Best practice for new HardDrive, fresh installation, unsorted pictures

[august9]

Unfortunately my harddrive broke the other day, without me having taken backups for some six months. Luckily I managed to save most of my pictures, including the "Lightroom"-folder containing the info for the developed pictures.

All pictures are imported to my new iternal harddrive (as it's SSD), and I wish to delete many of the ones I'm not satisfied with, before importing to my Lightroom on the new hard-drive.

I just recently started taking pictures and have had Lightroom for only 2 months. But have about 3000 pictures, each of them 20-60 Mb...(RAW-format).

I'm in a very clean slate on my mac right now, so instead of diving into Lightroom and suddenly messing things up I'd like to get some suggestions on what you would do if you were in my situation?

PS: ANY suggestion appreciated - also other newbie-tips and best-practices

Thanks

 

[clee01l]

First of all LR is an excellent image manager. It does not make much sense to "manage" which images before you put them into your image manager. My advice is to dump them all into LR and use LR's management tools to cull, sort and purge any images that you don't want to keep. Remember LR has better tools for organization than your file system. If you import them into a date based folder scheme (any one of the defaults is fine). You can group images into meaningful collections and add appropriate keywords later as time permits.

 

[Gnits]

I agree with Cletus.

Here are a few tips.

Create a directory which will be the MasterDirectory for your images. Give this directory a name you will recognise and does not conflict with any standard folder name. I use MattsPhotos for mine. In a Windows environment I keep this folder away from standard library folders such as MyDocs or MyPictures.

Within the master folder you need a basic sub folder structure. It is very useful to consider sub-folders per year. Within year have sub-folders based on a project names or based on dates.

Standardise your Lr import settings so that your import process will create an place your images automatically in your desired folder structure. Test this out.

Do not use folder names to categorise images (eg holidays, animals, events, people, etc.). This is doomed to failure from the start. Categories will always change and you may wish to put images into multiple categories. Use the tools withing Lr to apply categories (eg flags, keywords, metadata).

The reason for having a single Master Folder at the top of the directory tree is that it makes it very easy to manage such tasks as backups, upgrading to new disks at some time in the future, etc.

Make a conscious decision where you want to place your catalog and where you want to keep backups of your catalog.

The Lr option to backup your catalog will not backup your images and this feature is not a replacement for a proper system level backup of your Mac.

 

[august9]

Thanks a lot for your replies!

I've done what you suggested. it seems Lightroom is having problems finding my pictures after moving them, buy I did find a solution to that.

Regarding import-settings: I'm starting a blog about my father who has Alzheimers. Publish pictures and write some comments to the pictures etc, some longer posts etc. I find that when I edit pictures in Lightroom I need to make very different changes to pictures in different situations. I want touse a preset that can work for all situations, and just edit that one. But it seems the "vibe" of the pictures will be quite different in different situations, even with the same preset and just editing that preset.

I know I can't rely on one preset to do the job for me, but I do want some kind of consistency in all pictures. Obviously most pictures will be of my dad and his surroundings, some people he meets on his way etc. Anyway - since you gave such thorough advice, maybe you have some advice for this blog as well? I don't want to overcomplicate things, but now I've already edited many pictures twice and see that I do need more consistency. I don't want to publish more posts before I have some good workflow. The a few posts I have published includes some really bad pictures and are of completely different vibes. The pictures in the "frame" of the blog has a different vibe too (and those pictures was meant to be edited more before using them).

Any suggestions ?

I'm especially thinking of some kind of preset-theme that will work for many different kinds of situations (inside/outside, distance/close up, sunny/rainy etc). The blog isn't up and running yet, need a lot of edits (it should be possible to view but I can't see it publicly now for some reason). This is the address: alzheimerpappa.no

 

[august9]

Thanks a lot for your replies!

I've done what you suggested. it seems Lightroom is having problems finding my pictures after moving them, buy I did find a solution to that.

Regarding import-settings: I'm starting a blog about my father who has Alzheimers. Publish pictures and write some comments to the pictures etc, some longer posts etc. I find that when I edit pictures in Lightroom I need to make very different changes to pictures in different situations. I want touse a preset that can work for all situations, and just edit that one. But it seems the "vibe" of the pictures will be quite different in different situations, even with the same preset and just editing that preset.

I know I can't rely on one preset to do the job for me, but I do want some kind of consistency in all pictures. Obviously most pictures will be of my dad and his surroundings, some people he meets on his way etc. Anyway - since you gave such thorough advice, maybe you have some advice for this blog as well? I don't want to overcomplicate things, but now I've already edited many pictures twice and see that I do need more consistency. I don't want to publish more posts before I have some good workflow. The a few posts I have published includes some really bad pictures and are of completely different vibes. The pictures in the "frame" of the blog has a different vibe too (and those pictures was meant to be edited more before using them).

Any suggestions ?

I'm especially thinking of some kind of preset-theme that will work for many different kinds of situations (inside/outside, distance/close up, sunny/rainy etc). The blog isn't up and running yet, need a lot of edits (it should be possible to view but I can't see it publicly now for some reason). This is the address: alzheimerpappa.no

I started a new thread on this topic - that's probably better. Tanks again for your excellent advice