In the last post, we learned how to automatically place photos into dated folders, but if you need to find photos outside of Lightroom, you may want to store your photos in a year/shoot-named hierarchy instead. This still meets the best practice principles described in the How to organize your photos post. Here’s an example of a year/shoot folder structure:
First, in the Destination panel, look for the parent folder that contains all of your photos. In the “Where should you store your photos?” post, we suggested calling it something like Lightroom Photos.
Inside that Lightroom Photos folder, I’d recommend you have a folder per year. This makes it easy to split your photo archive over multiple drives, or archive some photos offline, as you outgrow your hard drives. For most of the year, this folder will already exist, but it’s January and you may not have a 2017 folder yet. If not, right-click on your Lightroom Photos folder and select Create New Folder (or create it in Windows Explorer/Finder and then select it in the Destination panel, if that’s more comfortable for you).
Select this year’s folder so that it’s highlighted in white. In the Organize pop-up at the top of the Destination panel, select Into one folder. This places the photos into the selected/highlighted year folder. This is a great choice for random photos that don’t need their own shoot subfolder.
But let’s go one stage further. Let’s create a new subfolder to hold the photos you’re importing, because they’re from a specific shoot. At the top of the Destination panel, check the Into Subfolder checkbox, and then enter a name for the shoot. In this example, we’ll call it Marwell Zoo, but you can add the date if you prefer.
Before you click Import, remember to double check that the photos are landing in the right place. Remember we said that Lightroom previews any new folders in italic? This is a useful double check to ensure that you have the right folder selected.
We’ll come back to reorganizing existing photos, but first, we need to learn how to use collections to group photos by topic without duplicating them on the hard drive.
I’m new to using lightroom, but fairly comfortable with computers, so the whole concept of having a storage scheme that has one home, and only one home, for every file makes sense to me. The database aspect of lightroom and proper tagging covers my needs to search and find specific photos myself (although the tagging of a huge backlog of photos does seem daunting). But I do want to make sure the pictures are findable by family members AFTER my demise (I’m in the process of scanning and cataloging a ton of Mom’s photos, so the thought is in mind).
1. I can see how to import easily into dated folders (YYYY –> MM, although I’d prefer to use (YYYY –> YYYYMM since I don’t want a bunch of folders name ’11’ but that doesn’t appear to be an option).
2. What I really want to end up with is YYYY –> MM –> Event with the non-event ones just in the month folder.
3. At the moment, once imported into a month, when I go to process an event I select all the pictures from that event and create an event folder in that month with the checkbox for moving all selected photos checked. Is there a better way of doing this? I am adding custom text to the filename when importing. Is there a way to do this with the folder names?
YYYY -> YYYYMM is possible, but only by editing the Translated Strings files. That’s described on pageE-19 of Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
Otherwise, you could set YYYY -> MM and check the Into Subfolder to set the event name rather than moving them later.
Who remembers photos by date? Surely there must be some other method of organizing photos on import other than date. If date is desired it can always be accessed in the automatic metadata. Organizing by client may well be suitable for many professional photographers, but even they have substantial personal work for which date organization is unsuitable. Any suggestions about import organization based on general subject material (folders), then refined by the addition of key words where or as suitable? Any other suggestions. Import organization based on date could be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to effective use of Lightroom. The other stumbling block for lightroom is the tracking of separate copies of the catalogue and the photos on muliple hard drives. This needs better coordination &/or more reliable hardware. I’ll defer the issue of screen(s), camera, printer, printing paper profilling to ideal results. The current interface seems unnecessarily cumbersome and/or complex. My two cents! SCB
Have a read of the other posts in the series Sanford, especially these ones:
Why not organize photos into folders by topic? – https://www.lightroomqueen.com/why-not-organize-photos-into-folders-by-topic/
How do I organize photos into folders? – https://www.lightroomqueen.com/organize-photos-folders/
How do I use the Import dialog’s Destination panel to put the photos in per-shoot folders? – https://www.lightroomqueen.com/import-destination-shoot-folders/