Organizing your Gallery

7000 images may seem like a lot. I "kept" over 9000 images just from this year. I'm sure there are people here who do many more than that. You'll feel better if you pay the piper now and get those images organized, key worded and rated. I can't stress enough how important it is to spend a little time thinking about what type of file/folder structure works for you and then work the keywords and ratings into your work flow. And keep on top of it!! With the number of images you are likely to continue to shoot, think how important it is to be able to find things later. But don't think it will be the end of it. After all, what you consider 5 star now, you'll look at in a few years and wonder "what was I thinking!" :)

You'll get lots of opinions on how to organize if you ask but to me the bottom line is what makes sense to you after you've considered several. Lightroom has so many powerful library tools available and ability to set up smart folders and export presets. Learning how to use those things FIRST will help you automate the process of creating many different scenarios for online or offline galleries. Some of the services you would use online have export plugins to aid in uploading into galleries. My opinion is that you first have to get your library in order so that you can better take advantage of galleries.

Thanks to everyone of you folks who have replied to Question. It helps me to hear what other people are doing with this type of situation.

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7000 images may seem like a lot. I "kept" over 9000 images just from this year. I'm sure there are people here who do many more than that. You'll feel better if you pay the piper now and get those images organized, key worded and rated. I can't stress enough how important it is to spend a little time thinking about what type of file/folder structure works for you and then work the keywords and ratings into your work flow. And keep on top of it!! With the number of images you are likely to continue to shoot, think how important it is to be able to find things later. But don't think it will be the end of it. After all, what you consider 5 star now, you'll look at in a few years and wonder "what was I thinking!"

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I do have most of my images key-word-ed, but I haven't rated them. Thanks for reminding me about smart collections.

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It seems to me that you are mixing two things together: how to organize your photos for yourself, and how to organize them for other people to view.

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I know... my question was not very clear.

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That was the upside; the downside is that I ended up with around 400 5-star shots that she wanted processed. Very few were done in the same light, so the automation tools were of limited use.

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Ugh... It is a pain to think about processing 400 images. Thanks a lot for sharing the thought :eek:

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Originally Posted by Nicks Pics

It is a pain to think about processing 400 images.

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There are a lot of people who feel as you do about that and I feel badly for everyone in that camp. Just the opposite, I enjoy post-processing so much that I would be thrilled to realize that I had 400 images to post-process.

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There are a lot of people who feel as you do about that and I feel badly for everyone in that camp. Just the opposite, I enjoy post-processing so much that I would be thrilled to realize that I had 400 images to post-process.

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I enjoy image editing too, generally, though one time when I had a big batch to get out recently it became a bit of a chore- to me.

Even I had this issue, way I took forward was very basic and might not be suitable for 7000+ images but give it a thought.

1. I searched for all *.jpg in my base folder which popped out all my images.
2. I copied those to one single folder
3. Sorted the images by date taken
4. Had a tea break while my damn slow laptop was sorting the images :)
5. Opened first image for preview (picasa viewer or windows photo viewer)
6. I believed in the very first thought that came to my mind after seeing the image (Keep/Delete)
7. Then you just need 2 buttons, "right arrow" & "delete" to keep the very best of all :)

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Originally Posted by terrib

I can't stress enough how important it is to spend a little time thinking about what type of file/folder structure works for you and then work the keywords and ratings into your work flow. And keep on top of it!!

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That sound advice is definitely worth reiterating.

I don't have a general, all inclusive gallery. Instead, I keep various galleries on specific subjects on smugmug such as:

Maltese Rescue California: http://rpcrowe.smugmug.com/Pets/MALT...RNIA/i-x9HN2FM

One Light Portraits using Flash Diffuser Pro: http://rpcrowe.smugmug.com/Portraits...ional/n-LPGK4/

Istanbul: http://rpcrowe.smugmug.com/Other/Istanbul/

Venice: http://rpcrowe.smugmug.com/Architecture/Venice/

And many more...

I also use Pixie reef (what a dumb name) to organize my photos on my NooK HD. I like this because I can have a slide show of our previous dogs ) especially before and after shots, playing on one of the tables at our rescue events (I don't need A/C power since the Nook HD is battery operated). The Nook HD has a neat addition of a point at which I can attach a security wire (table to Nook) so the Nook doesn't walk away with some dishonest person... The Nook HD actually has a very good display that works quite well even in bright light...

I have pretty much the same requirement as the OP (to create one or more galleries) and I use Lightroom, which is ideal for the purpose.

I find the easiest way is to have a collection called "Gallery" (or whatever), and add whatever you want to the collection. Then I have an export preset called (surprise, surprise) "Gallery". This exports everything to a suitable image size to a folder where I keep my gallery stuff. I go to the Gallery collection, select everything (Control-A), and run the export preset. Job done.

Actually, I have multiple galleries for different purposes - just using different collections and export presets.

The advantage of this method is that you can keep the gallery of images in step with Lightroom. If I add images to the gallery, then I just run the export again (choosing "skip" for those that are already exported). Or, if I've removed a lot of images, I generally delete the export folder, and export all of them again.

As the others say, organising images gets more and more important as the number grows. I've around 67,000 images in Lightroom, but I use keywords whenever I remember, and normally use star ratings as a way of rating and culling. When I've finished editing, anything with no stars gets deleted.

Beyond that I use colour ratings for fairly ad hoc sorting, or keywords for anything that goes beyond one shoot.

Another thing that helps: use a consistent folder organisation. I use a folder per shoot (sometimes a folder for a set of several small shoots on or around the same date). I have a top level folder "Photo Album", then folders underneath for each year: "2014", "2013" and so on, then for each shoot a folder called things like "14-12-22 Christmas lights" or whatever. I keep the date in the folder name, in the order year-month-day, so the folders sort in chronological order.

The images get imported into the folder and stay there. In Lightroom, it doesn't make sense to have different folders for fresh imports, stuff you're working on, keepers and so on. Leave things where they are, and use keywords, collections, star-ratings etc for any other sorting purposes.

But whatever you do, be consistent.

Thanks Mrinomy, Mike, Richard, Simon. I( am getting a lot of ideas, and I appreciate it. I needed to get more familiar with the way (s) people find works, so thanks a lot.

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I have pretty much the same requirement as the OP (to create one or more galleries) and I use Lightroom, which is ideal for the purpose.

I find the easiest way is to have a collection called "Gallery" (or whatever), and add whatever you want to the collection. Then I have an export preset called (surprise, surprise) "Gallery". This exports everything to a suitable image size to a folder where I keep my gallery stuff. I go to the Gallery collection, select everything (Control-A), and run the export preset. Job done.

Actually, I have multiple galleries for different purposes - just using different collections and export presets.

The advantage of this method is that you can keep the gallery of images in step with Lightroom. If I add images to the gallery, then I just run the export again (choosing "skip" for those that are already exported). Or, if I've removed a lot of images, I generally delete the export folder, and export all of them again.

As the others say, organising images gets more and more important as the number grows. I've around 67,000 images in Lightroom, but I use keywords whenever I remember, and normally use star ratings as a way of rating and culling. When I've finished editing, anything with no stars gets deleted.

Beyond that I use colour ratings for fairly ad hoc sorting, or keywords for anything that goes beyond one shoot.

Another thing that helps: use a consistent folder organisation. I use a folder per shoot (sometimes a folder for a set of several small shoots on or around the same date). I have a top level folder "Photo Album", then folders underneath for each year: "2014", "2013" and so on, then for each shoot a folder called things like "14-12-22 Christmas lights" or whatever. I keep the date in the folder name, in the order year-month-day, so the folders sort in chronological order.

The images get imported into the folder and stay there. In Lightroom, it doesn't make sense to have different folders for fresh imports, stuff you're working on, keepers and so on. Leave things where they are, and use keywords, collections, star-ratings etc for any other sorting purposes.

But whatever you do, be consistent.
Unlike

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Thank you Simon, it was very helpful to read your method, it sounds like you have a practical and functional way of doing it.

Happy holidays!
Nick