Organizing my Lightroom Catalogue – An exercise to do while Social Distancing

If you are like me, you've got a library of photos of considerable size. Most of these photos you probably haven't seen in years. Yet, there they are, taking up space on your hard drive. 

I decided to go through them. All 60,000 images that I have taken over the last 10 years and uploaded to my Lightroom Catalogue at home. My first goal was to go through them and delete the ones that I didn't need, or frankly, even want any more. 

I have my library catalog set up into year/location, and like many of you had done a terrible job at keywording these images once they were imported into Lightroom. 

I started back at the beginning and decided to delete and rate all my images. As I looked at my images in the Library Module I would mark them with an "X" if I wanted to reject them, I would mark them with a "1" if I wanted to keep them, and mark them with a "3" if I felt they are exceptional. 

You need to be in the Library module to manage your images in your catalog. If you look at the images in the film strip at the bottom you will notice the photos I have marked with an “X” to reject, and a “1” or “3” to save in my catalog.

This photo shows how to delete images that you have marked with an “X” to be rejected.

Once you choose to perform this task a pop-up window will show. It will ask you if you want to “Delete from Disc’ or “remove”. Choose, “Delete from Disc”.

Once I finished a year's worth of images, I would delete the photos I wanted to reject. The pictures I just wanted to keep would be left in the library, and the images I marked with a three would be placed into a collection of photographs called, My Favorites from "year x." 

I then started keywording all the images that remained in my hard drive.

I used the following methodology for keywording – year, country, region, subject, time of year, type of photo (landscape, wildlife, etc), 

The Collection of images that I kept as my favorites are then backed up to a secondary hard drive. I also sent a copy of these images to a secure, virtual location (cloud-based server).

While I was doing this whole process, I was also uncovering images that I really liked. Pictures that I forgot I had taken. It gave me a chance to open up these images and edit them with skills that I have now, probably the same editing skills that I wished I had when I first took these images.