What do I do with all these old photos?

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kelchm

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Hey guys.

I'm currently in the process of trying to organize all the digital photos I have dating back about 7 years.

I'm wondering to myself if the appropriate place for these photos is really in my Lightroom library. I'm thinking they might best be placed in iPhoto or something... (which I have been exporting select stuff to from Lightroom, anyway.)

What do you guys think? How do you deal with your backlog of random family photos?
 
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You can just import them, which I would do and they will be stored handy to work on, sort, etc.
You could also put them in a separate catalog for now to work on.
I don't think mixing with iPhoto is such a great idea except for special needs and then as a temporary thing.
 
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Hi kelchm! Please take a moment to fill in your signature (use the USER CP link at the top of the page).

I tend to keep two main catalogs. One for personal photos and one for other photography. Occasionally, if a project needs it, I'll have a catalog just for that project. But that is usually temporary since I import these "project catalogs" into my main catalog.

Others I've talked with use one catalog and sequester the family shots via collections.

I agree with Geoff and wouldn't start mixing workflows between LR and iPhoto.
 
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Hey guys.

Thanks for the replies.

I took the plunge and imported all 4''' or so photos. Some of them date back to 2''1. Unfortunately what I am now left with is a bit of a mess. I had doubles, triples and sometimes even quadruples of the same files.

It has quickly become apparent to me that a date based folder structure is fairly uesless. I'm having a really hard time finding things.

How do you guys structure things?



Oh, and I will add my signature tonight.
 
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In my opinion, the best way to organize your photos is to apply keywords, captions and titles to your photos, and to create collections. These are major strengths of the Lightroom Library module. Use them!

Oh, and I favor a single catalog as well (unless you have non-overlapping groups of photos and subject matter, such as personal and work).
 
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dj_paige said:
In my opinion, the best way to organize your photos is to apply keywords, captions and titles to your photos, and to create collections. These are major strengths of the Lightroom Library module. Use them!

Oh, and I favor a single catalog as well (unless you have non-overlapping groups of photos and subject matter, such as personal and work).
Click to expand...

The thought of trying to tag 4'''+ photos is pretty daunting.

Its something I'd like to do eventually but I don't think I have that kind of time right now. I'm still curious as to how other handle their folder structures.
 
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Dates.
Year
Year/Month
Year/Month/Day

Start from today and add keywords when importing new files.
Then Sort your old files into date order and make new folders for each date. It is not so daunting to then start working through the folders and keywording.
Collections can then be made using the keywords and/or dates.
This is what I have done, now I have about 5'k images in LR.
 
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kelchm said:
The thought of trying to tag 4'''+ photos is pretty daunting.

Its something I'd like to do eventually but I don't think I have that kind of time right now. I'm still curious as to how other handle their folder structures.
Click to expand...

Obviously, only you can judge the amount of time you have ... but you can apply keywords to multiple photos at once.

To me, the bottom line is that once you get done applying keywords to your photos (and yes, I concede that may take a lot of time), you will have a better structure to help you find and organize your photos than anything else you will do. Time spent on keywording returns more benefits than time spent on any other type of organizing.
 
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Now that I have already imported all my photos... is there some way to have LightRoom restructure them in a new date based folder structure?
 
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Matthew, how were you finding the images in your old system? It's relatively simple to temporarily duplicate your old folder structure, in Lr keywords and/or collections. That gives you the best of both the old and new worlds, as your migration is in progress.

Ooops, we simulposted. Once you've imported the images, you're going to have to move them to a date structure by hand. Lr will help by enabling you to select images by date(s) in the filter bar. Another option is to start over; the best way to have Lr organize by date, is at import time. In this process, Lr can create date based folders, and copy and rename files (on a custom token based template if you like) on the fly as you import.
 
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Well, what I did was just write and metadata changes I made and then remove those folders.... I then reimported them in a different way. Now I only need to do 2''8 and 2''9 by hand.

Also, I purposefully didn't duplicate the existing folder structure.

It was a nightmare of a backup that was compiles from three or four different machines. Like I said I sometimes had triples or quadruples of files.
 
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