For those who do date based importation..

[NJHeart2Heart]

I'd like to know who sorts by the following:

Year, then individual Year-Month-Day folders?
2015
. . . . 2015-01-02
. . . . 2015-01-03
. . . . 2015-01-04
2016
. . . . 2016-01-02
. . . . 2016-01-03
. . . . 2016-01-04

Year, then Month folders, then Day folders?
2015
. . . . 01
. . . . . . 01
. . . . . . 02
. . . . . . 03
. . . . 02
. . . . . . 01
. . . . . . 02
. . . . . . 03

or just month folders?

2015
. . . . 01
. . . . 02
. . . . 03
2016
. . . . 01
. . . . 02
. . . . 03

I currently use option 1, but am contemplating on going by faith and moving to a Year, then month only folder system...

 

[Replytoken]

Option 1, but obviously only have day folders for the days that I shoot.

--Ken

 

[wirrah]

I do decade (sort of)/year/month with a fairly redundant nomenclature (.e.g. 2010-2019/2015/2015-12). Years range from 1905 through to now. Still scanning old images... I inherited that setup 20 years ago and it works fine as I rarely take more than 200 photos a day and that's only on a couple of days in the year.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Option 2, but I use the long form, i.e. yyyy/yyyy-mm/yyyy-mm-dd.

I used to use Option 3, then switched to my current system (can't remember why), but probably could switch back to the Option 3 method as I'm not currently shooting very much. When I'm bored I may do that, but there's no pressing need as I rarely access images by folder.

 

[Tony Jay]

The first option should suit most individuals.
Unless one is shooting hundreds of days each year that is!

All that is needed for a folder structure is a simple, stress simple, repeatable and scalable system.
Don't overegg this goose but rather concentrate on metadata capture to allow one to find and group images using the library filter or with smart collections - this is where the money is.

Tony Jay

 

[NJHeart2Heart]

I do decade (sort of)/year/month with a fairly redundant nomenclature (.e.g. 2010-2019/2015/2015-12). Years range from 1905 through to now. Still scanning old images... I inherited that setup 20 years ago and it works fine as I rarely take more than 200 photos a day and that's only on a couple of days in the year.

Thanks Wirrah. Nice to know someone else uses Lightroom for older scanned images as well. I too have over 3500 scans of old family photos. I recently finished scanning prints. Looking at the digital results, at some point I may dive into the negatives and see if I can 1) find the negs for photos I value most highly and 2) Scan the negatives in hopes of getting better digital versions of those images.

 

[tspear]

If you access the images based on meta data, not based on the folder structure.
The only importance of the folder structure is two items:
1. When you run out of disk space and you want to move groups of images to offline or network storage. Some logical group size helps.
2. When you want to find a specific file in the restore process that you mistakenly deleted.

So look at it from that perspective.

Tim

 

[clee01l]

I currently use option3. Before that, I used option 1. I switched because it leaves a smaller foot print in the Folder panel and monthly. I move older images to an EHD. So grouping by month only is convenient for this.

 

[LouieSherwin]

Like Jim i use option 2 but with the long names yyyy/yyyy-mm/yyyy-mm-dd. While it is redundant you can always know for certain where you are in the date timeline by the folder name. If you just use the shortened versions than then the folder names by themselves don't give you that information. It is bit of convenience especially if you are browsing through the filesystem.

-louie

 

[Michael D.]

I import into individual Year-Month-Day folders. So today's photos will be imported into a folder I will create called 2015_12_18. I don't even bother with creating a master year folder as it's very easy to see the year.

Regarding scanned images, I just found some old family photos from 1971 and just started scanning a few and colorized them. I had never done this before and I must admit it's a lot of fun! I haven't decided if I will be adding them to my LR catalog, but if I do, I will follow the same naming conventions.

 

[DGStinner]

I use option 2 and rename my files on import to yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss.ext

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I'm YY/MM. I don't get to shoot enough each month to need to split by day.

 

[wirrah]

Thanks Wirrah. Nice to know someone else uses Lightroom for older scanned images as well. I too have over 3500 scans of old family photos. I recently finished scanning prints. Looking at the digital results, at some point I may dive into the negatives and see if I can 1) find the negs for photos I value most highly and 2) Scan the negatives in hopes of getting better digital versions of those images.

I know this is slightly off topic but... I've found that, often, older black & white prints will give better scan results than the scans from the equivalent medium or large format negatives as well as the advantage of not having to deal with a multitude of scratches and impacted dust. Later fine grain films, however, give excellent negative scans from 35mm.

But you'll need to experiment as I have not got a negative print pair older than 1969. But black & white prints from the 40s & 50s have given exceptional results whereas similar vintage negatives don't compare all that well and are often badly scratched (the storage wasn't the best over the years)! I suspect that the print has had all the work done for us and the negative scans can be brought up to par but it can be a fair bit of work. I scanned a set of first world war navy prints (ship damage) and they produced excellent results without any post processing.

But, as I said, you will need to experiment.

 

[NJHeart2Heart]

I currently use option3. Before that, I used option 1. I switched because it leaves a smaller foot print in the Folder panel and monthly. I move older images to an EHD. So grouping by month only is convenient for this.

Thanks Clee. This is my reason for considering option 3 myself. Just to simplify the look of the folder view when I do need to look at them. I have just current year photos on my hard drive, and the rest on an EHD as well.

 

[rbeamish1]

I am new to lightroom and trying to organize my pictures into some folder structure. I have scanned in photos from the 1940's thru the early 2000's. When I scanned the photos in there was no Lightroom so I set up a naming convention of yyyymmddssss-ss_(state)_city_description. these photo's were scanned as jpg's and then I did my editing in either Photoshop PSElements or the GIMP (I eventually migrated away from GIMP. After editing the files in the photo application I saved the final result in jpg. Would it be best to incorporate both photo application file and the final jpg or just the one of them. I also still have the original jpg images.
Would you advise do a rename of the files as I import the files into Lightroom.
Sorry for the long post, but and advice would be appreciated

thanks
Richard

 

[wirrah]

Richard, this is only a general response... Opinions will differ on this but that's the beauty of the software. It is a very customisable base to work from.

If I have understood correctly you have retained the original scans as they represent a base line you can return to and re-edit as required. Starting from that position, personally I would import both into Lightroom (but that's me). When you revisit an image you would work with the original. You would need to come up with some sort of convention to distinguish the two (you may already have that in the file name?).

As regards the file names. Some of your existing nomenclature can be stored in the Lightroom catalogue (city etc..) and, optionally, written to the image XMP. If you wanted to populate that data then you would need a plugin that can read a file name and then use it to populate the fields - or transcribe by hand. I believe there is a plugin out there but not sure. Someone else may be able to help with that. However there is no real requirement to change the file names.

Your folder structure should be whatever is the best to maintain photos as files on disc. Within Lightroom itself keywords, other metadata and collections are the path to identifying and grouping photos.

 

[sizzlingbadger]

I combine month and day....