I still organize my photos in folders - clients, travel, family, other - with dated subfolders under each. I'll import from my camera card to one of these folders, and then go into LRC and add that folder. After that, I organize everything in the LRC catalog using collections. I find the folder structure in the OS to be a good way to find files without having to open LRC. It also doesn't leave me completely tied to Lightroom should I decide to move on to something else in the future.

Amazing! The best Lightroom organization video I have seen. My disk space and folders were a disaster. This really helped. Thanks for the knowledge.

Thank you Austin! You explain things well and in a calm voice.

Thanks for this excellent video, concise and to the point. Very useful.

Great video to get me started with organizing several collections of photos

Very well presented and helped me immensely. Thank you!

Great video thank you!

Thanks for the video! Helped me a lot.

Brilliant. Has made my life so much easier. 🙂

Righteous bro thanks for the knowledge

Hi Austin James: I liked this video. With respects to deleting images, I use a Smart Collection where the Pick Flag indicator is set to "Rejected". Then I simply highlight all and delete as per our steps. Cheers, Keith

When I first started using LR, I setup it up based on an article that I found which recommended importing them into folders by date, such as you have them. I've used this ever since. I've seen Scott Kelby and others saying to setup a file structure according to subject matter and such. This just doesn't make sense to me as it's easy to have several subjects on the card before I get it back to my computer. I've sparingly used collections through the years, but I'm getting to the point that I'm better understanding the power of collections, especially smart collections. I still have a ways to go to be as organized as I would like, but overall I'm content with what I have.

thanks for perfect informations

Thanks!

Great tutorial, If I might suggest? Select ALL Photos, hold the Ctrl key and tap the Backspace key, (Ctrl + Backspace) this will delete all rejected photos, without the need to go to menus and select all etc etc. Saves a bit of time. Thank you again.

Ahh, thanks mah dude. You are a real life-saver. TBH, I am not really good at organizing stuff and I want to make this a good essential habit :)

To delete rejects you can select the top folder, then click Photos and select delete rejected photos.

Great video! Since you're so geography-based I'm surprised you didn't mention using GPS coordinates more for filtering and smart collections. This wasn't such a thing back in the day because not all cameras had GPS. But they do now, and since a few years ago LR auto-populates fields like City based on the GPS coords. You can then use that data for sorting.

Watched all 16 and a half minutes. Thanks for sharing the way you organize photos! I am working to being more organization to my catalog and recently adopted year folders on my hard drive, although I don't import into date folders. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the utility of keywords? I've recently started using them for genres (portrait, landscape, etc) and certain common subjects, but I'm not convinced yet that it's worth my effort to keep up long-term.

This young man understands database management.

thank you! I just came from your other Lightroom organization tutorial, and this video came just in time to clarify things! Also, which portable hard drive did you use (I can't find the link you mentioned)?

informative video

The biggest lesson to learn in terms of organizing your photos in Lightroom is NEVER delete your photos from within the Explorer app on your particular OS. Always do it from within Lightroom. Otherwise you're going to run into that missing photos dialog box that Austin showed in this video. In terms of how I personally organize my photos, I am a big fan of collections myself. It's much better than going down the folder route myself, because then you can rename it whatever you want to, so you know what happened on a particular day on a particular shoot.

This is such a great workflow, Thank you! Do you work from unsorted>review>working files>finished files?

Great overview! it was very helpful!

I've never used collections, only folders before, and your process seems much better, but in trying your method, when I import cr2 images and they show in 'previous import' my LRC won't allow me to drag them into my 'editing to do' collection. Any tips or ideas?

Hi thanks for great video. On the importing part in the beginning: does Lightroom use the date at which image was hot or date you import the photos to create the folder name?

After I set an image to be deleted, I press Command-Delete (on a Mac), which then opens the "Remove from Lightroom" or "Delete from Disk" dialog box.

CTRL+Backspace in Library module (Windows) removes X-flaged photos

Folders + Tags + Collections / Collection Sets, coves pretty much all you need

Why on earth do you go to the trouble of auto creating folders by date on import and then admit you you cannot remember the date of a visit and you then create collections of place names? seems a bit mad to me when you can import to folders name with the places you visit. You then avoid the chore of adding the images to a vast array of collections.. I just use collections for specific tasks, like choosing photos for an exhibition or a competition etc

How can I sort it when it is already a mess, I saw this video months too late.....

I have never struggled with catalogues, because I have never used them.

Everybody who thinks seriously about how they will find photos efficiently ends up using keywords as their fundamental organizing mechanism. All the professional organizations -- agencies, museums, image archives etc. -- do it with keywords. Let's say you take a picture in Zion of beech trees in fall color with a stream running through the composition. If you put that picture in your "Zion" collection, you have no way to find it when you want to see all your fall color images, or all your beech tree images, or all your images with streams in them. Every photograph has multiple subjects or potential uses, and keywords are by far the easiest way to tag a photo with all of them. When you realize that keywords are necessary and you're going to be doing them anyway, then spending time on other methods of cataloging photos becomes moot. Also, if they adhere to IPTC standards (any decent catalog program will), keywords are transportable, meaning that if you switch to a different cataloging program, you can automatically transfer your keywords and never lose all your cataloging work. Lightroom has powerful keywording features for exactly this reason.

Brutal organization method. Collections are great but the hierarchy method you employ may work for you but extremely unnecessarily complicated. bye forever as this was my first visit to the channel

you are not fully using the power of lightroom if you are not renaming on import and not setting meta date on import

Stopped at 13 seconds. You should change the title of this video to "The way I do something and that many other photographers disagree with" .