if you're a digital photographer you probably have tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of images and if you're anything like most people you
probably feel a bit out of control today I'm going to show you how to start
taking back control of your image library hello I'm Robin Whalley
welcome to lenscraft today I'm looking at a problem facing most photographers
which is how to better organize your photos in particular I want to show you
how to use folders and collections to start getting back some control and
whilst I'm using Lightroom you can use this approach with any photo library
software that supports collections and that's most of them I've also published
an accompanying tutorial on my website and I'll include the link to this in the
YouTube video description now I want you to imagine that you've just come back
from a photo shoot and you want to download your images what you want to
avoid is just dumping everything into the same folder along with all your
other photos instead you'll need a folder structure that's easy to handle
make sense to you then importantly grows as you shoot more photos there are a lot
of different approaches you could use but I'm going to look at a date based
folder structure at the top we have a single folder that's going to hold all
the other folders we create below this we have a new folder for each year
notice that I'm using the year as the start of the folder name to help list
the folders in date order then within each year there's a separate folder for
each shoot this time the folder name starts with the date in the format of
year month and day this again helps to order the folders by date the folder
name also includes a shoot name to help me quickly recognize it now because I'm
a landscape photographer I've used the location of the shoot but you can use
anything that you'll easily recognize when I come back from a shoot I create
the shoot folder and use it to store all my images from that shoot it's a simple
way to keep my images organized and it's a system that grows with me it's the
basic structure I have in place to hold all my
all files but what happens when I want to edit one of these where do I save the
finished image or master file well it makes sense to save it to the same
location as the original raw file that way I can keep the two together as well
as any of the variants that I create but this does give me a problem how can I
easily see and organize all my finished master files this is where collections
can help let's look at a basic example where I want to organize all my finished
photos ready to add to a website I can use collections to create a structure to
hold my finished photos without it affecting my folders or the actual image
files I'll start by adding a top-level collection set and I'll call it website
gallery this is going to hold all my collections and images for the web site
collection sets are just a way of grouping related collections together
and they're a bit like folders on your computer next I'll add a landscape
collection set inside the website gallery set I can use the location
setting to pick where to add the new collection set
I'll then add two more collection sets called urban and abstract
collection sets are very flexible because you can organize them into
hierarchies which is something you can't do with collections what I've created is
a simple structure to organize my photos now I can have my collections - these
sets to represent individual galleries on the website I'll start by adding a
peak district collection to the landscape set notice that I'm creating a
collection and not a smart collection I'll be looking at smart collections in
a future video because they take a little bit more setting up in addition
to the peak district collection I'll create another one for late district and
for Scotland rather than continuing to build this structure further I'll jump
to the next step and I'll add some images I'll go to the folders panel and
browse through my images until I find one I want to add to a collection I can
then click and drag the image onto the collection when I see the collection
name turn blue I can release the mouse button to up the image
another way to add a photo to a collection is by clicking to select it
I can then right-click on the collection and choose the option to add
a third way to add a photo - a collection is by setting the
collection as a target you can do this by right-clicking the collection and
picking the option from the pop-up when the collections set as the target you'll
see a small plus icon to the right of the name now when I find an image or
images that I want to add to that collection I can select them and
right-click I then choose the add to Target collection option from the menu
or even easier I can just press B on my keyboard
now you have your images in the collection you can view them by
selecting the collection or collection set if I pick a collection Lightroom
displays the images in that collection but if I pick a collection set it
displays everything below that set in the structure well let's say that I no
want to create a book for my website using some of my finished images I can
create myself a separate collection set for that as before I'll create the
top-level collection set first and call this website book
then I'll duplicate one of the actions that I want to include from the
website gallery set notice the duplicate collection has the same images as the
original I can then drag the duplicated collection over to the new book
collection set to move it whilst both collections are showing the same images
I haven't created any new images they're both showing the original master file
that hasn't moved if I were to edit the master file to update it the updated
version would then show up in both collections next I'll delete the website
book collection set using this minus icon but this doesn't delete the
original master file that's still safe in the folder along with the original
Raw file it also doesn't delete the image from
any of the other collections collections are a great tool for managing your image
library efficiently as I said earlier I've published a tutorial on my website
fully explaining collections you'll find the link to this in the YouTube video
description I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft I'll see you
soon for another video