Transition Plan for New Catalog

[swteven]

Ever since I made the transition from film to digital about 10 years ago I have been organizing my digital photos in folders titled with a subject. These folders are enclosed within about 10 folders enclosing the entire archive in general subject categories.


I use Lightroom to edit Raw files but have not established a system to take advantage of Lightroom's cataloging functions. I have read the DAM Book by Peter Krogh and read numerous DAM articles and threads on this forum so I know the concept of using keywords and metadata to tag my files. For several years I have been considering various strategies but I was not ready to fully trust Lightroom to do the DAM thing is was designed for! Part of my hesitance was that my legacy folder ID system was adequate. As my digital archive grew, the task of transition to DAM seemed more overwhelming.


I now have a plan that I think will work for me and it does not demand that I do it all at once. I want to describe it here and hope to get reinforcing feedback.


My new plan will not require folders titled by subject (I struggled with this). The new folder structure will be simple. It will have 10 folders, 1 for each year that I have been shooting digital: 2005, 2006… to 2015. The original capture date will determine into which folder the photo files will be transferred to.


I will import legacy files into LR on an "as needed" basis or whenever I have free time to spend on the import process. When I need to import a group of photos into LR, I will use my legacy folder titles as LR keywords and then move the actual photo files into the respective year folder. Each yearly folder will be a "bucket" that will be easy to back up. During the transition I will leave my existing folder hierarchy the way it is, gradually transferring files to the new system.


Questions and Comments are Welcome!

 

[tspear]

Since you are planning to jump in...
Consider the following:
Import one sub folder at a time. When you import, you let Lr place the images into a folder structure such as Pictures/YYYY/MM
Then use the previous import query link left tab. This will bring up all images in from the most recent import, you can then assign the common keywords which are represented by the folder names in a single mass effort.

Good luck,

Tim

 

[swteven]

Import one sub folder at a time. When you import, you let Lr place the images into a folder structure such as Pictures/YYYY/MM

Great, LM can manage that on import! Thanks

What & where is the "previous import query link left tab." ?

 

[tspear]

See attached, circled in red.

 

[swteven]

Thanks Tim, those are great tips!

Scott

 

[swteven]

The import plan I have devised also includes a file naming policy. I wish to keep my filenames simple and do not see a reason to have the creation date as part of the filename. I am pretty sure that the creation date will be in the EXIF metadata ?


Sequential numbers will create a unique number for the filename. I would like my initials to be part of the filename and have trailing abbreviations for derivatives of the original.


Originals:
swt-000101.nef, swt-000102.nef, swt-000103.nef


Black & White derivatives:
swt-000101-BW.nef, swt-000102-BW.nef, swt-000103-BW.nef

Comments Welcome!

 

[Modesto Vega]

The import plan I have devised also includes a file naming policy. I wish to keep my filenames simple and do not see a reason to have the creation date as part of the filename. I am pretty sure that the creation date will be in the EXIF metadata ?


Sequential numbers will create a unique number for the filename. I would like my initials to be part of the filename and have trailing abbreviations for derivatives of the original.


Originals:
swt-000101.nef, swt-000102.nef, swt-000103.nef


Black & White derivatives:
swt-000101-BW.nef, swt-000102-BW.nef, swt-000103-BW.nef

Comments Welcome!

Sounds sensible. The only comment is regarding the B&W derivatives. Do you have a camera capable of shooting B&W natively or is swt-000101-BW.nef a derivative of swt-000101.nef? If the later you might want to reconsider having separate RAW files for the B&W derivatives as you might end up duplicating data. Of course it is a different story if the derivatives are TIFF or JPEG files.

 

[swteven]

You are correct Modesto. My Black & White derivatives would be like this:
swt-000101-BW.psd, swt-000102-BW.psd, etc.

I do not have a camera capable of shooting B&W natively. In the past I have created B&W derivatives in Photoshop resulting in a B&W master file. LR seems to do a pretty good job of B&W conversion too. I will also use LR's ability to create Virtual Copies. In any case I do not want to have duplication and want unique filenames for each original.

I have been studying THIS POST that discusses a date-based approach.

 

[Modesto Vega]

You are correct Modesto. My Black & White derivatives would be like this:
swt-000101-BW.psd, swt-000102-BW.psd, etc.

I do not have a camera capable of shooting B&W natively. In the past I have created B&W derivatives in Photoshop resulting in a B&W master file. LR seems to do a pretty good job of B&W conversion too. I will also use LR's ability to create Virtual Copies. In any case I do not want to have duplication and want unique filenames for each original.

I have been studying THIS POST that discusses a date-based approach.

I do use a date based folder structure and do not rename the files when downloading from the SD camera.

Unfortunately Lr does not have a way to keep the lineage of an image; there is no way out of the box that you can link swt-000101.nef to swt-000101-bw.psd or swt-000101-bw.tiff. I have always found this slightly annoying and have given up any hope that Adobe will ever implement this.

I have now about 10,000 images taken with 3 cameras, primarily 2 Nikons. After so many images I am starting to see filename duplication. The folder structure takes care of this problem but doesn't take care of another, somehow unexpected problem, for reasons that would take to long to explain I do not keep all my derivatives on the same folder as the originals, effectively I branch out the derivatives; after 10,000 images I have found several times the situation described in this example: a derivative called dsc_0022_selenium.tiff and 2 or 3 files with Dsc_0022.nef all of them in different folders. Identifying which one of the 3 RAW files was the basis for the derivative requires visual inspection. Furthermore, if I decided to use a title in the derivative file name, identifying the source of the derivative becomes an onerous task.

Had I known all of this when I started my Lr catalog, I would have added to the date based folder structure unique file names, probably also based on date, something like adding a timestamp to the file name - e.g. yyyymmdd_hhmmss. This way the file names are unique and lineage between raw files and derivatives is preserved.

 

[tspear]

Most cameras allow you to add a prefix to the filename. I would suggest you start with that.
It will not help the history, but will help the go forward.

Tim

 

[swteven]

I do use a date based folder structure and do not rename the files when downloading from the SD camera.

Had I known all of this when I started my Lr catalog, I would have added to the date based folder structure unique file names, probably also based on date, something like adding a timestamp to the file name - e.g. yyyymmdd_hhmmss. This way the file names are unique and lineage between raw files and derivatives is preserved.

Modesto - Your situation sounds like a good case for establishing some kind of unique filename. My plan as I transition to a new catalog will be to assign sequential numbers on import.

 

[Modesto Vega]

Modesto - Your situation sounds like a good case for establishing some kind of unique filename. My plan as I transition to a new catalog will be to assign sequential numbers on import.

It sounds like it. In addition, something I like about the unique filename using sequential numbers is that I can use it for any film negatives I might scan later on this year; after all I doubt I would remember when I took those photographs and the scanner is likely to given then some more or less arbitrary date linked to when the negatives were actually scanned.

One other tangential point, in digital photography RAW files are similar to exposed but undeveloped film frames. The development takes place when a RAW converter like Lr, C1, or Aperture is used to view the RAW files. It is during the rendering by the RAW converter that they become a digital negative for the first time, but the RAW files themselves are not digital negatives. This is important because a new process version or RAW converter can drastically change the rendered image, the digital negative. This is why you want to keep your RAW files as they were downloaded from camera and separate from your derivatives.