This Lightroom guide is for beginner-photographers who are getting started in Lightroom and are looking for a good way to organize their photos and photo catalogs. If you are looking for a generic guide on how to organize pictures without any third party photo software like Lightroom, then please read my “how to organize pictures” guide instead. If you do not currently own a copy of Lightroom, I highly recommend purchasing one from B&H or other resellers.
Lightroom has certainly become a very essential part of a photographer’s workflow. I personally cannot imagine managing my photo catalog without Lightroom and I use it every day for my Photography needs. In fact, 95-98% of my post-processing work is done in Lightroom today and I rarely use Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, which not only simplifies my workflow, but also decreases the amount of time I spend on post-processing. The below process of folder structures and organization within Lightroom is my personal way of storing pictures and working with them for my home and professional use.
1) Where do you store your pictures and how?
The first question is, where and how do you currently store your pictures? I used to store all of my photographs in various subfolders of my hard drive (commonly in “My Pictures” or “My Documents”), but after I got into photography, I decided that it is best to keep all of my photographs in the root folder of my PC’s hard drive that I use solely for storing photos and small family videos. Hard drives are dirt cheap nowadays and you can snatch an external 1-1.5 Terabyte drive for under $100. I highly recommend getting a fault-redundant external drive though (usually two hard drives in RAID 1 Mirror configuration). There are also other fault-tolerant external drive array solutions such as “Drobo” that some photographers rave about, but I personally do not use them, since they are expensive and take too much space. As long as you have a good backup strategy, which I talk about below, you do not have to worry about losing data.
So, I highly recommend dedicating one external storage volume to your photographs for easier management and backup.
Back in the old days, there was no such thing as a camera mode – everything was manual. Photographers had to manually set the aperture, shutter speed and choose the right type of film for their cameras. To evaluate the intensity and the amount of light, they used to carry special light metering devices that measured the light and provided the exposure information, which they would then use in their cameras. In 1938, Kodak introduced a film camera with an integrated light meter and in 1962, a Japanese company called “Topcon” introduced the first SLR camera that measured the light coming through the lens into the camera. What this meant, was that photographers no longer needed to carry special light meters with them – the camera would do it for them. New “Automatic” camera modes started appearing on cameras, which would evaluate the amount of light that passed through the lens and would automatically pick the right exposure parameters to produce a properly-exposed picture.
