New to LR - Question about starting off...

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ctmtbr

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I bought a new Canon Rebel XSI and want to start off right with LR. Right now I am uploading my photos from the camera's 8GB card to my main computer hard drive and put them in the "my pictures" folder. Within that folder, are many more folders all organized by date. Everything is backed up on an external usb 2.' 5''gb solid state drive.

Now in LR, I have read that's it's best to just use one catalog, and not name everything by date, but to use the keyword/metatag schema.

Does that sound right? I've read so much about LR, I'm mainly now confused about how to best organize my original photos...
 
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Not only is that right, but it is also strongly recommended by me. It is my opinion that keywords, metadata and collections are much more powerful and flexible organizing tools than dates or than folder and file names. Leave your photos exactly where they are, add new photos in the same folder scheme; and then forget about what folder contains what photos. Just don't even think about it. Within Lightroom, organize exclusively with keywords, metadata and collections. You identify and locate photos based upon the photo's content (keywords), and not by date or folder name.

If you are a beginner, one catalog is the way to go. There are very few advantages to having multiple catalogs, and many disadvantages.
 
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Thanks, and if I can just ask you one more non-related question about originals. Say you go to the beach and you take 5' photos. When you go to upload them, 25 are complete crap, and 25 are good. Would you normally just delete all the ones you know are junk to save space, or would you keep them all? The little program I use to transfer them you have the option of course to just upload the ones you choose, and delete the others right off the card.
 
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I would upload them all. Cull out the bad ones by flagging them with a reject flag and either immediately or at some point in the future apply a filter to exclude all the rest from view and delete rejects from LR and the HD.
 
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