Hi, everybody, a very big, warm welcome to Episode 48 of the Photography Explained Podcast. In this episode, my step-by-step guide to how I organise my photos in Lightroom.

Don’t go – it sounds boring, but it’s important and it will help you (and save you tons of time).

I’m your host, Rick, and each week I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 10 minutes without the irrelevant details. My aim is to explain things in just enough detail to help you and me with our photography and no more.

Who am I?

I’m a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience, which I share with you on my podcast.

As I say, it’s not the most exciting subject, but it is an important one – you get this right and it makes your life easier going forward. Please trust me, I’ve done it.

So this is my step-by-step guide to how I organise my photos in Lightroom. Here’s the answery bit

My photos are organised in a logical structured fashion in a single Lightroom catalogue. The management and organisation of my photos have been built into my workflow. I’m able to find photos taken anywhere at any time quickly and easily. I also know where new photos are in my workflow. Yeah, I built the file and folder structure around my workflow.

You can listen to the episode here

Or keep on reading. Or do both. Entirely up to you!

My experience with Lightroom

First off I’m going to do a quick digression. I’ve been using Lightroom since 2007. That’s when Lightroom was first released. Lightroom 1.0 no less. I started off badly and complicatedly, but over the years, I’ve come up with a system that, well when I say system, it’s just a logical, common sense approach to looking after my data. My system.

There’s nothing fancy here. There are no secrets, no magical things. It’s just common sense (and that is the point of this) brought about from (years of) me overthinking things.

Lightroom Catalogue

I have a single Lightroom catalogue – 82,864 photos in one catalogue. Now the folders, well, I have a folder structure which is logical. I think I was struggling to find something once. And I had the lightbulb moment if you like, why aren’t my files organised the same way as my spreadsheets, Word documents, PDFs etc on my PC?

Photos are no different.

And I just did what I did in Windows Explorer. And that was it. On my notes I’ve written kiss – keep it simple, stupid.

I’m not talking to you here, I’m talking to myself.

I was stupid and complicated things.

Right folders.

Folder one is called 1 – Import.

That is the folder where I import new photos to. Now I told you in the last episode how I do that. This is where I put them. Now it’s got a number one at the beginning because it’s at the top of the structure, it comes under the Lightroom main catalogue name.

So folder one is import. Things get imported into that folder as I said before, they get backed up at the time of import so there’s always a duplicate set. More later in this episode.

Folder number two is sort.

I rename the folder so I know what the photos are – when Lightroom imports photos, it just gives you a date.

Culling the photos

In the sort folder, I will sort through the images and I will remove the rubbish, the duplicates and everything. Now how do I do that?

There are a number of tools in Lightroom. I’ll tell you what the other tools are at the end of this podcast. But the ones I use are Pick and Reject – P for pick on the keyboard, X for reject. That’s it, I don’t use any of the other stuff.

This is how I select my photos. It’s either yes or no. Maybe equals, yes, it’s the quick sort to get rid of rubbish, reduces down stuff. And once you’ve done that, delete all the rejects. That’s what I do.

You might be thinking, I don’t want to do that. Don’t forget, I’ve got a duplicate set somewhere else. But I delete all the rejects.

And I have never ever had to go back to the duplicate set. Never ever, that’s why I don’t keep the deleted images anymore. And I’ve always had enough in the stuff that I’ve picked.

Stacking the photos

Now I stack my images, a great feature in Lightroom. Because I take three photos (I bracket them) I put them into stacks so I can see the first image only (and not all three – this confuses things). When I’ve done my HDR merge, I add the new image to the stack. The new HDR merged photo is at the top – the point of this is I’m not looking at four photos, I’m looking at the one that I’m going to work on.

Now then, the folders.

This is the important bit – this is my file structure.

• Lightroom is the catalogue name.
• Folder 1 – Import
• Folder 2 – Sort
• Folder 3 – Commercial Work
• Folder 4 – Dorset
• Folder 5 – Hampshire
• Folder 5 – Bournemouth
• Folder 5 – Poole
• Folder 5 – Sandanks
• Folder 6 – London
• Folder 7 – England
• Folder 8 – Worldwide
• Folder 9 – Improve Photography (needs to go!)
• Folder 10 – Websites
• Folder 11 – Working files
• The last folder is 99 – Personal

(By putting a number in front Lightroom displays them in this order).

And within these folders are subfolders.

Commercial Work folder

All my commercial work is in one folder. That is then broken down by year. And then that year is broken down by the job name or the client name, and then the job for each client.

And that’s it. It’s that simple. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Now for the worldwide one.

It’s broken down by location. And year. And that’s it really – it is that simple. And it works for me.

I do break things down a little bit further.

Sub-sub folders

On a commercial shoot, I will put all the photos into a subfolder called general/ all – it doesn’t matter. It has varied over time.

The ones that I want to edit I will put in a folder called (wait for it) – edits. Then I edit the photos in the Edit folder. And that’s it.

That’s how I know what I’ve worked on and what I haven’t worked on.

What are the Lightroom tools (I hear you saying)

Pick and reject – P and X – keyboard shortcuts.

Star Rating

There are also stars – zero to five. I have used stars in the past but not systematically. That’s been a bit hit-and-miss but is a great way of sorting out your photos. Five stars is your best work ever. I used to love having my five-star photos rated but I’ve sort of stopped doing that now because my work has changed.

Changing over time

These things change over time, so don’t worry about it, but you need to get your file structure right. And then you can adapt all the other bits.

Colour labels

You can assign colour labels (to photos) – I have done this a bit but nothing systematic.

So that’s that, okay?

Are you new to this?

If you’re starting at the beginning, do the file structure and stick with it. And if you want to use stars or colour labels, do it but do it from the beginning.

If you are not new to this like me

What I tried to do was apply the star rating system and colour labels and all sorts of other stuff when I had about 30,000 photos in my Lightroom catalogue, I never got anywhere with it, never finished it.

Here’s what to do

If you’re starting from the beginning, do it if you’ve got the time – go through all your photos from start to end – do it now. It will help you in the future.

If you haven’t got the time, or you just can’t be bothered like me, and you don’t really need them, then don’t worry about it.

It’s up to you.

It’s not going to change your life. It might make things a bit easier that’s all.

Backing up

I talked about backup in the last episode, I think I’ll probably come back to backup as a separate subject because again, you spend £1,000s on cameras, lenses, computers and all that, so a little bit of money needs to be spent on backing up all those photos because you can’t take them again.

Well, I can’t.

My one-line summary.

My photos are organised in a structured way which is built into my editing workflow and helps me to find photos from any place and anytime quickly.

Okay, so what do I want you to do now?

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Next episode.

Having spoken in his episode about how I organise my photos in Lightroom I wanted to finish off with an even more boring subject. PE49 – my step by step guide to wait for it, how I apply metadata to my photos in Lightroom. Dull but important.

Thank you

Right, I’m over time. Thanks for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast. Check out my website Rick McEvoy Photography where you can find out all about me and my architectural and construction photography work as well as my photography blog, where you can find out lots more about photography.

Photography Explained Podcast website

And also check out my Photography Explained Podcast website where you can find out how to ask me a question, find a list of episodes and also things that I’m going to explain in future episodes.

This episode was brought to you by the power of Walkers (roast) chicken crisps, very nice. I need to eat now.

I’ve been Rick McEvoy. Thanks again very much for listening to me and for giving me nearly 13 minutes of your valuable time. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Cheers from me, Rick.

OK – that was the podcast episode.

Want to know more?

Head over to the Start page on the Photography Explained Podcast website to find out more.

And here is the list of episodes published to date – you can listen to any episode straight from this page which is nice.

Let me know if there is a photography thing that you want me to explain and I will add it to my list. Just head over to the This is my list of things to explain page of this website to see what is on there already.

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And finally a little bit about me

Finally, yes this paragraph is all about me – check out my Rick McEvoy Photography website to find out more about me and my architectural, construction, real estate and travel photography work. I also write about general photography stuff, all in plain English without the irrelevant detail.

Thank you

Thanks for listening to my podcast (if you did) and reading this blog post (which I assume you have done as you are reading this).

Cheers from me Rick