January Project: Organizing in Lightroom Classic this past year's Photos

I think of myself as organized. Using Lightroom Classic CC on import, and as shown in the image below, my photos are placed in annual and monthly sub-folders, with some projects or sets of images placed in their own sub-folder. I figure this structure will help me stay organized if in the future I switch to some other editing software. 

My organizational problem is that my keywording is a bit hit-or-miss. At least until year-end.

Here’s my solution:

Usually (and again this year) in January I go through my prior year images to be sure they’ve all been keyworded. I don’t go crazy with keywords. For example, a photo with any of our five grandchildren is keyworded with “grandchildren” rather than individual names. 

In the process of keywording, I find I also delete a whole slew of images. Most of the deletions are duplicates. This end-of-the-year process forces me to choose the best of sometimes dozens of images of, for example, the same sunrise. Due to the passage of time (this year’s sunset images were from August and October), the deletion process somehow becomes easier. 

All the same sunrise.  I have now deleted all but four.

As it turns out, going through this process yesterday (it was a perfect day to sit at the computer, with outside temperatures in the single digits and high wind gusts that made some New England ski areas close their lifts for the day), I reduced my total images for the year from 3,000 to 1,800. Having said this, I’ll point out that I think I take 10,000 to 12,000 images a year with a huge number of deletions taking place immediately after uploading from memory cards to computer.

When I’m finished with the keywording and deletions, I drag the entire annual folder (ex. “2017”) from my internal drive to an external drive.  Once moved to the external drive, this tells me that my 2017 photos have been “finalized”. The internal drive now becomes available to collect my 2018 images.


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