> On Sep 22, 2014, at 2:04 PM, Zos Xavius <zosxav...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So what do you do when your LR catalog hits over 100k? You just keep
> adding? I'm at the point where I want to just delete everything and
> pare it all down to just portfolio worthy stuff. I have months worth
> of shots to sort and edit and quite frankly I'm really not looking
> forward to sorting through 100,000 pictures either. Some flagged, some
> not. It seems like whenever I start purging I delete something I
> wanted by accident, so I've been really reluctant to delete things but
> the lack of hard drive space is cramping my style right now hard.
> Yeah, I could just buy another drive, but for every drive I buy, I
> have to buy a 2nd so I at the very least have some redundancy.
Just keep adding. Well, not quite.
I've written about it before. I maintain a two-catalog system for most of my
work. First catalog contains all my "work in progress" which generally
stretches back until 2006 now. There are about 88000 image files in that
catalog at present, organized into a year and day hierarchy.
Second catalog is a "completed work" catalog. This contains all the photos I've
abandoned ... eh, completed. It's also organized by year, but the years are
organized by project, not time. There are about 50,000 images in that one.
Beyond those two, I have a compendium catalog that I suck both of the other two
catalogs into and has all the additional images that come from years before
2006. That allows me to browse through everything when I'm scanning for
something interesting or searching for locations, keywords, etc. At present,
there are 375,000 files in that one.
In addition to the above, when I'm working on a particular project, I make
small catalogs once I've established all the photos that a project will
include. I recently created another one of these working on a client order. It
enables me to focus on that work, specifically and without distraction. Once
the project is done, I merge the 'sub-catalog' back into the completed work
catalog.
My workflow works like this.
- When I get back from a session, whether it's 10 or 1000 exposures, I import
them all and set basic keyword and location information.
- I step through them all quickly using the Pick and Garbage flags - no more
than a second looking at each image.
- Then I filter for just the garbage, flip through it, and delete it.
- Then I filter for the un-picked images to see if I missed any that might be
picks the same way I did the first pass.
- Once I've finished the second pass, I filter by picks and put them all into a
collection which is named "YYYYMMDD-{subject}". That way the collections stack
up in date order. For an average session, the collection usually has 5 to 20
images in it at that point.
- I unset all the pick flags and walk through all the photos slowly now, remove
what I now feel doesn't belong in the "good stuff," and start processing in the
order I think they're interesting.
Usually by the time I've processed five to ten in any given collection, I've
gotten through most of the ones I really like. If I then wait three to six
months and look at the collection again, sometimes another couple of images
jump out at me and I process them.
I use the star ratings this way:
* means "I've done basic adjustments on it." .. the image is interesting enough
to do that.
** means "I like this, I might post it." .. I write these to the completed
archive.
*** meens "Yeah, this one made it." .. a rendering was put on my iPad and on
the web.
Four and five stars I reserve for project work on virtual copies:
**** hot candidate for the project
***** included and finished in the project
Any file that gets demoted to under *** is removed from the project.
Once the project is done and the files written out to the completed work
archive, I clear all the star ratings.
Color labels I use for a lot of different things and they're always temporary.
For instance, I might use colors to group a panorama, or a set of sequences, or
whatever. No matter how I use them, I clear them after the use is over.
There are countless ways to organize and use the tools in Lightroom. This works
for me.
Godfrey
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