LR keywording vs. tags

[JClishe]

I'm late to the party but wanted to jump in. I'm *strongly* anti-folder. I look at sscarmack's folder list and I think "that should be a keyword hierarchy".

My folder structure is year\month, so it looks like this:
2015
....2015-01
....2015-02
....etc
2014
....2014-01
....etc

So there's never any decision about what folder new images should go into; I made that decision many years ago.

My keyword hierarchy has top-level keywords for Events, Places, People, and Things with relevant keywords within those. So for example:

Events
....2014 Myrtle Beach Vacation
....2013 Cayman Islands Vacation
....Tyler's football games
....etc
Places
....Myrtle Beach
....Cayman Islands
....Thornton Park
....etc
People
....Tyler
....Mom
....Dad
Things
....FJ Cruiser
....Gear
....2002 YZ 450
....etc

My complete hierarchy has grown quite long over the years but I started out small and added keywords as necessary. You can add keywords on import so for the most part there's no extra effort here. If I have vacation pictures to import, I'd simply create the keywords first (if they didn't already exist), then add the keywords into the import dialog, done. Obviously if I'm tagging people (I only do that for family) then I'd go through after import and add those tags as appropriate.

It may seem duplicative to have some keywords both as an event and a place, like Myrtle Beach, but over my lifetime I may visit a place many times so if I want to see every picture I've ever taken in Myrtle Beach I'd go to Places\Myrtle Beach, or, if I wanted to see images from a specific vacation I'd use the Myrtle Beach Vacation keyword. Truth be told my Places hierarchy actually looks like Country\State\City and it's very extensive with places I've visited over the years.

So the keywords above combined with star ratings and smart collections makes the library extremely versatile and is very easy to setup.

 

[The_Traveler]

Agree totally with jClishe above
Another unspoken but important advantage of keyword hierarchy is that is a system that doesn't depend on the memory of the user where or when pictures were taken and stored.