For me, subject-based folder organization is a nuisance at best and a major pain at worst. I still have several handfuls of folders from my first Optio, with names like Fall Colors or Ste Marteen. Which would be fine if that fall of 2003 was the only time I ever shot fall colors, or if the spring of 2004 was to be my only visit ever to Ste Marteen. But when I revisit those subjects, do I throw those new images in the folders with the old? To me that doesn’t feel right.
Since those very early days as I became overwhelmed with the proliferation of folders and sub folders, I have switched to a calendar based system. Every year has a folder with twelve subfolders. Period. If all else fails, I can look at the September & October subfolder if I want to find color. The images themselves are named with a date prefix in a format that is compatible with my computer’s way of thinking about dates. So if I ever for some reason needed to look at my images when not in LR,I can just sort my image files by Date and they will be in chronological order. When I import to LR, I always not sometimes not occasionally but always apply broad keywords to the entire set I am importing. Always including the general area/region and often the town name.Time permitting after importing, and it usually does, I will go back through and key word subgroups of images with a bit more precision. I.e., not just Venice, but also Duosodoro. As I work on a set of images, from a trip or a time frame, I create a Collection or two to hold subsets of the images. Sometimes Smart Collections (e.g., all images shot between 9-18-2015 and 10-05-2015 with a rating of 2 Stars or higher), sometimes subject based collections which I load by dragging-dropping selected images. All of this isn’t that much work, even for legacy images freshly imported. With scanned images, I name them according to the date they were taken. Or my best guess to that date. So I have LR in front of me. If I want fall colors, I look at my set of Collections. Nope, haven’t done that one yet. OK, I’ll do a keyword search. Maybe narrow it down by looking for fall colors shots near home and those in Michigan’s U.P. I see I am getting mostly October shots; I’ll check September and November for a few years, just do a quick scroll through to see if there are some groupings of fall colors I didn’t properly keyword because I was paying more attention to some detail rather than to the overall context. If I see some, I quickly keyword them, redo the search. All of this is very quick and easy and requires only a) a general sense of what events occurred when on the calendar, and b) a good but not necessarily compulsive keywording process. stan > On Nov 12, 2015, at 10:07 AM, Eric Weir <eew...@bellsouth.net> wrote: > >> >> On Nov 11, 2015, at 2:57 PM, Bob W-PDML <p...@web-options.com> wrote: >> >> On 11 Nov 2015, at 12:50, Malcolm Smith <rrve...@virginmedia.com> 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 > eew...@bellsouth.net > > "Our world is a human world." > > - Hilary Putnam > > > > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
