Recommendation for a good Image Management System in LR and where to find them

[Jay Jay]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightoom Classic 2020

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I would like someone to let me know about Image Management System that professionals use to manage their images inside Lightroom. I have watched Scot Kelby SLIM system and Jared Platt System and was not really convinced entirely in their systems. Is there any other Image Management System that professional photographers use to organise their images inside Lightroom? Any suggestion will be appreciated? And where to find them in sources and books. Thank you

 

[johnbeardy]

How do you define "Image Management System"? Lightroom is an "Image Management System that professionals use to manage their images inside Lightroom".

Maybe treat yourself to Peter Krogh's The DAM Book for Photographers which provides a philosophy which may well move you forward with this question. It's the best book in this area, by a long way. And it might be good to ask more specific questions here like how should I name my files, folders, which metadata to use.

 

[Allan_Devon]

How do you define "Image Management System"? Lightroom is an "Image Management System that professionals use to manage their images inside Lightroom".

Maybe treat yourself to Peter Krogh's The DAM Book for Photographers which provides a philosophy which may well move you forward with this question. It's the best book in this area, by a long way. And it might be good to ask more specific questions here like how should I name my files, folders, which metadata to use.

Excellent book, see his other titles particularly "Digitalising your Photos with Camera & Lightroom"

 

[Zenon]

I just briefly checked out Kelby's SLIM to see what it is about. Not being able to see the actual modules here is my simple interpretation. I have always tried to keep things as simple as possible. Since 2011 I have always maintained one catalogue. Some like to have two or more. I have read about having two, one for business and personal one for hobby shooting, etc. Personally even with business and personal I'd still have one catalogue and create two subfolders.

I have been very careful to maintain the catalogue which is very easy. I always move folders around using LR. If I use the OS (which is rare) I make sure to re-establish the broken link/s. Since 2011 I have never had a single catalogue issue and that includes the 3-4 catalogue upgrades. The latest was V10 which created a new catalogue.

When I travel I create a catalogue on my laptop based on the trips name. When I get home I merge that catalogue into the one on my desktop and drag it into the correct year.

So here is my file structure. During the each year I have shot I name the folders based on event and date. I don't bother with subfolders. After that comes the key-wording, collections or whatever you want to do with the files.

This is about it. As basic as it gets at base level.

 

[clee01l]

Many of us here use some variation of John Beardworth's Workflow smart collections. I've extended it to work with Publish Services

 

[Jay Jay]

Thank you for your responds. Thank you Zenon. Thank you Ceel011 for John Beardworth's Workflow smart collections. Once I had the time to look into it. I will comment on it here. I would to say in Thank You to John in advance for his effort and sharing! Keep up the good work.

 

[Jay Jay]

I have just finished studying John Beardworth's Workflow smart collection. Frankly is not for me! Good Luck. More suggestions will be appreciated! Thank you all.

 

[PhilBurton]

I have just finished studying John Beardworth's Workflow smart collection. Frankly is not for me! Good Luck. More suggestions will be appreciated! Thank you all.

Jay Jay,

I have found John's system invaluable because with the proper design of "worflow keywords" it ensures that I don't skip steps by accident. I use it mostly for LIBRARY and DEVELOP. For common operations, I store add keywords and then remove them as I complete various steps. For unusual situations, e.g. for me, ETTR, I add that keyword during LIBRARY review of images.

 

[clee01l]

I have just finished studying John Beardworth's Workflow smart collection. Frankly is not for me! Good Luck. More suggestions will be appreciated! Thank you all.

Maybe you haven't "finished" studying the Smart Collection process.
I use a Color Label Set to quickly identify which of 5 stages any given photo might be in.
This 5 stages are:
"To Be Worked", Purple label assigned on import
"Work In Progress", Blue Label for images progressing through my work flow
"Needs Further Review", Green Label Images that I "think" might be complete but nit yet committed
"Complete: Not In a Published Collection", Yellow Label, Processing is finished but the images is not assigned to a Publish Service.
"In a Published Collection", Red label, Processing is completed and the images is published online to in q local folder

A Publish Service includes a local Amazon folder where they get included in an Amazon Photo Album as a rotating wall display of my photo art or shared on mobile devices for friends. |
I used to have publish services for my local camera club, Flickr, Facebook etc.
For an image to be complete, I need to assign at least one keyword, a Title and a Caption. Internal keywords route the images to the proper Workflow Smart Collection. The image needs to have passed through the develop module and to be cropped (I always crop every image for composition). Smart Collections will gather images that need these develop processes.
Crucial internal use keywords are assigned to images to funnel them into the desired publish services. For Example "@FaceBook" keyword will trigger the FB smart collection for images that have a Title, Caption , other keywords, and a Red Label.
Images assigned to the "Work In Progress" Label get reviewed (culled) and images that don't pass my quality test get rejected (X) A Smart Collection gathers the rejected images for later review and deletion. Anywhere in my workflow I can reject and image
Images that will be processed to completion/publish will get a pick flag
the next step I'm my workflow is assigning keywords Titles and Captions. I have Smart Collections that collect those image lacking keywords, Titles and Captions.
I use rating (stars) to arbitrarily select images of particular merit. The rating stars are subjective. but there are Smart collections to gather these.

If I want to give a talk in Dragonflies, I can create a Smart Collection that finds images that are
"Complete: Not In a Published Collection" or "In a Published Collection" and might be 3 stars or more.

If I want to send a photo to Facebook, it gets published in a FB Smart Collection and that corresponds to a FB album At onetime there was a Facebook Publish Service Plugin that worked with the FB API to automatically post images at FB, but FB discontinued that part of their API so now it needs to be done manually.
Jeffrey Freidl has Publish service Plugins for most of the Social media sites Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)

 

[LouieSherwin]

Hi,

If you want specific examples and video tutorials on techniques using Lightroom to organize your images I suggest that you take a look at another Peter Krough multi-media book Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom 5. Don't be put off by the title as very little has changed in Lightroom since version 5 with respect to DAM techniques.

I also found the Multi-Catalog Workflow for Lightroom 5 very useful. Although generally speaking for most people trying to work with multiple catalogs is not advised there are some circumstances where they can be useful. A common practice which I use is to create a travel catalog when taking a long trip and to merge all those changes back into my master catalog when I get home.

-louie

 

[johnbeardy]

You know, it might be good if you could consider my initial point:

How do you define "Image Management System"? Lightroom is an "Image Management System that professionals use to manage their images inside Lightroom".

What are your needs? People would define LR as being such a system, so are there specific aspects that you are struggling with?

 

[Jimmsp]

As John asked: " What are your needs? People would define LR as being such a system, so are there specific aspects that you are struggling with? "
I use Lightroom as the tool of choice when teaching a class on Photo Organization and Work Flow. I am assuming that is what you mean by Image Management.
Lightroom provides all the tools that are needed. You can start at the top and create folders, rename folders, name and rename files, move files and folders around, and name your files and a subfolder upon import.
After you start looking at your photos you can flag them, then select them for further work, mark them for deletion, delete them, rate them, and give them a color code which you can choose what it means. And then you can give a photo multiple key words.
You can than create collections and smart collections based on all of this capability.

How you use all this power is now up to you and your needs. Not everybody "needs" everything.
Some people use it all, others use some.
For instance, I use John's workflow smart collections, albeit modified a bit, only when I have photo shoots of more than 100 or so images.
I use both folders (some named, some dated) and collections, as I am prepared to switch DAMs if I ever have to. Some people depend primarily on Collections.
I don't use facial recognition, though I have played with it.
In some ways, what tools you use are somewhat dependent on what you shoot. I might do things a little differently if I only shot weddings vs shooting wild animals on trips to different countries.

In other words - what is important to you?
Are you primarily interested in a workflow for photo processing? or in retrieving a historical photo or set of photos?

 

[johnbeardy]

And remember, we're not giving you a hard time - just help us to help you.

 

[AlanHaynes.com]

Without knowing much about the type of photography you do, I can only give basic advice. I'm a travel photographer, so dates and places are most important to me. With that in mind, here are a few basic suggestions.

1. Once you start using Lightroom to manage your images, ALWAYS use Lightroom to manage them. If you use you use Windows Explorer or Mac Finder to move or change photos, Lightroom will lose track of them. The same thing will happen if you use another image manager such as Adobe Bridge.
2. Make sure your photos all have unique file names. Find a renaming scheme that works well for you. I suggest using a file name that contains the date of capture along with a sequence number such as 20201109-0001.jpg.
3. Keep your photos in a well-organized folder structure. Organizing by date is one way of doing this. A top level folder named 2020 could contain subfolders named January and February which would then contain photos from those months. This is similar to the way I do it. If you prefer to organize by place, you might have several high-level folders named, for example, Europe, Africa, and USA. Each could contain subfolders for various states or countries within those geographical areas.
4. Do NOT use collections as your primary organizational scheme. Some photographers advocate storing your files in one big folder and then using collections to organize them. There are several reasons NOT to do this. One imortant reason is that no other piece of softare can see these collections. If you were eventually forced to abandon Lightroom, you'd have to start over. Other software CAN, however, see the folder structure because that's written to your hard drive and not exclusive to Lightroom.
5. Add as many keywords as you can to your images so that they are easy to find later.
6. Use star ratings to separate the great images from the not-so-great. I use Five stars for the award-winners and one-star for personal photos that may not be so great, but are important to me. In between photos receive 2-4 stars depending on how much I like them.

There's a lot more to it. Good luck.

alanhaynes.com

 

[Zenon]

As to reply 1. You can use the OS, etc to move folders around as long as you re-establish the lost link/s. I have seen people do that with good intentions but forget or just didn't know about it. Later down the road see catalogue disasters.

I believe if you are going to move ten of thousands of files it is better to do use the OS. Move the root folder. For the day to day stuff it is better to use LR. I have been doing this since 2011 and I have never had to worry about it nor had any catalogue issues.

 

[AlanHaynes.com]

Zenon, what you say is correct. But most of the clients that I work with are not as computer-savvy as we are. To many of them, the operating system is a mystery. So, when I teach them Lightroom, I teach them to do everything in Lightroom lest they really screw up their computers by delving into the the file system.

 

[Zenon]

Zenon, what you say is correct. But most of the clients that I work with are not as computer-savvy as we are. To many of them, the operating system is a mystery. So, when I teach them Lightroom, I teach them to do everything in Lightroom lest they really screw up their computers by delving into the the file system.

That is a very good point . When I took LR classes in 2011 one of the first things they showed us was to move files using LR. They never mentioned the OS. At that time none of has enough files to make a difference anyway.