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Organization of Photos in Light Room?

BevG

BevG

If I can't remember it, it didn't happen
Joined
Dec 26, 2015
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I currently use Forever's Historian software to store all of my jpg photos. I have over 44,000 in there. I have about 100+ face tags and maybe 100+ other tags (i.e. Christmas, Girl Scouts, etc.). I am thinking about exporting them and loading them up into Light Room instead. When I export them, it will write the tags, comments, dates, rating, and camera metadata to the file.

So how do I organize them in LR? Do you use Collections or Sets? What about keywords? I do plan to put the photos in folders by year and month.

Do you use the facial recognition feature of LR? Since my face tags will import as keywords automatically can I some how tell LR they are a "face tag" instead?

I did export a small database of about 9,400+ pictures but I am going to need a good plan before I tackle the big one. I can export in groups where I define those groups, i.e. I can dump all the Christmas photos for all years and then import them into LR and have it put them in a set or collection or something.

And lastly, here is the kind of searches I want to do in LR (other than date searches). Show me all the photos across all years with tags like "James", "Christmas", "Orlando-Epcot" without me having to know which year to look in. I'm okay searching for just 1 tag at a time.
 
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BevG said:
I currently use Forever's Historian software to store all of my jpg photos. I have over 44,000 in there. I have about 100+ face tags and maybe 100+ other tags (i.e. Christmas, Girl Scouts, etc.). I am thinking about exporting them and loading them up into Light Room instead. When I export them, it will write the tags, comments, dates, rating, and camera metadata to the file.

So how do I organize them in LR? Do you use Collections or Sets? What about keywords? I do plan to put the photos in folders by year and month.

Do you use the facial recognition feature of LR? Since my face tags will import as keywords automatically can I some how tell LR they are a "face tag" instead?

I did export a small database of about 9,400+ pictures but I am going to need a good plan before I tackle the big one. I can export in groups where I define those groups, i.e. I can dump all the Christmas photos for all years and then import them into LR and have it put them in a set or collection or something.

And lastly, here is the kind of searches I want to do in LR (other than date searches). Show me all the photos across all years with tags like "James", "Christmas", "Orlando-Epcot" without me having to know which year to look in. I'm okay searching for just 1 tag at a time.
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Here you go Bev.. Cheryl @gonewiththewind has done several LR videos that should help you :)
https://the-lilypad.com/forum/threads/lightroom-from-workflow-to-wow-videos.44963/
 
I was too intimidated/overwhelmed to use LR so I use Google Photos for the same purpose. You can't tag things but it will group things and photos into tag-like groups (all photos with a cake come up as "birthday" for instance). You can also search by person tag (which you can add a name to once it groups a particular person's photos together) and by date. It also serves as an online back-up for my photos and is free as long as you don't mind them saving your files as smaller than full-resolution (but still big enough to print).

It's not fool-proof and not as nice as being able to fuss with it in LR but it's a whole lot faster & easier and works well enough for me.
 
Thanks @cfile. I re-watched the videos. Cheryl has some good ideas, however my older version of LR is more limited in features. I think I am going to wait until I can move up to the Creative Cloud version of LR and PS, maybe later this year?
 
I've used collections a little bit. Mostly for projects, like Project 365. I love the way "smart collections" automate the process. You set rules and when a photo fits those rules, it automatically gets copied into the collection. For example, I have a smart collection for my 2019 Project 52 photos that follows two rules: 1. The photo was made this year, and 2. The photo has the keyword "2019project52."

But I don't actually tag a lot. Instead, I write titles and captions for every photo. It feels easier and more natural to me. And I have LR set to automatically save all the metadata to photos. So when I search my photo files, words I've used in titles and captions will yield results.

The other big organizational use of LR for me is uploading my photos to Smugmug, which, along with Backblaze, is one of my backup methods. Every time I process photos, the last step is uploading them all to Smugmug via the Lightroom Smugmug plug-in.
 
BevG said:
Thanks @cfile. I re-watched the videos. Cheryl has some good ideas, however my older version of LR is more limited in features. I think I am going to wait until I can move up to the Creative Cloud version of LR and PS, maybe later this year?
Click to expand...

@BevG You know I'll be happy to answer any questions or do a scrapping session with you! That way you can go ahead and get started in your current version of Lightroom and then transfer your catalog when you go to LRCC. I used LR before I switched to CC and there weren't a ton of differences that I remember from switching over, but that was a long time ago and I have, you know, old brain most of the time . . . but I think that most of the organizational aspects, keywords, filters, etc., were all features in previous versions.
 
Definitely import in sections. It's the only way I've found to avoid the import quitting when your computer may go to sleep automatically...if you do that. It also takes a lot of memory I've found even when I had my former iMac filled to the brim with memory.

I am just happy keeping my photos arranged by year and then week, mainly because I do Project Life. Older photos are mostly by year and then I sometimes tag them by groups of short older trips e.g Phoenix & CA Family. My newer imports often get photo recognition if I'm not in a hurry. (guess how often that happens....) I sometimes take time to go back over older years and do a state/country, person tag. I used to try to consider Throw Back Thursday a day to do an hour or so of that. But it doesn't always happen. At least I do have a good tagging system in place from doing this over about 4 -5 years.

I had had great plans for a photo book of my grandson when he turned 21 but that never happened because a lot of his older images were ones that had to be scanned first. It overwhelmed me. Scanned photos are the hardest for me to organize because I do them randomly from old, and older albums.
 
I have a "killer" set of organization and tags on my 49,000 photos right now. I don't want to lose that. Historian uses virtual folders and tags that allows the user to create an hierarchy of nesting (or grouping) of photos besides date order. It also shows you the organization structure, similar to how Collections look in LR. However, it uses tags (what LR calls keywords) that get embedded in the photos to track them. You can put as many as you want on a photo. It uses a database to match up which tags go in which folders (i.e. that "Christmas" goes in "Events", while "Food" goes in "50th Anniversary", which is a subfolder of "Events" but "Food" also goes in "Inside", which is a subfolder of "House"). Obviously I have some renaming to do to remove duplicates like this because LR will not know those 2 foods are different keywords. One is food pictures from my in-laws 50th anniversary party while the other is random pictures of food - exciting things like the chicken nugget shaped like a duck.

So while I can dump out all those tags with the photos, I can't organize them like I want in my version of LR. I can't even see my full list of keywords in LR unless I export it to a text file. That is not going to work. I already found out that moving things around (granted I did it outside of LR) wrecks the collections, i.e. it "lost" the photos. When I watch Cheryl's video, I see that LR CC lets you create those groupings and structures for keywords. I like that. My current version only lets you put 9 keywords in a group - that is a problem with the 100+ people tags I already have.

Anyway thanks for "listening". It helps to write it out here. If I get it figured out I will have to write a "How To" for other Historian users. :)

p.s. Remember that database that matches up the folders and tags? Well it has gotten corrupt on me 3 times now. I had to manually rebuild parts of it. The pictures still had the tags but the software lost track of the photos.
 
It sounds like I'm missing some great organizational tips, I'll have to check out Cheryl's suggestions. Right now, mine just mirrors/syncs to the structure on my computer - super basic.
 
Reporting back - oh my.... I made a list of my current tags and their hierarchy = 276 of them, plus another 100 face tags (I didn't count these yet).

So like @michelepixels said, I noticed that I often created different tags within a batch of photos for a specific reason, but now that those photos are scrapped I don't really need to keep them grouped like that. I think her idea of using collections for temporary groupings is great! I also like her idea of using the title and caption. So for example, rather than have a tag for every place we went on a school field trip, I will use a keyword of School and then put the name of the place in the caption field.

Ditto with what @gonewiththewind does, I don't need a tag that says "George & Tina's wedding" and another that says "Anne & Matt's wedding", I just need a keyword called "Wedding". The face tags will tell me who these people are or I can put it in the caption field.

And with that I got it down to 32 keywords and all the Face Tags.
 
SeattleSheri said:
It sounds like I'm missing some great organizational tips, I'll have to check out Cheryl's suggestions. Right now, mine just mirrors/syncs to the structure on my computer - super basic.
Click to expand...

The organization really helps when you need to find a photo to go with a certain kit (like if you are a CT member), but it also has helped when I needed photos for a birthday slideshow or album, or a celebration of life service, etc.
 
Which version of Lightroom are you using?
For people, I do mine differently than Cheryl. It's almost generational in the concept.
(And I realized as I was explaining this, my one brother is set up wrong!)
So, each grandparent has a top tier. Then, my dad has a tier and so does my husbands family. "Growing up family" as I call them. My family (husband, me, kid, pets) has our own tier. Then, as you can see below, each of the siblings has their family attached to them. My aunts and uncles are nested similarly - blood aunt/uncle, their spouse and kids. Then each kid has their family attached through them. Kinda like those generational charts.
This works for me and helps me quickly narrow down who I'm looking for.
Capture.jpg
 
@bestcee - Are those Keywords or file folders? My version of LR can not nest keywords and finding a list of all your keywords in not really possible (other than let you print out a text file of them all). I do like the generational structure as that is useful for helping someone else in the family see the relationships.

Most of my photos have only 1 tag (keyword) other than facial tags, so I am going to dump them into file folders based on that tag, i.e. Christmas, Valentines, Orlando, etc. Since I can nest file folders, this will let me duplicate the keyword structure I already have.
 
@BevG Keywords. My photo file folders are literally years.
2016
2017
2018 (nested with 2018 Dropbox)
etc....
 
@BevG I have continued thinking about this and you should have a keyword list and hierarchies in Lightroom. I believe they've been there since at least 2011, if not before . When you're looking at the Library in Lightroom, over to the right, you should have Quick Develop, Keywording, Keyword List, Metadata, and Comments. If you don't see all of those options, hover over one of them and right click. You'll be able to select Keyword List if it's not showing.

Also, to be able to see the nested keywords in the Keywording panel, change from Enter Keywords to Keywords and Containing Keywords and then you should be able to see your nested keywords.

Can you check that and let me know if you see the nested keywords?

And I don't know why I want this to work for you so badly. LOL
 
Okay here is what I see - only these 9 random keywords. The pop-up is what I see when I click the Keyword Set. I can create my own sets but I can only put 9 keywords in a set. I probably have 200 or more. I don't know how many sets I can have, but looking at this pop-up screen I suspect it is limited. The other bummer is that there is no way to see the complete list of keywords within the software. I can only dump the list to a text file. I have version 5.7 from 2013.
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And if I change the Enter Keyword choice, I see this pop-up. Picking the second choice does not bring up anything. It just shows me what keywords there are for this picture.
capture.jpg
 
So I think I am going to go with something like this for the file folder structure. I can easily dump the photos out of my existing system into this file folder structure. This way all the dates for a topic will be together. When I go looking for a photo, I tend to do it by topic or person rather than by date. Besides I can always filter by date.
capture.jpg
 
@BevG

You're still not activating your Keyword List, where you will see the nested keywords.

Hover over Quick Develop, Keywording, Metadata, or Comments. RIGHT CLICK on any one of them and you'll get a fly out menu that looks like this:

Untitled-1.jpg


That will give you the keyword list with all the nested keywords!
 
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