Photo Storage and Organization

[KimN]

Hello All -

I'm looking for advice on how best to manage my digital photos. I've recently begun shooting in RAW and have bought a massive external to help manage the file sizes. Right now I have photos in my old iphoto library on an external hard drive, I have photos on my newer Macbook, and I have photos in Lightroom.

Previously I had been importing only the photos I wanted to edit into Lightroom, but I've begun to upload all my pictures directly to Lightroom. Is that the proper way to use Lightroom? It seems like I have less issues with editing photos later, since the original copy is always available. If I continue to do this, I'm not sure how to balance some pictures in Lightroom on my computer, and others on my external - will I have to export them from Lightroom and delete the originals??

Any help you can give would be appreciated! Clearly I'm a beginner at this.

 

[KmH]

Get, read, and study The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

Lightroom's primary reason for being is image database management.
However, as described in the book Ii linked to above effectively using Lightroom's image database management capability requires a fair amount of work, in the form of image rating and keywording, when adding images to the database.