- [Instructor] The best way to build an organized
Light Room Classic catalog is to start
with an organized file management system on a hard drive.
File management is the foundation
of the Light Room Classic catalog system,
because Light Room Classic requires all photos to live
somewhere on a hard drive.
Organizing your photos is personal.
I'm going to show you my method,
but you may have a completely different system
that works for you, and that's okay,
as long as you can find the photos on your computer
without needing an application like Light Room Classic
to do so.
For this course, I will be working with files
on my external photos drive.
I've put the exercise folders here
and I also have a folder named T. Jackson Photos.
This is an example of how I organize my photos.
I'll open that folder to see what's inside.
This is just an example, though.
My actual collection of images spans many years,
and is stored on multiple hard drives.
I organize my photos by year,
so every year I create a new folder,
and then inside of each year are folders for each event
with the date and a little bit of a description.
So if I open up 2017,
we'll see the same naming convention here.
This is just how I organize my photos.
You may want to organize yours by portraits,
or landscapes, or something descriptive like that.
But this is what works for me.
Let's back out and take a look at the exercise files.
I've organized the exercise files in folders
to follow the course outline,
and I'll use these folders to teach you how to import.
But this is not how I would organize my photos
for my real catalog.
Before you're ready to import your own photos
into your own catalog, you need to make sure
that they are organized and where you want them.
Find all of your photos, and put them in a location
they can stay for a long time.
And do this before you start importing them into Light Room.
It will make life so much easier for you in the long run.
And this is something I wish I had understood
before I got started with Light Room Classic.