How I Organize My Photos in LightRoom Classic

MY WORKFLOW

My Folders

LightRoom is a cataloging system, not a storage system. This means when you import your photos, Lightroom has an arrow that points to where your photos are. If you move your photos outside of the app then a question mark shows up under your photos because LR doesn't know where your photo went, and it is still pointing to the previous location. This means you must move the photos within the app using the folders tab by dragging and dropping. I like to rarely move these to avoid any broken links.

I have separate folders by month, then one folder which holds my exported edited content. This saved folder will not show up under folders in the picture because it is exported only. I put these on my internal computer space so that Lightroom can run faster, and I don't need to connect a hard drive to edit photos.

My Collections

Collections is a way for me to organize my photos easily in Lightroom. Every photo goes into a collection so that I can find photos for my galleries and instagram content. My family photos are exported and stored on google photos. I pay 2.99 a month for drive storage and these are shared with my family. I sync(the sideways lightning arrows) some folders so that I can access them on Lightroom CC, my iPad, and even my iPhone. I have a max space of 1TB for LR Cloud space under the photography LR plan which is $21.00 a month.

Hard Drive Backup

You always should have a back up hard drive. I manually copy my photos to a backup folder on my hard drive under 2021. Then, to save space - I can move my folders on my computer to the hard drive so that Lightroom now points to the hard drive. I am not able to delete those photos from my computer. This does mean if you want to access those photos on Lightroom now; you have to plug in your hard drive. I plan on only moving the photos to my hard drive annually.

Import Workflow

I insert my SD card in then copy my photos to a folder in whatever month they were taken. The format is date - location - event. I then go through each photo and reject the ones I want to delete, I also add photos to different collections. I use hot keys for this to increase efficiency. X for set as rejected photo and B to add the photo to a target collection. Then I filter by rejected photos and delete all rejected photos from the disk.

Cost

$21.00: Adobe Creative Cloud Photo Plan(Photoshop, LR Classic, LR CC with 1Tb of Cloud Storage)

$2.99: Google Photo Storage(200 GB)

Total Cost per month: $23.99

Do you have a LR Classic workflow? I’d love to hear what is working for you! I will post more about how I use both Classic and CC to edit my photos, thanks for reading!