Organizing in Lightroom with Scott Kelby | #BHDoF

Thanks for the useful tips!

All great info. One issue - Mr. Kelby admits that the people he is talking to “already know how to use lightroom, but their organization of same is awful”. Then he says we should start by putting everything into folders. What he didn’t tell me is how I go through my 65,000 images that are sorted buy year, and specifically key-worded, to put them into said folders. Im not going to open each image on the hard drive and see what folder it should be put into. Otherwise, this is a great bunch of information

i moved everything to a drive. It was stolen no more pics or vids wish i'd thought of 2 drives

Scott and B&H, this is absolute gold, incredible this is even free material. Hats off to you both!

I put all of my images from all different formats onto an external hard drive, now I can't get them into Lightroom and the bitley video only shows you how to get your Lightroom photos on a hard drive noe hard drive photos to Lightroom

This video is 10/10 - so good and valuable

When I got started in LR in 2009, there there is no such thing as collections. I used Folders, and I learned a way from a gentleman (I read his book but forgot his name and book title) and it works for me for the past 15 years doing photography professionally. Folders are split to 4 or 5 main category based on the work you do, ie weddings/school stuff ie graduations, senior portraits/commercial and corporate/events. Each sub folder is named with the year, month, date, followed by the name ie 20241109_JonathanChristineWed. As long as I know the approximate year/month of the shoot, I can pinpoint and find the folder and photos. Btw I have 4 diffferent pairs of Jonathan and Christine weddings over the years and I have no problem going straight to their folders with no confusion, simply because of the date. Likewise a regular company may hire me several times over the year, for years... and for all sorts of things from portraits to family day, to townhalls, to interiors shoot to product shoots and there will be no problem finding a specific image among 50 thousands of images from that company, as long as I know the date, and I will know because it will be in emails or whatsapp history. Image of Tom sommersaulting during Family Day for ABC company in 2013? No problem, go to Corporate folder, 2013 and look for ABC Company - Family Day. Collections on the other hand, had been extremely messy for me. I don't want to go to the turtles folder and not sure which turtle belongs to which customer out of the 3000+ turtle images. How about the fish image which was related to the turtle... suddenly things get complicated. I only use quick collections for assembling a blog post or doing a fast selects of previews for a client or so. The main chronological structure that ensure I have decades of sensible archival is always chronology ie year/month/date followed by a name of the event or client. And I have two catalogs, 2009 to 2024, and 2024 onwards to current, so, still a one catalog strategy, but after 15 years, its reasonable to start a second one for better management.

Can someone please shine a light on me and confirm my doubts? If the current state of my catalogue and all the photos on HDDs and SSDs is a mess ... would I be better off organizing them into all the appropriate "root" folders on the "mother" SSD inside lightroom folders to retain all the editing I've already done over the years ? What would be the best way to go about it? Please explain it to me like I am a 12 year old child :D TIA

This is excellent! It seems a little redundant to have a "picks" and "selects" collection. Just have the main collection and use filters? Idk, I find filters super easy. Love the advice here though!

In English. I don't understand that such a (mostly self expressed) photoguru gives this advice to make maps and so on.
The catalog of Lightroom gives you all methods to sort, select and whatever your pictures.
So. Keep your photos in maps with a name given by your camera software as eos utility. Nameofcamerayearmonthday. Even Lightroom can do that if you import directly from your card or camera to disk.
Before importing set all your tags. When you work with numbers for your shoots set them, further on everything you want like place, subject, and so on. Date is us not necessary because its in the exif. Even place is not necessary because you can use gps if applicable. After Import you can even give all persons on the photo a name
So. If you search whatever name in whatever place in whatever situation or whatever day or whatever you have tagged, tell it Lightroom and you get the picture. No fuzzing around in your explorer searching for whatever you rhought you could find.
No Scott Kellby for me. Are his other advices of the same quality?
So when you search for a spe

Scott Kellby snapt niet erg dat Lightroom catalogus juist voor wegnemen veel werk zorgt. Raar en vreemd. Zorg zelf bij importeren al voor de juiste tags en gedie met sorteren en mappen maken is nergens voor nodig. Brengt zo heel veel mensen in de moeilijkheden.
Mag ik nu ook twijfelen aan zijn andere adviezen?

Great video! Photos still have to be imported into a physical folder on the hard drive during the import process. My question: do you create a folder in Lightroom for the shoot that you are importing (and then never mess with it)? Or do you import the photos from the shoot into the top level folder in your Lightroom Catalog?

scott I could kiss you!!!! Thank you for your service.

Bro the WD 8 TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black is £157.97 on amazon as of now :(

Hi Scott. Brilliant advice, Thank you 🙏🏼. I have a question though. What about culling images from full shoot that will not be a pick or select.

Quite the most useful video on Lightroom

Very helpful, thank you. I have one question, when you create a top level collection set (name of the shoot), when and how do they get moved into your main categories that you mentioned at the start of the lesson? I noticed that you can't move a collection set into another collection set. Cheers 👍

Thank You..Thank You Scott, I wish I had discovered this sooner! You have just helped me so much and taken away the frustration I have had learning Lightroom!

What a show man! Super informative and entertaining! Thanks!

What is wrong with iPhoto & then edit in PS?…of course backup on external drive.

It takes an hour long video to simplify organizing your photos? You bet! A great investment of time. This brought my LrC under control in a couple hours before it got totally out of hand. Awesome, thank you Scott!

Very Well Done!!!!

Hi Scott . Why wouldnt u just buy a big mirror drive instead of 2 drives please

I like this system but what about family pictures? Everyday pictures of the family. I wouldn't create a new collection each day? What's a better way?

Great video! Scott is the BOSS OF PHOTO, as usual :) I am sitting and setting uo my Lightroom Collections right now. But one question is in my head - at which exact moment should I backup my photos to the other HDD or Cloud? As far as I understood first thing is to copy photos from memory card to external HDD. But when should I copy it to second HDD (or cloud)?

you've saved my life

This is probably a very stupid question, but how do I backup the harddrive if I have them in different locations? I'm guessing I'm somehow going via the cloud or my laptop, but you emphasize to NOT have the photos on the laptop. Advise pls.

Scott is still as funny ever. I have been using LR since It first came out. I guess it's time for me to use Collections

Why is it always about Lightroom? What happened to Camera Raw? I tried both and still prefer Camera Raw.

I always use Bridge to import my photos, but I see that you just copy the photos to a folder. Am I wasting disc space by using Bridge? I'm thinking it's not necessary! Comments??

This is fantastic! TY. Couple of questions. My main computer keeps crashing. Hesitant to create new catalog in it. Is the cloud best? I'm hesitant, bc then I'll be locked into adobe for life :))) $$$. Thinking keeping the new catalog on my laptop. Thoughts on best practice? Can a catalog be shared between 2 computers? does that even make sense? Thanks for your help.

I cannot tell you how help this video has been. Thanks so much for posting this!

Wow@@ I load my images to a Desk Top Folder then into LR, After processing I load to Smugmug & a external Hard Drive for images processed to save. I save unprocessed RAW images to an External Hard Drive. Then i delete images from Light Room. this is a simply process for an old man in his 80's. Your Video was very interesting imparted a lot of knowledge along with very entertaining. Thank You very very much.

Great but frankly....To much work. Just make new catalogue for each shoot. The end

I haven’t even watched this video yet BUT….years ago, vintage LR3…. I suffered a massive problem with the catalogs/organization …retrieving of specific images that it drove me AWAY! Like I still feel the frustration. I still use LR for editing sometimes…but I need to learn the Libraries/organizational side.

Hopefully this gets ME organized to USE Lightroom as it’s meant to be: Efficiently as a DATA BASE.

This is not all that helpful. How are you supposed to sync a backup drive in a safe deposit box? Go to the bank and pick it up every few months? And starting out with 6 folder categories? This means you have to move photos one by one into each of these? What if you have 30,000? Who is doing that? Adbbe just sucks. And I have been a customer of theirs for 20 years. Gets worse every year.

For file management, I got tired of drilling down into 4 categories to get to the day I took the photo I’m looking for. So now my folder naming convention goes:

[yyyy]-[mmdd] [Description]

So a typical folder name looks like:

2024-0601 Wisconsin Trip

Prior to editing photos, I copy that name and batch name all of my images from that set the same name. This way, when you sort by name, folders lay out in perfect chronological order, with easy to browse descriptions.

If you copy a photo somewhere and need to put it back later, you go right to the folder with the same name and paste it.

When you edit a photo, keep the name, and add -Edited or -Watermarked, and then the edited photos land right next to the original photo so it all stays together.

You just have to be willing to scroll a little, but I prefer that to drilling down, finding out I’m in the wrong set of folders, backing out, drilling down again, etc etc.

I learnt soooooo much. Thank you

The replicated hard drive in the office or friends house is the dumbest solution to redundancy I've heard. Why not use a local drive and something like Microsoft OneDrive? You can use the local drive for speed and let OneDrive synchronize the cloud copy. It allows you full version control too. The same synchronized folders are available on a laptop ot ipad too. So travel is covered. I really liked the advice on folder, file and catalog organization. The section on Collections and importing changed my whole work flow. THANK YOU!!

Wish there had bee a 20 minute Q&A.

seems so easy, it is not...lightroom interface is no bueno

If this is your first time looking for the right video to learn how to organize your photos, do yourself a favor and watch this. You might find other videos that are 10 minutes long, but after watching a few of those, you'll eventually circle back here anyway.

So if I take a full shoot of say a soccer game, and a lot are blurred, I have these RAW files on my hard drive. They're in "full shoot" then how do I delete them off my hard drive so they no longer exist? I obviously would't want to keep a blurry or misfire shot. .Thanks this is the best organization tutorial for LrC ever.

Just an FYI – in case you haven't heard yet. "Lightroom" is NOT "Lightroom Classic'!
This video Title states "LIGHTROOM" yet the video is about LrC.

Wow! I have used folders for years. Scott presented the best argument to use collections instead: photos are available in any module. Excellent presentation.

Fantastic your video, man. Congrats. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 the first one that I could understand.