how to ORGANIZE your LIGHTROOM PHOTO collection! 

THIS VIDEO IS RIGHT ON TIME FOR ME! I just upgraded to Lightroom Classic, and I have no problem editing my photos, but I need help organizing them with catalogs, collections and folders and this is going to make my life MUCH easier...THANKS!

Fantastic solution for one of the most fundamental questions for understanding Lightroom, or "make your own visual understanding" of the program

That was quite informative. Just enough to get me started with Lightroom as my pictures definitely need organising!

Thanks for the instructional! This helped me get a better grasp on how to work with Lightroom.

Thanks man! you've explained very well!!

This was a very useful video. It may not have the "wow" factor of some, but once you have several thousand images, and start moving them around on hard drives, it is useful to know how to do that so Lightroom can still find them. If you have moved images another way, Lightroom does ask if you want to locate it, which you can do. It sets up a new link to the new location, and even establishes additional links to photos in that location. It works, but this definitely faster. Thank you.

If you do make changes on the finder level its not a huge problem. You can relocate, update folders or use synchronize folder. I re-organize on the finder level all the time. Which can be a lot quicker to do. As long if you have everything in a single root folder then synchronize folder is your friend. This will simply update all changes and will even import new images that arent imported yet.

Awesome understandable tips and you just saved me so much time to reorganize my LR mess!

thank you very much that was very very helpful! I'm a beginner user of Lightroom and your video saved me

Great tutorial. To the point and easy to understand. I feel greatly relieved that I can omit Catalog and create Folders for all my images. Thank-you for this tutorial.

Great video. It gave me ideas and inspiration to better organize my LR Classic content. Once done, I plan on useing CC moving forward as a repository and Classic as needed. Thanks

Thank you, exactly what i was looking for!

This was so helpful. Thank you!

I am on my second go at lightroom and am as bewildered by the file management as I was the first time. This video has given me hope!

it is so awesome to see someone with drag racing folders!

clear and simple explanation. thanks a lot!

The most clear material on how to sort this mess out. Thank you, guess I postponed it so much, just to find your video :))

Thank you such a refresher

JUST LEARNED COLLECTIONS, THANKS

Soooh good. This is going to take quite sometime but it'll be worth it. The best mess tidier I've found. I know I'm going to come back for reference. Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot ! This video helped me a lot !

Amazing! Thank you!

Very helpful. Thank you!

great video man. You are a life saver

Thanks for sharing : I remember early on that LR (folders) did have all my hard drive folders under "Pictures" on the left side. But, now when I click the Pictures folder, there are no folders under it at all. I believe I got so frustrated in the way I had unfortunately organized my images in LR, (never being able to find the image, or when I did find the image in LR, I couldn't work on them because LR couldn't find the file) I somehow removed or deleted the folders represented in LR that were in the Pictures folder. Question : How do I reboot LR to recognize the many folders inside of Pictures on my hard drive ?

Thank you it was very helpful..

Well explained thank you.

So useful! Thank you :)

Thanks this help a lot !!

Very good guide... thanks for that.

Thanks for sorting out the chaos and clutter of my unmanaged LR. Just need to learn how to back my images up on an external hard drive when I import them. Thanks.

thank you - I have watched many LR videos, this one makes sense -

Excellent tutorial - thanks

Thank you so much for the great info. I still have a problem of how to merge catalogs. Do you have a tip on that?

This was incredibly helpful. Unbelievable sir

Very helpful thanks

Very helpful. Thanks

Thanks so much ... saved me a lot of headaches and work. lol

I have lightroom as part of the Adobe Photography package. I've not used it a lot yet, but this is getting me excited about organizing all my photos (and even graphics files created in Photoshop, Poser, DAZ, etc). My biggest problem is being able to FIND a particular image by it's content. Looks like organizing in Lightroom and using keywords might well be the answer. Thanks, Colin!

Excellent instructions on how to solve my biggest problem, three disks and a thousand copies. Thanks very much.

Thank you!

finally I understand how to organize my lr photos. tks

Thank you 🙏

Thank you!!!

Thanks for this tutorial. I have archived all my photos through lightroom CC 2015 onto my harddrive and now have updated to lightroom classic cc...how to I move the archived photos into lightroom classic cc with all my ratings and edits???? Would love some help with this please

Great video!

-- Thank you!

Thanks for you sharing! I finally know how to solve these picture problems, HaHa!

For the past 3 years ive been shooting and backing up and organizing my photos by date Create catalog label (2017/October/19/ " Activity or shoot") I now would like to create ONE single catalog for a year and go about organizing my photos in one place unless I have a shoot with a client which i would create its own catalog. The question being how can i take the past 3 years of catalogs, work, edits, and transfer them into one catalog. Any help with this would be very much appreciated thanks.

This is very helpful in learning how to move files, pictures, etc. I am just starting to load all my pictures into LightRoom. So far only have about 150. Didn't want to dump all at once and really screw things up! If I grasp what you are saying, I think the actual picture file still resides in "MY PICTURES". A link is created in the catalog and stored with all the instructions and changes to be applied to the original picture upon export. Collections is a way to group your pictures in many different ways without physically moving them. Questions: When importing pictures from a card or phone where they are deleted after the import, where are the originals stored? If I add another folder in a nested folder hierarchy in MY PICTURES, or just one photo to a folder that has already been imported, I would have to import just the new folder or just the one new picture into LR? I think perhaps I need to further edit MY PICTURES before importing them. I have all my photos archived on an external drive the old fashioned way in nested folders. I have created my LR catalog on my computer (it resides C.../users). I have two other external drives. I want to use one to back up the catalog and the photos. The other one I thought I would store the photos. I still have some confusion ... may be overthinking this and making it harder than it is. I would appreciate comments.

I have a similar problem with the folders on my hdd. They are all messed up especially photos from my iphone since I have copied them to my hdd at different times. After watching a few videos I decided to create a new catalog. Then import all my photos into this catalog with copu option. Then have them placed in a new hdd/folder according to date. Afterwards I will go over each folder (date) and will put them into collections. This will take a while for sure but in the end I will have my current photos organized and will have a new foundations for future. Once I am done I will delete the old unorganized photos. I hope this might help others with a similar problem as me.

I had the same question (I'm 73) and your answer was clear and concise (I'm a retired teacher). Thanks

Thank you for this video. One question. Does your LR use up space on your laptop or on a hard disk? Cause I don't have much space on my laptop and have tons of photos. So haven't dumped the whole thing into Lightroom. How do I solve this? Thanks in advance.

If you're working with tons of images you can save a little time by selecting the image(s) you want to move to the target collection and just hit B. Sounds silly but it saves time. Same to remove them from a collection.

Brilliant!!. That has made things so much simpler.

the best thing about this video are your voice cracks and your pitch changes; and your guide as well.

Excellent! This is one of the most confusing/frustrating thing about Lightroom.

What version of Lighroom is this? I really like the way you have things structured. i don't think the new one is the newest cloud version because that one looks like a rip off of Apple Photos. Thanks for your help in advance. M

hi....I have messed up transfer from my old pc / lightroom photos to new pc...all the "Develop" adjustment are lost. I still have all the original adjusted pics on my old pc. Is there still hope of re- transferring ,this time correctly? thank

I need to know what I have done or not done to create the problem I'm having. In LR Library the Folders do not display all the folders on my hard drive and the Collections I have created have gone away. I had to have the hard drive on my computer replaced, but my pictures are on my hard drive so nothing was done to them. The only other thing that has happened with my computer is I moved a couple of weeks ago. I have no idea why I've lost these things and I need help!

Is there a way to switch off the automatic selection when opening the library because it's really annoying when I move files that there is always one wrong file selected that I have to go in and delete from the collection also I can't seem to move more than one file to a target collection at a time?

Well explained. Although ---- There seems to be a thinking which says if you use Lightroom you must use catalogues. I virtually never use them myself, I use Lightroom purely for editing RAW files and saving as Jpegs. Catalogues which are created automatically, are deleted. Although I still have the option of saving a set of photos as a catalogue, but which I hardly ever do... On the various LR help forums, most of the problems seem to be catalogue related.

My LR is so much messed up that my images are empty. How can I get pictures back before I organize them in LR?

Awesome tutorial Question. I have about 400,00 pictures organized by year and month on my hard drive(s), all backed up. I was actually using Picasa to organize (but not edit). I have been urged to use Lightroom on my Mac.. but importing is SUPER slow... and then opening up any file is super slow, even though I have a 2017 iMac with tons of Ram. It has been suggested that I use smaller catalogs.. but then I don't have access to everything if I search. Second, I used the face recognition on Picasa. Face recognition is amazingly slow on Lightroom and terribly inaccurate. But I use it all the time to retrieve photos. Google photos does it but over a certain number of pics (and I exceed), it stops facial recognition. Am I doing something wrong with Lightroom or is there a standalone program for facial recognition? Help me with these issues. Thanks

A wonderful video. My Lightroom is a total mess. I have around 36,000 photos and they were arranged by date. My issue is a great majority of them were photos I scanned and moved all over my hard drive. The problem is over 60% of them have incorrect dates. I have photos that are dated back to the 1940’s. So then, I had a great idea of going through them and making new folders of the subject of the photos. So now I have 20% of my photos in named folders and the rest by date. I am not sure what to do? If I put them all into collections will I have the same freedom in a collection folder that I have with the photos in the location folder?

Now does your external hard drive have to be plugged in in order to use the pictures you stored on it?

Thank you, I really need to reorganise my LR but felt it was too daunting. I will try this method as it is in small steps!

I've had Lr & Ps for 3 years, but I've been using ON1. I've had major issues with the ON1 company and with the programs, so I uninstalled it. My photos have been imported into Lr., but I need to organize them into folders by name. So, I need to find all the images by various names and create collections and folders for them.

I'm using Photoshop Elements 13, I put all my photo files in My Pictures, I name my files by date (Cats 03-02-2017/ C001), will Lightroom 6 rename each photo? The problem I have is I may have individual pictures named the same in different folders, I know I have a mess. Would Lightroom 6 be a good upgrade?

my catalog is a mess when i started i had no idea what i was doing, i want to go through all my pictures and put them in folders how do i do that???

Is there a way to delete all my photos in Lightroom at once. When I first bought it I downloaded everything. I have over 6,000 photos! BIG MISTAKE!!!

Can you show me a bit about doing keywords in lightroom please

Terrific, simple tutorial. Thank you.

doesnt want to give out his nsme, Colin: good video thoe, excellent content, i feel just like colin, my light room is all over the place, thanks mate, definitely most helpful.

someone please can help me .Why I only can see in folders the photos that I already import to LR not all my photos in my PC? If I go to Import I see all of them but not in my Library . Any help will be appreciate. Thanks

IN moving photos around to different folders, what happens to duplicates?

QUESTION: I see your picture folder is empty and all your photos are on your external hard drive. How do you then, create an auto backup using the external hard drive rather than your laptop or picture folder ? Is there a way to make time machine to back up an external hard drive ?

I do more video than still photography. I don't want Light Room to become the center of my universe. So I use the OS to load my media onto my hard drives, about 13 TB plus 13 TB of backup, at the moment. Each media drive has a media folder on it. My original media for a give day of shooting gets its own sub-directory named with the date (YYYY-MM-DD format) and a few words to help me remember what I was shooting that day. Once the media is loaded, I seldom move it. What I don't really understand about LR is that, if I do move the original media, why can't LR reconnect to it the way video editing SW like Premiere Pro does? (It's really a simple process from a programmer's prospective as long as the file names have not changed.) Before I subscribed to Adobe CC, I did not have LR so I used Google Picasa, which has face recognition. This has made it simple for me to locate photos with a specific set of people in them. LR doesn't have that capability does it? Programs come and go and I've learned over the years not to let them manage my files. That's why I do not use Bridge or LR or any other program to dictate where I can put my files. This is especially true when multiple programs both want control. I thin the computer and its apps should do my bidding, not the other way around. (This may be because I'm a codger and have been writing software to make my computers do what I want them to do for about 45 years. :)

thanks for that.....my problem is the cache file folder is so large especially when uploaded from Bridge; bridge creates a cache folder and also Lightroom creates a separate folder each time you open a new lrcat.... would it be advisable to set a specific cache folder away from your (C:) Drive. ???

Hey Collin,what i was wondering about is the fact, that even with so many Images you have in your LR DB it still Looks so smooth and fast.I only have about 10k and it really starts to slow down, a couple of weeks ago i wanted to do a Little Diashow for some friends and it didnt feel so smooth while browsing through the Pictures (in Fullscreen btw). I already have a seperate SSD just for Caching Premiere / LR / etc. but it seems like i couldnt figure out a big difference to nonSSD (just in LR ofc).Using Win10.. was wondering if only MAC does give you this smooth usability..Maybe you can do a Little short tutorial about your Settings in LR so that i might see the difference i am missing right now :( Greetings Andy

at the beginning of video, you said "not to move photos around unless your actually in LR, because LR wont know where to find them". Well my question is what to do if I sae this video too late.

If I delete them "on the disc" in LR, does the raw file that is stored /copied to my hard drive, deleted as well????

Alas, what if I have a folder structure that is photos by day and have 2000 photos that where imported to the wrong place? Thats up to 365 folders x years, that I would have to drag and drop to... its possible, but still a huge amount of work... is there no automated command that will to a 're-organize'. It would be like importing, but re-assign photos inside of lightroom.

when you create a collection does it duplicate the original file? i.e. does it create more data on your computer?

if I make changes in Lightroom catalogue, they do not reflect on Finder folders. Why?

I’m trying to add ONE photo to MULTIPLE folders.... Lightroom will only move it around! When I create virtual copy it moves BOTH.... I need one photo going to MANY folders. Is that possible????

Did you ever know that you are the wind beneath my wings? Thank. You. So. Much.

Lightroom filing is not easy! Coupled with Onedrive storage, i end up with an almighty mess. And another thing i have learned the hard way is to do all organising within lightroom. I have just spent the past couple of hours naming all my picture files in photos, only to find row's of question marks with missing pictures when i opened lightroom. Nightmare.

I think for a person just getting started for ease of learning start out with a new catalog and add some pictures not a catalog with hundreds of pictures and place they are stored.

The problem is, you can't the hard drive use on another Lightroom.

Sorry, but this is another youtube video on lightroom that DOES NOT explain how to use a section of lightroom. I completely agree with the gentleman's question because i have the same problem in a slightly different way. My take on his question is he has downloaded many, many files and does not know how to get rid of the ones he does not want to edit. Sir, my photos ARE ORGANISED in files on my hard drive, i DO NOT want to start putting them in another set of files. I, and i think the gentleman are asking is: i only want 1 photo in lightroom to edit and put it back into the same file, but i have to download the whole file. How do i clear ALL the other photos from the film strip at the bottom. Are both myself and the gentleman not grasping the ethos of how lightroom works, or how WE are supposed to use it?

imagine being 86 and still doing your thing.

Actually I think it is less work to start all over again

Your photos folder is a mess and this is a video about organizing :(

Lightroom bankruptcy looooool

It called file explorer, use it. Why would I use this useless crap program to organize? Same goes for bridge. You are giving credit to a trillion dollar crap company.