how do you organize in lightroom 2.0?

[IPT]

Hey, well I just kicked out for Lightroom 2.0. So far it seems great. I am trying to decide on my fileing though. It seems that you can only search one "catalog" at a time, and if your catalog gets too big it slows things considerably. So my question is, how many catalogs do you have and how did you break it down. I imagine people that do weddings and such will do it by shoot. How about people more like me who are not making a living from this but still take a decent amount of photos. Some moose here, eagles there, landscapes and northen lights there... Are you doing it by year, type of photo (landscape, animals, other) or just using your "my pictures" in it entirety? Just curious on others hindsight and experience with this. Thanks

 

[BlueCorn]

There isn't any one set way of doing things and a lot depends on your shooting style. Landscapes are what I shoot most of the time. During a 4 day workshop I might only make 200-300 images. A sports, wildlife or wedding shooter is going to shoot more images just by the nature of what they do. That's common sense but I just wanted to put my comments into the proper perspective.

I keep about two years of images online at a time so my primary catalog generally has about 6,000 images in it. At the end of the year I use shift+click to highlight the years images that I want to archive and do an "export as catalog." That takes that bunch of images out of my master catalog and puts them into their own catalog so I can go back to them. (All of my images and catalogs get copied to 3 different hard drives and then stored in 2 different locations.

If I was shooting sports or weddings, I'd probably maintain a separate catalog for each job. I also use "collections" to group together master images that I regularly use for prints.

 

[IPT]

"At the end of the year I use shift+click to highlight the years images that I want to archive and do an "export as catalog." That takes that bunch of images out of my master catalog and puts them into their own catalog so I can go back to them."

Beerguy, can you elaborate on that? I am assuming you select only certain images from that year and export that and make it a new catalog? Do you for example just save your # picks, fav's, or what?

Just trying to get an idea of what others are doing.

I was at Denali last weekend for 5 days and took over 1500 frames! It'll be interesting to whittle that down and see how many images I get. I know for a fact I have over 100 images of the same sheep on a hillside..... you know, one looking one way in one shot, the other in the nect, one's eye is closed,or jaw looks busted, etc. I am sure I'll pick 2 images out of the 100. Maybe I should have a "sort" catalog and export the top 10% to the main catalog??

Just thinking out loud again......

 

[BlueCorn]

I delete obvious rejects at import then I export the whole folders as a new catalog. You can select multiple folders, within the Library module, and export them all as a single catalog. All of your picks and ratings stay intact.