> On Nov 11, 2015, at 2:57 PM, Bob W-PDML <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 11 Nov 2015, at 12:50, Malcolm Smith <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: >> >>> Sorry if this doesn't answer your questions directly. Unraveling a >>> slightly mucked up Lightroom catalog database takes time and >>> persistence. You need to look at a lot of things, one at a time, to >>> determine what the state of a particular catalog is and what files it >>> is looking at. Always look from catalog to file system, and then the >>> other way, to determine issues that need to be fixed. >> >> It's so important to get Lightroom to set the catalogue database right from >> the start. I thought I understood that, and I also thought that at least the >> images I had from DSLRs were in a logical order. >> >> [...] >> >> For someone organised, starting with Lightroom should be a big help, but if >> you don't know what it is you want until you start, you have to live with >> and correct the errors that you make! > > My view, which I implemented from v0.n beta of LR because it is a sound > general principle, is that you should not confuse the physical organisation > (i.e. on the disk) and the logical organisation, in the catalogue. Therefore > I have a completely flat unstructured set of photographs on disk, in one > folder (but see below), and I use LR to catalogue it. That's the point of a > catalogue - to make multiple independent groups independently of the physical > organisation, so that they are easy to find and to view in different ways. > Folder structures on disk are a 2nd-rate attempt to do something similar - > you don't really need two ways to do it. Occam's law applies. > > However, my installation of LR itself does create subfolders on the disk > whose name is based on the file date, but I suspect I set it up this way > while I was drunk, or perhaps it was the default setting, when I first got > LR. It's unnecessary, but quieta non movere trumps Occam.
Listening to Malcolm and Bob, I realized that in fact I do have an organized catalog, which I arrived at with the help of folks here, after I’d acquired Lightroom but before I started using. It is exactly what Bob described. Lightroom assigns images to date-based folders when they are imported. I always add a short descriptive phrase after the date so that later I have a rough sense of what’s in each folder just by looking at the name. As Bob points out this results in an identical structuring of image files in the file system outside Lightroom. I was intrigued by Bob’s comment that the point of the catalogue is "to make multiple independent groups independently of the physical organisation, so that they are easy to find and to view in different ways.” My first reaction was to wonder what else he was talking about. Then it occurred to me that there are a couple other things I do that might qualify: I make q quick pass through the folder, flagging images not worth saving. Then I make a more careful pass, assigning a one-star rating to images I want to work with and use that to create a collection of those images. I then do my editing from within the collection. In the process anywhere from a few to several images get deleted from the collection. I have yet to find tagging helpful. At some point I may do so. If I do, I feel certain the tagging system will evolve organically, over time, in the process of tagging. I can’t imagine developing one in the abstract, in advance of using it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Weir Decatur, GA USA [email protected] "Our world is a human world." - Hilary Putnam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
