shawn

One thought on collection naming: In my existing (keyword-based) smart collections I use numeric prefixes on the collection names to keep them in a particular order in the UI. This would probably be a reasonable thing to use for the smart collections too. That is, if you have a collection named something like, “031 People I know – Reviewed” you can key on “031″ in the smart collection and be fairly well assured you’ll never run into problems with partial matches or the like.

Of course, putting numbers in the name doesn’t imply you have to go through the collections in any particular order in your workflow; it’s just really easy to make sure numbers are unique since any duplicates will sort right next to each other in the collections list.

When I first started, I used Lightroom strictly for my SLR shots, and iPhoto for my iPhone shots. I hated having to use both, so I took everything out of iPhoto and sorted the photos into Processed. And, somehow, I’ve misdeleted a whole wack of photos in the process.

I currently use one catalog at a time, and create a new one when one gets too big.

Raws in the file system are organized automatically through Lightroom by camera then by date.

Processed, ready to go public photos are exported to a “Processed” folder where it’s then divided into a thematic scheme, i.e., People, Places, Flowers, and so on.

iPhone photos first get dumped into a folder, then selected ones go into Lightroom for processing and later exporting to the Processed folder.

This has worked to a point, but has proved to be unscalable. For example, my “iPhone Dump” folder has gotten so big that I never select any to put into Lightroom. Sometimes, I edit photos on the Lightroom, and that photo on it’s own is ready to go public. When I sync with the Mac, that ready photo gets mixed in the iPhone Dump folder, and not Processed. Eventually I would have to sort this out.

Anyways, I’d like to “start from scratch” and adopt the scheme outlined here (as it makes sense) or some likeness to it. How would I go about this? If I reimport everything into a new catalog, would my chronology go haywire?

Not sure if current online services will do block-level uploading of changed parts, but my internet connection is limited enough to rather re-upload a 10kb xmp file than a 25mb DNG one!

Looking forward to a LR3 update as well, I am still not sure about the most practical way, besides just having one big catalogue, as the filtering and collections make any selection quite easy.
Cheers