How I Tamed Lightroom Classic

Getting inside the guts of Lightroom

I don’t know about you, but Lightroom Classic was driving me crazy.

I was using Lightroom Classic to store and edit my photographs, some 35,000+ photos. I didn’t know where they were stored on my hard drive, and many of them were missing. Lightroom stores imported images by date, but this is not how we remember our photographs: by event, by celebration, and by category. This called for a serious intervention.

First, I tried to ignore the problem by going to Capture One Pro, an Adobe competitor from Denmark. I like the program very much. However, Lightroom kept “pulling me back in,” because its ecosystem matches my needs and workflow. I subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud for Photography Plan that includes Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Photoshop and one terabyte of storage on Adobe’s Cloud.

I knew I had to bite the bullet and get organized. So I turned to my favorite “How to” site: YouTube. I was not disappointed.

I found a great video by Scott Kelby on “Organizing in Lightroom with Scott Kelby” hosted by B&H Photo.

Scott proposes a 7-step process called SLIM (Simplified Lightroom Image Management) that helps to organize your photos on disk. Here is a link to a forty-three page pdf of his method, hosted on Dropbox.

First, he recommends buying an eight terabyte external hard drive. I purchased my 8-terabyte Seagate from Amazon. Then, he recommends getting a second drive as a backup drive to store off-site – at a friend’s house or in a safe-deposit box at your bank. Finally, he recommends an online storage site to have your images safely stored online.

With respect to Lightroom Classic, he recommends doing all your operations with Lightroom itself, as Lightroom keeps track of all changes. This is key.

Next he recommends creating a folder structure on the hard drive that reflects the kinds of photos you take, and how best you can remember where to find them. Note that is how the images are organized on the disk, rather than how you organize them into Collections in the Collections pane of Lightroom Classic.

For example, my folder structure at the highest level has the following folders:

Larry Kerschberg’s Folders for Lightroom Classic

Your folder organization will reflect the types of photos you take, so you can find them easily. For example I travel quite a bit, and if I expand the Travel folder, we have the following:

Tavel Folder Expanded

Note that the photo count for some folders, e.g. USA, is zero, because the photos are contained within subfolders.

So for future imports into Lightroom Classic, you can import your photos and then drag them, within Lightroom, to a folder on your hard drive. Another technique I use is to create a folder within the hierarchy, with the photos copied from your memory card, and ADD them to my Lightroom images.

Scott also recommends having all your photos in a single catalog; he mentions that previous versions of Lightroom Classic had a limit on the number of photos allowed in a catalog. But newer versions can handle all our photographs.

Final Thoughts

Taming Lightroom Classic is pretty easy but requires knowing a bit about how this marvelous program works. I followed Mr. Kelby’s SLIM method and was able to get a handle on my photos.

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