Lightroom Organizing Disaster...Need Suggestions

I would follow with the plural so it would be Stormy and Clouds, to that I would probably add Thunder, Rain and Sky (where I don't use the plural).

I tend to take more shots of field crops, so my keywords for a photo like that would actually be more focused on that as that is what I would probably search for.
 
It seems like a lot of work but then again once I keyword everything and rate most stuff, it won't be so bad when I Import next time. To keyword 10,000 photos it sure does takes a long time, haha.
 
It seems like a lot of work but then again once I keyword everything and rate most stuff, it won't be so bad when I Import next time. To keyword 10,000 photos it sure does takes a long time, haha.

This is just me, but unless you have a gazillion photos that important to you - keyword for the most part going forward. Not worth spending precious life keywording a gazillion photos you won't every do anything with, or that you will create again likely better than before. If you are bored and have lots of time on your hands....as you were. :)
 
It seems like a lot of work but then again once I keyword everything and rate most stuff, it won't be so bad when I Import next time. To keyword 10,000 photos it sure does takes a long time, haha.

This is just me, but unless you have a gazillion photos that important to you - keyword for the most part going forward. Not worth spending precious life keywording a gazillion photos you won't every do anything with, or that you will create again likely better than before. If you are bored and have lots of time on your hands....as you were. :)

Well there are a lot of photos that I have forgot about and never shared. So I thought about working on them cause there are some really good shots I just forgot about them. I've been removing a lot of useless junk too. I don't have exactly 10,000 photos, but around 8,000. I did a whole year's worth of photos in probably 45 minutes so not bad.
 
It seems like a lot of work but then again once I keyword everything and rate most stuff, it won't be so bad when I Import next time. To keyword 10,000 photos it sure does takes a long time, haha.

This is just me, but unless you have a gazillion photos that important to you - keyword for the most part going forward. Not worth spending precious life keywording a gazillion photos you won't every do anything with, or that you will create again likely better than before. If you are bored and have lots of time on your hands....as you were. :)

Well there are a lot of photos that I have forgot about and never shared. So I thought about working on them cause there are some really good shots I just forgot about them. I've been removing a lot of useless junk too. I don't have exactly 10,000 photos, but around 8,000. I did a whole year's worth of photos in probably 45 minutes so not bad.
Oh 45 minutes. You are hired. Haaaa.
 
I've watched a TON of YouTube videos and read a lot of blogs about how you should organize your photos in Lightroom and a lot of them tell you to avoid the date folder structure because Lightroom already has a way to browse by date. But if you look for photos by date, filter, keywords or collections then I guess why does it matter what your folder structure looks like if you never browse it anyways.?
 
I just use the Date format as it just requires a quick check at Import to see that I it is going where it is supposed to. The Keywords could be the name of the event or subject, if various then I will add later. An after selected the photos to process I may add a more keywords to those specific photos.

This is usually a time to do a bit of photo sorting so I'll probably be doing a bit as well between now and the end of the year.
 
I just use the Date format as it just requires a quick check at Import to see that I it is going where it is supposed to. The Keywords could be the name of the event or subject, if various then I will add later. An after selected the photos to process I may add a more keywords to those specific photos.

This is usually a time to do a bit of photo sorting so I'll probably be doing a bit as well between now and the end of the year.

I've already processed the 2010 folder and almost finished 2011 so far. What I ended up doing was saving the metadata and then remove all the photos in 2011 and then import them back into Lightroom using the data format and I've found more images that I never seen before..like ones that never got imported or shots that I removed, but not deleted from the hard drive. Could of been accidental or on purpose but either way, cool! I've always felt like I was missing photos.

Its a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

So we have a classic car that we bring to shows a lot and I take a lot of pictures of it. I'm trying to figure out how I can keyword the car so when I search for photos of our car, I only want to see ours not someone else's car that's the same make and model. Any ideas?

I'm still on the fence about what to do with our home renovation photos. I'm thinking to just export them as JPG and remove them from the Lightroom catalog.
 
Now when I delete I delete from disk, otherwise you have photos that remain on the disk, but are not in LR.

My '68 442 I had as Dave442 (hence the name here). Just need to give your car a name.

The Home Renovation photos can just be JPG in a directory on an external disc. I would take them out of LR. I guess an option would be to leave one photo and in the Caption note the location that you stored the JPG's at.
 
Now when I delete I delete from disk, otherwise you have photos that remain on the disk, but are not in LR.

My '68 442 I had as Dave442 (hence the name here). Just need to give your car a name.

The Home Renovation photos can just be JPG in a directory on an external disc. I would take them out of LR. I guess an option would be to leave one photo and in the Caption note the location that you stored the JPG's at.

68 442 is a nice ride, we got a 76 Ford Torino. You know..the Starsky & Hutch car. Haha.
 
@Dave442 How would you keyword travel photos, like say if I visited a small city with a big lake with the family for half a day. Took pictures of the lake, boats, downtown, birds, etc. Would you just use general keywords for the name of the lake, town/city and state?
 
For Travel I often include word as one of the Keywords. Then the general location is also added to all the photos and possibly the main landmark, so Lake, Town, City, State is usually good. Sometimes I add the County if it is something that I may use in a search as it often covers a day of travel while a small town doesn't. I also add Country to photos outside the U.S.
I usually don't expect my Keywords to get me right down to the photo I am looking for, but if I had some decent bird shots from that trip I would add Birds (and BIF if really lucky) as a keyword at least on the picture or two that were Rated. Later, if looking for a bird shot I would see one or two from that trip and may take a look at the Folder(s) of that trip (which are just by date).
 
For Travel I often include word as one of the Keywords. Then the general location is also added to all the photos and possibly the main landmark, so Lake, Town, City, State is usually good. Sometimes I add the County if it is something that I may use in a search as it often covers a day of travel while a small town doesn't. I also add Country to photos outside the U.S.
I usually don't expect my Keywords to get me right down to the photo I am looking for, but if I had some decent bird shots from that trip I would add Birds (and BIF if really lucky) as a keyword at least on the picture or two that were Rated. Later, if looking for a bird shot I would see one or two from that trip and may take a look at the Folder(s) of that trip (which are just by date).

I think I'm slowly getting the hang of this.

I created a parent keyword called Subjects so all subject keywords like, flowers, shoes, sunglasses, animals, etc all go under that parent keyword. I kind of like this because I can easily find photos when browsing the keywords.

I like the fact that I don't have to worry about naming the folders anymore..I can just import them..then cull the best, rate, edit and keyword and I most likely won't ever have to go back to that folder again.

I created a Temp folder for shots that I don't plan on keeping..these maybe test shots or just shots for eBay, Facebook or Craigslist etc. If I do plan on keeping them, its just a simple drag and drop process.

Do you keep videos in Lightroom? I personally don't. It makes me install Quicktime and I hate Quicktime, haha. I just deselect videos when importing photos into Lightroom and manually take them off the memory card and into the proper video folder I've created. From there I edit it using Vegas Pro.
 
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I use the Keywords Test_Shot and For_Others on shots that were just brought into LR for checking something or maybe a quick test edit of someones photo for critique. Then I go back an delete these images.

I do go back to my date Folders, just because I just don't get around to adding complete Keywords to every photo. So if I have a photo with the Keyword I may check some of the date Folders that did turn up with photos that had the Keyword for other similar shots.
 
I use the Keywords Test_Shot and For_Others on shots that were just brought into LR for checking something or maybe a quick test edit of someones photo for critique. Then I go back an delete these images.

I do go back to my date Folders, just because I just don't get around to adding complete Keywords to every photo. So if I have a photo with the Keyword I may check some of the date Folders that did turn up with photos that had the Keyword for other similar shots.

@Dave442 Do you add photos taken with your phone to the Lightroom library? I know some create a separate folder for those shots. Just curious what you do with them.
 

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