Organizing 1,000's of photos

I am looking at Light Room, both for editing and organizing photos.

I need something simple to use for organizing.......would this be a good way to go if I want the LR for editing?

Using PSP X2 now......

It can mean different things to different people. Some people still want to operate in a strict folder system and think LR will prevent that which isn't the case. LR will take any folder system you want to use and work with that. There are plenty of misconceptions out there about what "importing" means for LR. It simply means telling LR where your files are. Having told it where they are then the only thing to avoid is then moving them about outside LR as it will lose track. This isn't the end of the world but you would be making work for yourself.

So where to start? How do you currently organise your photos? Do you use some sort of folder system based on dates, locations, people or any other tag? It is worth thinking through how you want to do this in the future to save rearranging stuff later.

Once you are ready to start importing and building your LR catalogue it is easiest to do it folder at a time. In this way you can easily assign tags to groups of photos at a time. I have over 45,000 photos in one catalogue and find it very easy to find any photo by using keywords and metadata. I nest keywords in groups to make it easier to find the right keyword for sorting. I sort the entire catalogue by date with newest photos first.

Then you have all the power of virtual folders which is how I think of collections. It is a very powerful concept and this is one example of the benefits of using a database approach like LR rather than relying on physical folders to sort everything.

I recommend having a look at Julieanne Kost's LR videos on Adobe TV.

It's a very good question, and given the quantity of photos and work effort involved in indexing, once you made a choice there is no going back. I used ACDSee, and tried Lightroom too. I found Lightroom to be an "acquired tasted" myself. Somehow I just don't find its ways very logical and certainly not intuitive, for me at least. I found that you have to put much effort up-front figuring out how it works. I'm not particularly fond of its image output either actually. Many times, I found that after applying multiple corrections and effects, that it introduced all sort of artifacts in my images, that was bad. Most will disagree, and I guess it's popular for a reason, but I never got around to "appreciating" it I guess, but worth a try I presume. Also try ACDSee, you may like the way it manages images better. In the end, I'd be hard pressed to steer anyone away from Lightroom photo management functions, as I have given up on it before I was able to get to understand it enough to tell whether I like it better than ACDSee or not. Whichever way you go, my only recommendation is that once you get into managing images, forget File Manager (or whatever tool you may be using to manage image files and folders on your computer), and manage (create, move, archive to external drive, delete etc.) files and folders entirely from within the photo manager of your choice, or else, things get astray quite easily.

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Roger

Thank you both.............I have recently watched the videos mentioned, probably should have done that first

I really don't have a method and that is where I am drowning............I've got images on 2 computers and an external HD. I know many images are duplicated and I have to make up my mind to sort them before I go completely crazy.

I will look into ACDSee......they have SO many programs. I want something to edit and organize.

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Brian

Photo Mechanic By Camerabits....fastest out there....expensive though.

LR to "organize" up to 100,000 photos per catalogue (there is no hard limit though).

PhotoMechanic to browse or filter 1000s of previously uncatalogued images fast.

LR to do darkroom type photo manipulations.

Photoshop for advanced artistic work with selected photos.

YMMV

One if the stronger features of LR as an image catalogue is that it can continue to work when images go offline, i.e., to browse and manipulate images residing in unaccessible archives. A weak point is that you cannot make it rescan for exif data, only xmp. Exif data may change if you use a tool like exiftool. Moreover, the LR catalog file actually is an open source database format, opening a few options when forced to migrate.

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Falk Lumo

A second vote for AcdSee. Look at the 'Pro 8', edits and organizes.

What I like about it is there is no Import. If you open a folder you can start organizing or editing

immediately.

Dan F

Lightroom is great. The easiest thing to do is to gather all the folders with pictures into one monster folder in the location where you want to keep your pics. Create the catalogue in that folder and import the whole lot. After that you can organize all your pics into folders, out of folders, create new folders, rename folders - the whole malarkey through Lightroom. Whatever you do, don't move things around or change the folder structure by going direct (as I have done in moments of absent-mindedness) because that will destroy the linkage between the moved photos and your catalogue and reestablishing those linkages is a pain in the proverbial.

Some people seem to have problems grasping the conceptual basis of Lightroom, but it's worth spending the time and trouble, as it transforms a large collection of photos from a burden into a pleasure. At least, that's my experience.

Dana F said:

What I like about it is there is no Import. If you open a folder you can start organizing or editing immediately.

Click to expand...

Well, it would still look into the folder. In LR, you have to tell it to look for changes in folder tree first (via the sync popup menu option). Faster if there were no changes, a click slower if there were changes.

Overall, I'd say ACDSee (Windows version only) sits somewhere in between PhotoMechanic and LR. All three are viable alternatives. IMHO.

I've tried several iterations of Lightroom and just don't like it. I know it's very popular here but I just think it's typical Adobe bloatware. The programme insists on running a crazy catalogue that seems to be a resource hog - and don't ever try to back it up or copy it - unless you want to leave your computer running all night.
ACDsee Pro is a wonderful programme, often completely underestimated here where the majority seem to be enthralled with Lightroom. ACDsee Pro has a very powerful yet simple cataloguing, tagging, sorting capability. It's a great editor - RAW development or JPG editing - or RAW editing. It has some great batch processing capacity, can create CDs, slideshows, create desktop wallpapers - etc etc. And no, I don't have shares in ACDsee.

And one final thing - I have rarely seen a photograph posted here that can't be improved with ACDsee Pro. In my humble opinion of course :-D

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Mike McEnaney. (emem)
www.veritasmea.com

emem said:

The programme insists on running a crazy catalogue that seems to be a resource hog - and don't ever try to back it up or copy it - unless you want to leave your computer running all night.

Click to expand...

On my aged notebook, backing up one of my catalogs (60k images) is a matter of maybe 1 minute (run automatically by LR btw) and the backup compressed to zip weights a mere 100MB for said 60.000 images.

The catalog is blazingly fast too, filtering said 60k images (e.g., a lens) happens in real time, same for virtual/smart folders etc. ACDSee does the same thing btw (using a database), only maybe a less transparent to the user.

Maybe this can narrow it down for me.............I am an older man who doesn't have the attention span of most here, therefore I need the one that is the easiest to complete my task with the least amount of effort. I am probably going to delete at least 1/2 of what I have stored as they mean nothing to anyone.

I really do appreciate the comments you all have given me and I will continue searching for tutorials and feedback to determine what is going to work best for me.

thanks again!

I've found Lightroom to be a great product to organize pictures... much better than Elements (I wouldn't even use the organizer in Elements as I didn't like it).

I suggest looking at Media Pro if all you are going to do is manage digital assets. The program will work on video, stills (nearly any format - TIFF, JPEG, flavors of RAW etc) and documents. Media Pro is the latest incarnation of the DAM (Digital Asset Management) tool described in the DAM book. (I leave the exercise of looking up the DAM book to those that are interested). The history is:

IMedia -> Expression Media -> Media Pro

Another tool is Capture One v8, which has merged the RAW converter program with Media Pro asset management. (Media Pro 1 and Capture One are software offerings of Phase One) However, I am having serious issues with C1 v8 right now, it is crashing in a big way on a daily basis as I attempt to update metadata in my catalogue. Adobe is not the only player here, don't get caught up in the Adobe cabal.

Disclaimer - I have LR also so I have different methods of working with my RAW images.

BrianC said:

I am looking at Light Room, both for editing and organizing photos.

I need something simple to use for organizing.......

Click to expand...

I've noticed that our computers allowed us to group our files into nested folders. Can't get simpler than that.

I have all my images set into folders by date. However that does not help me when I want to look at images by location, camera type, lens type, ISO, keywords etc. I can look in each folder for that one image or group of images but looking through 543 folders is not very efficient. Having a program that is capable of looking through all of those folders and being able to filter them is the only way to go.

I prefer the interface to Capture One over Lightroom. The default for filtering in Lightroom is four fields with details scrolling down from the top. Capture One borrows from Media Pro and provides a easy to use filtering mechanism that runs down the side of the workspace. I have LR, Capture One and Media Pro (which is only a Digital Asset Manager - not a converter or editor). My preference is Capture One even with the performance issues I am having with version 8.