Kevin Childress wrote:

 

Greetings from an LR3 newbie.  One of the primary reasons I purchased LR3 was for it's organizational capabilities.  That said, I want to make every effort I can to get the hard drive folders in a particular order before beginning LR3 importing.

I will suggest that getting your hard drive folders into a particular order before using Lightroom is entirely unnecessary.

The reason I say that is because Lightroom provides you with organizational tools that are much more powerful than any organization you can achieve with folders. Lightroom's keywords, captions and other metadata should be where you are going to spend your time and effort. Leave your folders alone ... don't move them at all ... import the photos into LR, and then begin adding keywords and other metadata to your photos. Do not spend a second trying to move photos or folders from here to there, or renaming photos or folders.

From this point forward, you should use Lightroom tools as your organizing tool. You will no longer browse your folders in your operating system to find your photos.

For example, all photos in your Blue Ridge Parkway folders and sub-folders could receive the "Blue Ridge Parkway" keyword. In addition, you can add more detailed keywords, such as Mt Pisgah, Craggy Gardens, etc., and keywords indicating people in the photo, and so on. So, if you want to find photos of Craggy Gardens also contain your daughter "Jennifer", Lightroom makes this search extremely simple to do.

Do not spend a second trying to add calendar based folders to what you already have. The instant you import your photos into Lightroom, you have the ability to search your photos by year, or year/month, or year/month/date, or any sequence of those. This feature of Lightroom does not have to be turned on, it is available immediately (assuming your photos came from a digital camera and not a scanner).

Kevin Childress wrote:

 

In the future, when I need to add new locations, or year_month folders, what would be the best way to do so?  A) create the folders on the hard drive as I always have, and import the new material?  or B) Will LR3 allow me to create this same structure during import so that I will have a consistently formatted backup on disk?

I agree with Geoff. When importing new photos, do the easiest thing possible, use the Lightroom Import's defaults which will create folders based on the capture date of the photo(s). You might want to spend a minute to make sure these new folders will be sub-folders of "Kevin's Pictures". Thereafter, creating the folders takes zero seconds of time, and no thought on your part.

As another piece of advice, I recommend you just stop thinking about folder structure. Just stop. You don't need to think about folder structure any more because you will not use folders to find your photos, you will use Lightroom tools like keywords and other metadata to do all searching, and you will use Lightroom for all photo management. Now, to clarify, on day 1 of your Lightroom usage, you have no choice but to continue to use folders, in the Lightroom Folder panel, not your operating system, to find photos, because you have no keywords. Lightroom leaves your folder structure intact. As you add keywords and other metadata, you should stop using folders and use these new, more powerful tools.

for initial importing of your past work, your location based folders will help selecting & assigning keywords & populating IPTC fields easily

going forward, a simple CCYY MM structure is best, otherwise you're 'organizing' in 2 different places, with very good chance of getting out of sync.

i would also recommend you use the LOCATION IPTC fields (Country, State, City, Location), since LR and many other apps understand what these are (as opposed to keywords), so no confusion between "Paris" the city vs. the celeb or the hotel.

another recommendation - for each of your cameras w/ multiple ACR Camera Profiles available, do some tests to decide the one you want as a default. Also decide which lenses you'd like to apply corrections to automatically during importing, and make that the default. I prefer to do this prior to importing, because a mass change to change these profiles after tehy are in your catalog will add an "adjustment" icon to the file & i prefer to only see this icon on files i've edited (worked on). hope this makes sense!

good luck!

I kept my existing folder structure when I started using LR.  In my case I found it easier to start with a date-based folder structure, so I had a file structure like this:

And I imported the top level photo folder ("Photo Album"), so I got an LR structure like this: