How you can use Lightroom as an assistant to organize your photos?
Lightroom has become a very essential part of the workflow process for many photographers, including myself. I cannot imagine managing my photo catalog without Lightroom and I use it every day for my photography needs. In fact, 95-98% of my post-processing work is done in Lightroom and I only occasionally use Photoshop for advanced photo editing / retouching, which not only simplifies my workflow, but also decreases the amount of time I spend on post-processing. Over the past few years of using Lightroom extensively, I have come up with efficient ways to store, organize and access photos on my computer, so I wanted to share a few tips with our readers on how I do it for both personal and professional work. As matter of fact I use Lightroom as my assistant and secretary on a daily basis and am very happy with its performance! Read on for how you can utilize this wonderful software and simplify the organization of your photos with Lightroom.
Tip 1
Choose where to store the images
When using Lightroom, you can assign a drive (external, internal or network drive) to store your photos. Lightroom will remember this location until you change it again. It is very important to choose the storage properly.
Tip 2
Move or delete the photos in Lightroom
It is very important that you use Lightroom for moving or deleting the images. If you move a file or photo directly from the storage device without using Lightroom, then Lightroom cannot find that image anymore. This is a very important point when using Lightroom organizing power.
Tip 3
Creating a new Folder or Subfolder
One of the significant features of Lightroom is the capability of creating a new folder or subfolder in the storage device. I use this feature quite often, but the most important step is moving the files inside Lightroom. It means that I create a folder in Lightroom and move the pictures into the folder and Lightroom will update the database automatically without copying or duplicating the pictures.
Tip 4
To organize by date or not
By default Lightroom creates and organizes the pictures by date. It can be useful but most people don’t remember things by date. When looking back at a folder named 2009-06-08, you really have no idea what’s in that folder. Sure, it signifies that the photos were taken on June 08, 2009, but if you’re like most people you won’t remember what happened that day. This is why I create new folders in Lightroom with a descriptive name and move certain photos to these folders. Here is an example.
In future articles I will show you how to search for your photos by date regardless of which folder they are located in.
That is all for now. Stay tuned for more tips on Lightroom’s Organizing Power coming soon! Check our UPCOMING CLASSES for new Lightroom Bootcamp starting September 17. This four part workshop series covers many of Lightroom’s Hidden Gems.
Ted and the Omnilargess Team