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How will you use Lightroom catalogs? Will you have one catalog per job, one catalog per year, or just one catalog into which all of your images will be imported? There is no single correct answer, but it is your answer that will determine how you set up some other aspects of Lightroom’s structure. And while Lightroom is great at organisation, it needs your help.
Sometimes you need to combine images from various jobs into a single collection. In addition to Folders, Lightroom has Collections as well. You can manually transfer photos into collections, or ‘smart’ collections can collect images for you (for example, a smart collection that holds all photos with a star rating of 5, or all files that are videos).
Where are you going to physically store your photographs? It seems sensible for professional photographers to have separate folders for each job, possibly with sub-folders for more complicated jobs. In this way, you are ‘sorting’ your work into a sensible structure. You could name your folders with the date and a simple description: e.g. 160601-SmithFamily.
There are two types of metadata in Lightroom: EXIF (provided by the camera, such as exposure and date) and IPTC (provided by the photographer, such as business details, client name, location and keywords). Lightroom makes it easy to add IPTC data to your files. If you want Lightroom to help you sort and search your photos, you must add good IPTC data first.
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