# Suggestions on how to organize all my years of photo's in LR 4.3?



## KKCFamilyman (Feb 18, 2013)

Currently they are in windows

Year
Month
Date taken folders

I tried the iphoto thing years ago and it ruined years of phot's so very hesitant to do something that will not leave them in their original repository on my server. Any suggestions would be appreciated.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Feb 18, 2013)

What ever works for you is the right way. There are numerous popular ways of organizing, but they all require keywording to make the best use of the database. I'm lazy and have not always done keywording carefully.
If you do not religiously keyword everything, organize the way you feel is comfortable.
BUT ... Lightroom knows the year, month, and day of each photo, merely go to the filter panel in the library and the first column is the date. Drill down to the date you want, and only images from that period are shown, it could be year, year and month, or year, month, and day.
This might tell you that filing them by location, event, or some other type of organization would provide information that Lightroom does not do (unless you keyword those things)
I file mine by event, the date takes care of itself. If I were to always keyword them, they could all go into one directory. I also break my rule for a multi day event, adding the date to the directory such as when I'm doing a play, and there are two or more days of dress rehearsals, then I create a folder for each day because some of the actors might be missing or out of costume on one of the days and I do not want to miss his/her image. Of course, I'll forget this after a month or two, but by then, the project is finished.


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## weixing (Feb 18, 2013)

Hi,
Yes, learn to use the keywords and keyword hierarchies to organize your photo is the way to go. For example, my keyword hierarchies is something like the below:

- *NEW
- LOCATION
- Country A
- Location Name
- EVENT
- Birding Trips
- Birthday
- Family Trips
- LANDSCAPE
- PEOPLE
- Family
- Friend
- WILDLIFE
- Birds
- Bird Family Name
- Bird Name

Every photo will have one or more keywords associate with it, so I can use the smart collection to find any photos or create virtual album quickly (for example, all "Birding Trips" photo I took in "Country A"). Also, all photo that I just imported will have the "*New" tag, so I can use the smart collection to find all photo I haven't tag yet easily and take my time to tag them. Once finish tagging, I'll remove the "*New" tag from those photo.

As you can see the keywords and keyword hierarchies are very powerful and how to organize it is basically depend on you. 

Have a nice day.


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## David Hull (Feb 18, 2013)

KKCFamilyman said:


> Currently they are in windows
> 
> Year
> Month
> ...



What you have is fine. Now since you are in LR start tagging your photos. It is unlimited what you can do using the database driven architecture of a program like LR. Start with people’s names; organize these in terms of Friends, Family, etc. My folders are Year -> Quarter -> YYYYMMDD_Description. The whole point of LR is that you don’t need a folder structure any more complex than what you have.

You have to be religious about tagging though.


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## Marsu42 (Feb 18, 2013)

dilbert said:


> You need to learn how to use keywords and keyword hierarchies.



+1, don't use categories ("folders") since that's not the lr way - if you want to filter down something use smart folders ("keywords contain "grandma" and "birthday" and "2012-04-01").



dilbert said:


> Start with using both date and location based keyword hierarchy.



It's also nice to geo-tag your shots, either through LR4 and metadata presets or even (and still) better with the free geosetter software that automatically adds location keywords (lr: write keywords, tag in geosetter, lr: read keywords).



David Hull said:


> You have to be religious about tagging though.



It's best if tagging is done right after import, so that there aren't lots of untagged photos floating around.


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## Menace (Feb 18, 2013)

I use key words soon as photos are ready to be imported in to LR - such as family, xyz's birthday, xyz's beach trip, etc etc

Cheers


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