Staying Organized: Image Files

I LOVE organization, seriously love it. Anyone remember that show Clean Sweep on TLC? I wanted Peter Walsh's job of a professional organizer - to turn mass chaos into beautiful organized spaces? Yeah, that sounds like a slice of heaven to me!

So, it only makes sense that, once I started taking more and more photo's I wanted to find an organized way to manage those image files. I used to cull the images, export the originals into an 'name - originals' folder, edit, and then re-export the edited images in a folder with the name of whoever those images were of and keep all the images on my external hard drive.

Yes, it was a bit of work but I didn't know any other way to keep things organized! Thankfully I stumbled upon a blog post by Zach & Jody that revolutionized the way I store images...

Lightroom Catalogs.

This rolls all of those separate steps I was doing into one and not only keeps your images organized - it helps speed up your program!

A very simple and quick summary - really, just go to Zach & Jody's blog because they do a super awesome job explaining.

1)Within Lightroom, go file - new catalog.

2)Name that catalog first with the date the images were taken then with the subject's name: YY-MM-DD-Scott & Kari

3)Save to either your desktop or external hard drive or both. I have 'year' folders on my hard drive that I save everything from that year into.

3)Import ONLY the images from that photo session, Cull, Edit all within Lightroom. The catalog saves the original image as well as all the edits you do so there is no need to pull any of the files out of the program! This also enhances how quickly Lightroom works - no excess of images to bog it down.

4)That's it! Any time you need access to the images you pull up the Lightroom Catalog and everything is there waiting for you! This is also great because since each session has it's own Catalog it is very easy to find the photo's you are looking.



If I didn't make any sense just go over and watch Zach explain it all :)