Lightroom Technique: How I organize my catalog
On his blog http://blog.ericscouten.com/2008/10/lightroom-technique-how-i-organize-m... Eric Scouten shares how he uses his lightroom catalog and why. A very interesting subject to read if you are a photographer and use lightroom. I am using a similar apporach and placed the following comment under his post.Patrick Krolis / bodyNsoul Photography 12.15.08 at 11:28 am Interesting as I use a similar approach on my folder organization. Yet I use a different approach on my file naming and export naming. As I shoot primarily people for for fashion, beauty or fine art, doing both commercial and personal photo shoots, I tend to use the persons name, rather than the place in both my file as my folder naming structure. Also I tend to shoot at least 400 pictures per shoot, bringing the amount of pictures in my catalog above 30.000 in a few months. 30.000 seemed to be the limit my Lightroom 1.4 could handle on my 1.25 Gb RAM Windows XP laptop. While I moved to a 64 bit Vista machine and LR 2.1 now I still am not sure whether it can handle more than 30.000 images in a catalogue very well. So I tend to have one or more catalogs for each year and am not using the year as a top level folder as you are doing. 1. Catalog naming My catalogs will be named yyyy-X, where X is the sequence number stating at 0 for the amount of catalogs I have from a certain year. 2. Folder structure My files are either imported directly into LR from my CF cards or directly from the camera when shooting tethered in the studio. In both cases my files end automatically into folders that are named yyyy-mm-dd, clientname-jobname. If the shoot is personal I might fore go the jobname part. As such my folders are named something like 2007-10-27, FALCON ADVERTISING - Digicel Launch. 3.File naming My files are renamed automatically during the import process and will be either clientname-xxx or jobname-xxx, where xxx is the automatically assigned 3 number sequence starting with 001 for each shoot. 4. Export naming 4.a.My files can be exported for different uses. All exports are done in LR. As such Unedited proofs send to the client can be either on CD or on the web in a LR created gallery in a 600×400px format. No special renaming is done in this case. 4.b.After the client selection images will be extensively post processed and send for approval over the web or email, these images will be exported in a 900×600 format with the text “-proof” appended to it. 4.c.Hi res files can be siend either as TIFF or JPG to the client, depending on their requierement and will have “-hires” appended to them and so forth. 4.d.Images exported for my portfolio or for use on the internet will have either “-portfolio” appended to them, or in the case of special formatting for specific website the website name or acronym appended to it. The last may seem trivial but some of the websites where I submit my images to will apply automatich sharpening to them in that case my export will have less sharpening on output. Others require special sizes and so on. I ended up writing a comment almost as long as your article :) I guess that you can see that I am truly inspired by your article. But that is also because I believe that a structured folder approach is a good start to some organisation of your images.
