Over time we all develop huge libraries of photographs, and defining and sticking to an organizational system becomes more and more important. If you’re just starting out, now is a great time to come up with your own system that you can build from the ground up. If you already have a huge library of photos that is not organized, now is the time to update it.

This article will focus on tools and techniques in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom since that is my main editing platform, though the concepts and ideas found here can be used in other software packages.

There are 3 areas we need to look at when talking about managing a large library of photos:

• Organizing your photos on disk
• Organizing your photos in Lightroom
• “Keywording” or “tagging” your photographs

Where do I put the photos?

Having a logical system for where to put your photos is important. You need to be able to find your photos if you don’t have access to Lightroom (or whatever cataloging software you use). This could happen for a number of reasons: the software crashes, the computer crashes and you are looking at your backups, or maybe you are on the road and just need to find one file. For whatever reason it’s critical that you have a system that allows you to find your files without any other software.

There are a number of ways you can organize your files on disk. I’ll explain what I do, however this may not suit everyone.

I start with a high level folder named “Photography.” Inside, I have folders for every country that I’ve photographed. Inside the country folder I have folders for states/cites/National Parks, etc. Every time I import photos I let Lightroom create folders by date and import the photos there. This way if I go to a location 3 different times for 4 days each time I have a total of 12 folders for that one location.

Example: If I wanted to see all my photos from Yosemite National Park, they would be on the photo drive under /Photography/USA/CA/Yosmite NP. Within the “Yosemite NP” folder there are folders broken down by date for each day I’ve photographed in the park.

For work not based on location, such as studio photography, I simply create a folder inside the “Photography” folder named “Studio,” and create sub-folders of every “shoot” that I’ve done. If I use a model more then once, I create a folder with the model’s name and then inside that folder, I create folders for each shoot I’ve done with that model.

In Adobe Photoshop Lightroom I can point it to look for photos inside the top level “Photography” folder. The great part about my system is that if, for example, I want to see all my photos form the USA I simply click on the USA folder; if I want to see all my photos from Chicago I can dig down and click on the Chicago folder; if I want to see all the photos taken on one particular day in Chicago I can click on that date.

Lightroom

Lightroom has three main ways of organizing photos.

• Pick/reject
• Star rating 1-5
• Color labels

There are number of ways you can use these options for sorting you photos. I can’t write about every possible way, but I can write about my way.

Pick and reject

I use this when I first import photos from a shoot. I go photo by photo over everything and select the photos that I think might be keepers by “picking” them (you can use a keyboard shortcut for this, “p”). Once you have gone though all the photos, you can choose to see only photos that are flagged as picked.

Then I start to edit the photos; if I’m not happy with the image I can un-flag it by pressing “u.” I have never found a great use for the reject feature, especially because sometimes I need to find an image that I may not have edited and I like seeing all the photos that are not “complete” as un-flagged.

Star rating

I use star ratings in a few different ways. First, when I’m going though a collection of photos and editing them, I will star photos with three stars when I’m happy and feel they are done (if I’m not happy, I’ll un-flag them). After I have all my photos edited, I should be looking at an entire page of three-star images.

Then I look at the photos as a collection and often I’ll have two images that are just slightly different and I won’t know which is the better image until I’m looking at them both side-by-side. When I finalize my selection, I’ll mark the chosen photo as 5 stars. Five-star images are the best photos from each shoot that are fully edited and that I’m happy with.

Color labels

You can assign a number of different color labels to each of your photos; you can pick from, red, yellow, green, blue or purple. Again, as aways there is an endless way you can use these, but here is what I do.

Red: Photos get the red label after they are fully edited (marked as five stars), named, and keyworded. These are the photos that are going onto my website.

Yellow: Images in a group that I’ve used for a panorama or a stitched-together photograph.

Purple: Photos that I’ve used for stock photography.

I don’t really use the rest of the color labels, though you might find them useful for something.

Keywording

It’s important to keyword for two reasons: first, so that you can search and find photos in your collection through whatever software you use, and second, so that photos you post on the web can be indexed by search engines and found by other people. Proper keywording is the best and fastest way to get traffic to your website short of paying for ads.

Two-step process

On import

Every time I import photos I tag them with very general keywords such as the location name, state and country, and in some instances things like the time of year, or general locale that can be applied to every photo (“urban,” “nature,” etc.). Along with the keywords, I’ll add my name, website, phone number, and copyright in the metadata of every photo.

On the finished photos

Every photo that goes up to the web gets a unique name and keywords for that individual photograph. This will help me find the photo later inside of Lightroom, but more importantly help people on the Internet find my photo as well.

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