7 Powerful Tips to Organize Your Lightroom Folders

if there's a piece of advice that makes me nervous it's when people say that you don't have to look at worry about or even open up your folders panel in Lightroom and while I understand the spirit of where they're headed with this advice I think it has the potential to be dangerous especially for beginners and here's why how you decide to set up and structure your folders panel in Lightroom is literally the entire Foundation of your catalog and just like when you're building a house you need to make sure you start on a solid foundation and then and only then should you move on to building your house of organizational Wonder with things like keywords and Collections and all of the tools that adobe gives us now since there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution on how you should structure your folders in Lightroom I'm going to walk through a few different options of how you could do it that way you know that you are selecting the right method for you and your photography along the way I'm going to talk about some tips of why I think it is advantageous to open up that folders panel and how I use it in my workflow and if you think you got a crack in the foundation or even if you think you have a need an entire overhaul I'm going to look at an easy and straightforward way on how you could get started with the cleanup process that's a lot to cover so I think maybe now it's time let's get started now again we are in the library module in Lightroom and we'll go on the left hand side to the folders panel and open that up and this is all of your image Library you can see it on multiple hard drives or whatever you have imported into Lightroom should appear here now the first tip is critical and super simple but critical again and that is to create a parent folder and what a parent folder is is a top level folder that contains all of our subfolders below here and ultimately holds our entire photo library so all of our files and the best thing about having a parent folder is you always have just one click say we want to copy our entire photo library over to a new hard drive we copy this parent level folder move that over and say we want that and all of the subfolders to copy if you want to back up to cloud storage you would tell the cloud storage I want this folder and all of the subfolders and within Lightroom we can always right click and say synchronize folder and this would be synchronizing this folder and all of the subfolders below it to make sure that whatever matches in Lightroom is matching what's out on your hard drive let's say we just copy some extra photos from our SD card and we forget to import them this is an easy way to catch that so it's one of the easiest ways to create a subfold or to create a parent folder is just to create a folder and drag and drop so here you could see I have 2023 and they don't fall in line This is organized by date this is just one example so hold on and we'll get to other ways to organize but I would just click I'm on the top level folder right now but I would just click the plus sign hit add subfolder I'll keep my naming convention and then hit create and you'll see my 2023 subholder has been created and I can simply take my 2023 folders with my photos and drag and drop and what Lightroom is going to ask me is moving files on disk do you want to do this and what it's doing is it's going to move them in Lightroom so they appear this way but it's also going to do double work in moving them on the hard drive so now what I see here is what I will see out on my hard drive so if I right click and I say show and finder or show out on my hard drive here is my library and it had moved that folder for me so let's move these other two really quick I'll go back to Lightroom let's say we're going to drag and drop these two I selected them both by holding down the shift key I'm going to drag them into 2023 again it's going to ask me are you sure you want to move them I say yes let's get this cleaned up and in the right order where it needs to be and if I go back out and look at my hard drive all of a sudden magically they are all in line so this is one of the reasons that we always always If an item was within Lightroom we move it from within Lightroom or we make those changes to the files to the folders into the structure from within Lightroom sorry we need a quick little sidebar that we just want to have everybody on that same Foundation remember Lightroom isn't storing your photos your photos are somewhere on your computer's hard drive or what I really recommend is an external hard drive now it just knows how to look and find where those photos are and read the file so think of Life think of Lightroom as a lifeguard who knows and is watching all of your photos and files in the pool but if you happen this is once photos and files are already in Lightroom if you happen to go outside on your hard drive and change a file name or your folder name or the structure Lightroom let's just say gets distracted by that I got some sunblock in my eyes I wasn't watching what you were doing because it was outside of Lightroom and now I can't find the file or folder I kind of freak out so instead of doing my job and jumping in to save your file what I do is I kind of just decide to go on break so I gray out the folder put a little question mark on it and move on and make you do that cleanup work so it's a best practice once your photos are already in Lightroom you should rename your files your folders or restructure them from within Lightroom all right back to the show now this naturally brings us to a new point of how would we structure our folder Library within Lightroom and set up our hierarchy and we are going to talk about in just a minute about three different ways I think of categorizing things and that's by date by location and by theme but first let's also talk about why I think it is really important to keep date somewhere in your folder structure in some fashion there's a few different reasons but one of the most important reasons for me is when you think about how many photos you are going to take over your journey as a photographer think 10 years in the future you are going to have hundreds of thousands of photographs we're talking terabytes of data when it's all said and done the more and more you go into this journey I don't necessarily want all of my fold over photos just clumped into a folder that is just not manageable for me and even though we can use the keywords over here and the collections again when you're talking about backing up folders or what is copied over to your hard drive all of that stuff is important and what's in sizable chunks like let's copy all of our 2023 photos over to a new hard drive and make sure they're backed up and let's take anything that's 20 20 and before and let's archive that all of these are critical decisions that I make and they're normally based on date because the stuff that is more recent is the stuff I'm working with and this is the stuff that is not as important to me at the time there's maybe a few photos that I'll bring forward but the majority of that is going to become archived over time all right I think that sets up all of the stage where we can actually start talking about how we structure and organize the folders and naming conventions now the first thing I will mention is another bonus tip so many bonus tips but one of the bonus tips is if you hold down the art ALT key and close all your holders everything will close up similarly if I hold down the arc Alt key and open every folder will stay open so if you're doing a whole bunch of scrolling with your folders and you are manually trying to click them all closed you don't have to do that you can just scroll all the way up to the top again another bonus of having that parent folder will hold down the alt or the option key and we will close them all and the next time you open again they're nice and tidy again and you can just go digging probably through your most recent items so again we are now going to dive into the meat and potatoes of this we are going to talk about whether we want to organize by date by location by theme or maybe do a combination of each to figure out what works best for you now tip number four is decide if you want to organize your folders by date location theme or something else that is intuitive to you there's no wrong answers to your strategy but the point is have a strategy because this can either make your life easier or introduce unnecessary or potentially unnecessary frustration and that's why it's critical take a few minutes and think about what's going to work for best for you your photography what is intuitive to you how do you think about your photography and you're going to see I kind of use a little bit of all three in different ways when we first look at dates I like dates for the reason that if we look at how Lightroom organize folders on the same level they're alphanumerically ordered so that I can easily keep things in chronological order for example 2022.01 to signify January 02 February all the way through online and go to the end of the year but ten fine October I can keep everything in chronological order for me the Advent the advantageous part of this is it's easy for me to look across my backups to look at the cloud and make sure everything has been copied over to all of the locations it should be copied to make sure I have multiple backups in place so if something kind of goes wrong it's a little bit easier for me to pinpoint versus if everything was just in a 2022 folder now in addition to that with date I don't just use the number and that's really the key with this structure is you got to put some meaning behind it I highly highly we have to label these anyway give them some meaning so that way when you are looking on your folder system and not in Lightroom you don't have to do too much digging to know exactly what photos are in which folders because again as these years add up there's going to be lots of photos there and we want to get a good handle on things here because it doesn't mean to say I never would have thought that I would have been photographing Gardens and birds as much as I am now earlier in my photography Journey but because I have my folders organized it's kind of easy for me to go back and cherry pick different things that I want to go back and re-look at and potentially edit again or photos that I've never edited before and go back to that so if we're not going to do it by date let's look at location as landscape and nature photographers quite often we get to go back and visit places multiple times so you could have it by continent if you are a world traveler or if you're not you can simply have things starting from States but then within the states I don't just pile all my photos together I still keep them in subfolders with the date format so they're in chronological order because if I visit the Smoky Mountains for 10 years absolutely I hope that I will be using photos from that first trip and that last trip but I want to have an easy way especially early on in my journey those older photos are not something that I'm using because I have evolved as a photographer and I hope that for all of us that we get better within time so it's easy for me then to pull those out of collections or not have them used in collections and say these aren't the photos that I want to use anymore now again with stars and keywords and collections I still absolutely go into collections and have locations and have national parks and have my States organized by automatic collections but I'm already renaming these folders it's really easy because these come back from a trip so this is how I chose to organize things and if it's not by location I also like to think of things in themes if you are early in your photography journey I encourage you to photograph as much as you can so create different buckets for me I photograph animals and that includes birds and wildlife some portraiture mostly my family but that is in there as well Garden is more my macro flowers and smaller scenes nature is landscape photography wider intimate scenes Sports travel is more cityscapes so architecture people all of that kind of stuff think about maybe you photograph real estate or weddings whatever it is what are the big buckets concerts that you can put your Photography in so you can do that like this but if I still open those subfolders for garden I have the year to keep everything in chronological order I have the state that was used potentially you could put the country abbreviation code and then I put the place for nature I still have the state abbreviation I have the national park or the places location but then I use NP and SP to signify National Park or state park and that brings me to tip number five strategize and be consistent with your naming conventions because this is the clutch thing when you look forward into the future I always use NP I always use State Park I like to use abbreviations but then I also prefer to let's pull out a theme here and let's go back to dates in 2022 here are my buckets that I like to use a lot I do a lot of garden visits nature again is my landscape photography trips because it's Grand Landscapes and smaller scenes but if you are consistent with how you choose to name things it is so easy to sort and find new Collections and new ways to keyword your photos because that goes to tip number six all the way on top of your folders is this filter folders bar and I think a lot of people overlook this but it's so powerful when you name your folders I can easily look at NP all of my National Park trips so if I happen to organize by date this will all pop up through years if I organize by location and again I don't have a lot of examples but just in your mind picture it would have all of the different states as well as all of your different National Park trips if you organize just by nature and Garden or cityscapes that again could be in there we can do different words with let's say we want to look for all of my PA trips so every time I photographed in Pennsylvania it's easy to come up as well now again PA has Patagonia so that doesn't necessarily always work but it gives me a great way to down select my work and look at what I've done I can also photograph or photograph really that's the only thing I got on my mind these days I can start labeling things birds and these are the new buckets that I have for my photography as well because that is a area or a direction that I'm going in so again just think and take a couple minutes of what works best for you now if we start with something and we just have a mess what is an easy way to start cleaning up our folders the first thing I do when I have a mess is I just create a folder that's my mess to organize so these are all the photos that they don't really have a home and I don't know if I want to do it by theme or by location so I'm going to take a look at everything that's there and again remember everything is alphanumerically so say you have a ton of folders and you want to reorganize things you can always rename this and if you put a zero or a one in front of it so let's do one to start it's going to move that folder very to the top for you so all the stuff down below you don't necessarily have to worry about right now on the same level but I brought my mess to the front because that's what we're going to work on today and that's an easy way when you open up you don't have to do all of that scrolling so you can label one two three four however you want use that to your advantage that alphanumeric ordering the next thing I'm going to do is hit backslash so the backslash is bringing up a filter bar up here so filter open filter closed filter open now I have my mess to organize I have my filter open and I'm going to click on metadata and within my folders you have all of these different columns that you can sort by if we click on the down arrow here oh sorry over here click you don't have to click on the down arrow click date you have all of these different things so whether you've switched camera brands whether you have keywords already in there whether you want a group by shutter speeds however is intuitive to you GPS and map location for me it's easy let's look at date and we can Group by year we can select here to group by month and this is going to I mean think about it for nature and Landscape these are pretty much our trips so for October of 2022 okay I was in the smokies and this is Oregon for me so I can either click the first one hold down shift and click the last one to select all or I can use command control a to select all of them but this is a way for me to down select and start organizing my mess so let's start with 2022 again I'm going to look in February these were all from my trip to Yosemite so again command control a to select all of my photos from 2022 February I will go to this down arrow in my mess and hit add subfolder I know it's 2022 I know it's O2 February I know it was in California and you know some Yosemite and I'll hit create now Lightroom has added my subfolder with those 15 folders or photos and they are in there so let's do another one really quick let's go back up to metadata let's look at 2022 and let's look at July so July was Pennsylvania I will select them all with command control a I will add a subfolder I will label it 2022.07 for July I know this was Pennsylvania and the Poconos and the other thing to note is that I have include selected photos when you create this folder and I will start creating subfolders this way I can also just look at my whole mess folder again and I could say show me everything I can go down and hand select all of the birds by holding down Commander control and just scroll to what makes sense I could select all of the fold photos of flowers whatever I want to do now again this is a little bit slower of a way that's why if you just kind of group by years in buckets and bend them that way you can I feel that's faster but potentially you have really easy buckets where you could Bend things like this I can say Okay add a subfolder this is 2022 birds and that's my theme for right now I could say animals I could say Wildlife whatever you want to do be consistent and hit create and now all of those bird folders are together follow my hero 70 photos all of my Poconos photos from that area and you can just keep grouping and that makes sense to you so that is a quick and easy way to start cleaning up folders and there's nothing to say that you need to go back and do all of your photos start fresh decide okay I'm going to start organizing my photos now and just adopt a method and do this moving forward again I still believe absolutely use keywords and Collections and stars and color labels there is no organizational tool that adobe gives me that I leave behind or let it feel lonely but I feel that folders have a lot of potential and you should open up that panel and use it to your advantage don't miss that opportunity I have a few more folder tips and tricks but I think it's important that we digest everything that we covered because that was a lot and plus it's important to take a moment and contemplate what folder structure really is going to work best for you before you go ahead and implement now if you really can't wait and you want to get a handle on organizing your photos in Lightroom you can check out my course let's get organized in Lightroom within four hours I cover absolutely everything and nothing more of what you need to know about setting up and organizing your photos in Lightroom but I know you may have known some of this folder or device but I hope you found something new in this video to incorporate into your workflow until next time cheers to a happy Lightroom experience foreign [Music]

Channel: Chrissy Donadi

Views: 25,752

Keywords: Adobe Lightroom, Landscape Photography, Nature Photography, Organize Your Photos, Organize Your Photos in Lightroom, Travel Photography, lightroom classic organization, lightroom organization

Id: 1fa4_e4cp8Q

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023