Lightroom Organization: My 3 Point System

With the demise of Aperture, most of us are using Lightroom to organize our photos. In Episode 8 of The Photo Flunky Show, we'll talk about some classic mistakes people make in Lightroom organization and what you should do, instead.

I share my three point system for Lightroom organization to keep things simple and effective.

In the links section below, you can find my Keyword hierarchy to use as an example for your own Lightroom organization.

Related Links

Keyword List

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Transcript

 

PHOTO FLUNKY:  Episode 8

 

I’m your host, William Beem. Welcome to the Photo Flunky Show, Episode number eight.

 

Today’s topic:  Lightroom Organization – You’re Doing It Wrong!

 

Thanks for joining the Photo Flunky Show.  You can find us at photoflunky.com.  Also now available on iTunes and Stitcher Radio.  There are links at photoflunky.com.  Show notes are available at williambeem.com/episode8.

 

Today, let’s talk about Lightroom organization, and there are really two main things that you want from organizing your photos in Lightroom.  This is not going to delve into any of the post processing, book creation maps or any of that stuff.  All this is about today is organization and all you really want, the benefits from organization, is to save time and find the photos that you want when you want them.  It sounds simple.  It’s what everybody needs when you’re busy working on something.  You don’t want to have to fight your organization system; you want it to work for you.

 

So let’s start off with some of the classic organization mistakes that people make with Lightroom.

 

Keep in mind that Lightroom was designed to organize your photos. I know that sounds like a redundant concept to talk about, but sometimes there are people who just don’t trust Lightroom.  They don’t want to let it do what it was designed to do and they try to override it with their own techniques and force that upon Lightroom and honestly, that’s usually what gets them into a lot of trouble.  Lightroom knows how to extract data from your image files.  You don’t need to duplicate the effort.

 

Here are some of the mistakes that people make.

* They create elaborate folder structures. You don’t need a big, elaborate folder structure.

 

* They use dates in the file name or folder.