Folders, Coding and Keywords

I have folders for my images on both the external hard drive and in LR. On the hard drive, the Raw images are sorted under either shoots by year and month, by trip, or subject. The “shoots” folder contains the mix of images taken during that particular month.

In LR any new images are imported into the folder ‘new’ with a subfolder for the month or trip. Once I am done with the selection and editing, the really good images get moved into the appropriate folder, the rest stays for a little while longer in the ‘new’ folder until I decide to have a final look at them and toss what I do not like.

In the LR library, I have many folders that make sense to me and allow me to quickly find images without having to do a search with keywords. (I have to admit that I am often not very good at keywording when I import and it is something I feel I need to to do some catch up work). Here are some folder titles as examples: National Parks (with subfolders for each park I have pictures of), landscapes (subfolders for areas in the US), International Travel (subfolders for countries or larger geographic areas). All local images go into the folder ‘Greater Santa Fe Area’ with subfolders for special local projects.

Since I have more images on my computer than I have on the web sites, I use color coding to denote which image is where. I don’t use the star coding much, except during the selection process.

As I said, my keywording can use some improvement. I am good with it, if I import images after every single outing where I can apply the keywords to all imported images. In catching up with it, I select the images, which get the same keyword(s) and apply them this way. Another option is the spray can symbol at the bottom.