific negative or transparency very easily. And it worked very, very well.

I never shot stock. I suppose for someone who was shooting transparencies for stock, a system that worked off keywords might be better, but even then, how do you find a specific photo of a fire hydrant? Look up the key word “fire hydrant,” and there are the frame numbers for all the fire hydrants I’ve ever shot. All 20000 of them. But they still have frame numbers.

Now it’s a matter of habit. What worked then, works now. But if I do want to see all of the photos I’ve shot of black bears, I go to the LR5 collection “Bears, Black”, and there they all are. No duplicate file names, just a bunch of black bears, arranged in whatever order I want (collections are usually ranked by star rating).

Interestingly, whenever I find someone who is new to all this, and looking for a way to organize their growing stash of photos, 99% gravitate to a system based on dates. The then choose to either use LR5’s collections or keywords do the sorting.

I agree except those are keywords for me, not folder name choices. I wrestled with this problem a long time ago, trying both approaches. I finally settled on dates (for folder organization) AND full key wording as the solution. That way months later I don’t have to remember which folder to look in (usually because I can’t..CRS has set in

Since I file by date, with extensive keywords and I use Collections, it’s easy: import with overall keywords (e.g., the event, location, etc.), define my picks and create a collection. This collection is not date-based, BTW. I might name it “Caribbean Photoshop Cruise” for the photos from all the dates of that cruise, including at-sea days, at-shore days, and all excursions across the entire cruise. Then I’d keyword photos appropriately, such as “Aruba”, “Curaçao”, “Photowalk”, “Sunset”, “Boats”, etc. This works for me and allows me to find images by keyword or date (if I can remember it, which I usually can’t!). Since this was a vacation, the photos from this cruise were in a collection in the Collection Set “Vacations”.

I have 36,142 images going back to 2000 (13 years) – all loaded into folders by year and then by day. For organization, I apply keywords and use collections extensively.

Technically, the issue being raised is metadata. The problem is coming up with a metadata scheme that fits your needs and whose naming semantics you understand. I’m a data warehouse architect by profession. I’ve lived metadata and naming semantics every day for the last 20 years. It is and always has been a major issue for all database jocks.

The underlying problem with defining metadata is that you do NOT understand your overall metadata needs until after you’ve lived with the data for a while. BUT… You need to define your metadata needs to organize your data BEFORE you understand those needs.

For example, you create a folder for “Grandson’s First Birthday”. Great! Then his second birthday rolls around and then you create “Grandson’s Second Birthday”. Hmmm… Starting to get a bit messy. By his fourth birthday, you have multiple folders. And then…

Grandson #2 comes along. Hmmm… Now your metadata (implied by the folder name) is messed up. So… Do you rename the folders to be “Grandson’s Birthdays”? Maybe “Grandsons”? What happens if a Granddaughter pops out?

As you live your life, your needs, ideas, and constraints change, and then your needs for better metadata gets more and more complex. But with context naming structure (like “Vacation to Hawaii”) you’re stuck with that.

After using Lightroom since 2008 (V1.0) and Photoshop for several years before that, I went through several iterations of metadata, including organizing by context. I found that organizing by date (import does that automatically) and then applying keywords and using collections provided an easy-to-maintain, flexible metadata structure that doesn’t require a lot of maintenance. And, most importantly, virtually all maintenance is done within Lightroom.

FYI… Within the last year, I’ve started using Lightroom to manage my videos. All photos and videos are imported and organized using Lightroom into dated folders. Since photos and videos are used across multiple video projects, it’s relatively easy to track them down.

Each to his own, but I’ve found that date organization is the only long-term metadata solution that doesn’t require a lot of maintenance.

Regards,

Dan.

Wow! After hearing about this while watching a replay of The Grid this week, I had to stop in here and check out all of the comments. People seem to love their dates.

I’m afraid I’ve never used dates to name folders or projects, though. As you say, that information is already in the metadata, so why recreate it? The information that isn’t in the metadata is what describes the photo.

I have top level areas for Travel, Portraits, Events and other things. If I want to see my photos of Zion National Park, they’re under Travel. If I want to see my portraits of someone, they’re in a folder under Portraits with the name of the subject. It works very well and it’s easy to find. Naturally, all of these folders are under one directory folder called Photos.

One person commenting above mentioned tracking photos of a child. I still don’t see why dates make that easier. I’d have a folder for Family and use a keyword to tag images with the child (since there are likely photos with multiple family members). Then it’s easy to create a Smart Collection to show your precious child and sort the images by date.

I guess there are many ways to skin a cat, but I prefer simplicity. Dated folder names can grow very unwieldy because it keeps changing. Having a folder named Family is simple – one place for the people you treasure the most.

The post looks like solid advice to me. Folks, sometimes you may want to take a step back and try a different idea for a test. Just give it a shot. You may like it or you may double-down on your old strategy. At least try to have an open mind. You may like it.

I’ve been using a date-based system for filing my physical film-based images since about 1971. When I transitioned to digital, I continued using the same system although the images are now stored on disks instead of in filing cabinets. When I import images into LR I use presets to define the folder and file names which are date-based. The folder name has a descriptive tag appended, for example ‘ArchesNP’ or ‘Smith-Jones Wedding’, so I can see at a glance what images are in it.

It is important to distinguish that is the physical location of the images and I don’t need LR to find them. I also use keywords and collections to create a logical organization of the images. The logical organization could be by subject or by customer name or by stock agency placement or anything else I might dream up.

I been using Lightroom for a few years and find like you the easiest way is to use just descriptive folder names and I store all my images in there and all the ones I process and export to tiffs and jpegs also go in same folder then I use the filter menu to find them it’s simple. It’s as easy or as complicated as you want to make it.

I’m another Date sorter in my filing, year and month. Whenever I’ve thought about sorting more by categories, but I’ve always been stumped by what to do with those images that don’t fit in to those neat little boxes like big trips and events do. General categories like landscape, people and such don’t catch all of this either. So I’ve stuck with the Date system since I tend to remember when much of this stuff happened anyway. Can anyone suggest a way to file these “slip through the cracks” images?

Like many others, I use and sort by keywords in Lightroom. I do also love to use collections to sort. It’s actually where I tend to collect the “Events” into one place.

Hey Matt, I may not agree with every assumption in the post for my own personal use, but I DO appreciate your opening the forum to this discussion! Personally, I love photography because of my creative, right brain side, but I admit I sometimes second guess my organizational processes (left brain) and like to feel that I have an efficient system. So it’s great to hear other’s solutions to compare, contrast, and learn.

RE:#4 – I never used Collections as a purely organizational tool; I only really used them when creating a set of images to be shared or published. Now that we have great Publishing tools in LR, I almost never use old-school Collections at all. Published Albums have completely taken their place.

Since I shoot RAW, I don’t share any of those files with anyone. To share images, I simply export processed files to JPEGs and post them on the web or email/message individual images. That way people only need access to my site with any device–computer, tablet, phone, etc.–and don’t need LR. I share photos for every volleyball match and many of my “customers” view the images over smart phones. My approach works for them and my workflow supports that approach. YMMV!

Good tips. I agree with all–but “strongly” disagree with #3.

I am currently going through 1600 photos I took over the weekend at a Pet Expo event. I did pet portraitures there. If I were to only rely on flags, I’d be very limited on how I could sort them.

I use flags for choosing the photos when first going through the lot. After flagging the ones that are candidates for post-processing, I then sort by flagged items and inspect closer for clarity, exposure and composition. I then rate them. Five stars are tack sharp and at the top of the heap for immediate work. The others are for whatever reasons, still usable, but not in the first round of editing. Or, they may be items that I will get a specific area to fix a five star photo with. To not be able to sort flagged photos because you want to keep it simple by not using ratings is very, very limiting.

Finally, labels. This again is incredibly useful to me. I use color to visually show me what status each photo is currently in. No color means they have not been adjusted yet. Yellow means that a RAW file has been modified with Development adjustments already and is ready to port out to Photoshop for further editing. Red means that Development has begun, but is still in progress. Green means that either a RAW file or PSD file has been completely post-processed and is in “final” stage, or ready for “prime time!”

I understand your wanting to keep things simple, but c’mon man! I think we are all smart enough to logically use the available tools that Adobe has given us for sorting our files. You and Kelby are the creme de la creme of photo tutors. This is why it is so shocking to me that you are taking this approach. Please forward this comment to him and try to “see the light” using Lightroom sorting features.

Like some others, I organize by date–mostly. Occasionally–OK, rarely–I create a folder by subject. However, I use the Collections and Collection Sets capabilities to the utmost SFAIK. My initial pass through photos determines picks, not picks, and rejects. A second pass revises those. The picks get “moved” into a collection. I convert the not picks to rejects and delete them from the disk. Within the picks I may select a few of the absolute best photos and make them green. If I’m sorting volleyball pictures, I may also add star ratings so that when I create senior pictures for players I can filter the best of the best without looking at 400+ pictures of each player after 4 years. I also keyword the photos in the collections, giving me the ability to find pictures from any year for a specific subject such as an individual volleyball player, location, etc. Keywords are critical for my use of LR. Matt doesn’t talk about file names, but I use names that are meaningful, such as GMUvsJMU20130925-007. That naming gives me the 2 schools and the date of the volleyball match and I establish that name at import along with any import presets (e.g., that adjust color temperature, Clarity, Vibrance, initial sharpening, etc.) to minimize editing and thus speed image processing. I’ve developed this approach since 2007 to handle 250 – 400+ volleyball match photos and it works for me. Otherwise, I agree with Matt’s comments for most photographers.

I happen to organize by date. I have adopted George Jardine’s method of organizing my Library. To me it makes sense and is pretty straight forward.
George is a great LR teacher and he explains his workflow and logic in full detail in his Library Video Series. Check out his website at
www dot mulita dot com

Holy moly #2 recommendation is seriously messed up.
You need to rename your files by date and time gwb_yymmdd_040519.dng. Then store all files together in one year folder . dng_2013. Then you have no duplicates. And backups are easy. With 250,000 photos, I’ve never regretted this.