Hi, and a very warm welcome to Episode 199 of the Photography Explained podcast. I’m your host, Rick, and in each episode, I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 27 minutes (ish) without the irrelevant details. I’m a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience, which I share with you in my podcast.
Here is the answery bit
You need to organise your photos on your computer so you can find any photo quickly and easily. Once you have done that, you have the small matter of looking after that precious collection of photos, which, as a photographer, is your everything. I don’t want to overstate this—as a photographer, your photos are you. Without them, you are not far off nothing.
So this is important.
In the last episode, I told you how I organise the photos in my Lightroom catalogue. I will start this episode with the same apology—I am talking about Lightroom as this is what I use. But to be clear, I pay for Lightroom with my own money and have done so since I started using it in version 1.0 back in 2007.
OK – I needed to get that out of the way. Again.
A lot of what I talk about will apply to whatever software you use, and much of the Lightroom-specific stuff will be very similar, possibly called different things. But at the end of the day, digital photos are digital photos, and software is software.
This is not a one-off task
We must be mindful of maintaining a digital photo catalogue every time we import photos to a catalogue, every time we export photos from a catalogue to give to someone else, and at all times in between.
Yes, dear listener, look after your catalogue every time you do something, and you will save yourself problems later. This is the best way to not end up where I am now!
Right here are some things that I do to keep my catalogue shiny and lovely, some of which I will do once I have got rid of the rubbish that is.
This is everything but how-to-process images, okay? All the other good stuff.
Get rid of the rubbish
If you have any rubbish photos, get rid of them. You will not regret this. I have loads of rubbish digital images to get rid of. This is a big job for me and a pain in the proverbial. I should have removed the rubbish every time I imported photos into Lightroom, but I didn’t. I do now.
And rubbish photos are
- Technically rubbish
- Duplicates
- Similar photos
- Photos you don’t like
- Photos you will never do anything with
- Rubbish photos
- Boring photos
OK, so if in doubt, get rid—you will not regret this, and you will not end up in the position that I am in now. This is one of the easiest ways to manage a digital photo catalogue.
And taking fewer photos, of course – have I mentioned that before?
Right – here are things to do with what you have left after the rubbish has gone.
File names
I don’t change the file names of the digital files until I export them out of Lightroom. I have never really thought about this before—I don’t use them when I am in Lightroom; they only come into play when I export photos out of Lightroom to do something with. The file names are assigned by the camera, and I just leave them as they are. Maybe I am missing something here. Stop overthinking it, Rick.
Why do I add keywords?
I haven’t assigned keywords to many photos, and I regret not doing this. Keywords may help a photo be discovered online. I say may as there is no guarantee, and the likelihood is probably not that great, but I will take any help I can get. And it for sure won’t do any harm to assign keywords to photos.
Keywording photos is free and yes it takes time, but that is it. And once it is done, it is done. And you can copy and paste common keywords from one photo to another.
In Lightroom, you can add some keywords and sync to a load of photos, and that’s it. After doing that, I would also add image specific keywords, but I don’t spend too much time on this.
This is one of those—some will say there is no point in doing this, but I have decided to add keywords to my photos when sorting them out and when I import a new batch of photos into Lightroom.
Move on Rick
How stacking helps in Lightroom
I use Auto Exposure Bracketing, short name AEB if saying all three words is too much! Why do we have to abbreviate everything? This is where you take three photos at the same time with different exposures and merge them together later to give you a wider range of lights and darks. So, for every photo I take, there are three photos, and four when I merge them together.
I don’t want to look at loads of sets of three photos side by side—that is not helpful to me. So, I put each bracketed set in a stack, with the first photo which has the correct exposure on top of the stack. And when I have merged them, the new image appears on top. Awesome.
What are Collections in Lightroom?
Collections in Lightroom are like albums or playlists.
When you add photos to a collection, they do not move—they stay where they are. You can add many different photos to collections and the same photo to multiple collections.
You can also sync these with Lightroom Mobile, which is super handy.
I use collections all the time.
I have split my entire catalogue into 38 collections of images, which I am going through collection by collection.
What are Smart Collections in Lightroom?
Lightroom has Smart Collections, which are automatically created when you add a star rating or colour label to photos. You can customise these to suit you. And there are other Smart Collections that help, such as the one for photos without keywords, which of course is useful to me.
You can also create your own Smart Collections. As part of my simplification process, I have removed these and use only a few now.
Collections are albums, and smart collections are smart albums. Does this help?
Flags, stars and colour labels.
Let’s go through them one by one – these are things that you can use to identify photos.
Flags – I use these all the time.
In Lightroom, there are three possibilities: Pick, Reject or No Flag.
When I am sorting through photos, I use Pick and Reject to quickly get rid of the rubbish. I do a couple of passes to ensure I only keep stuff I need and will use. I reject stuff I don’t want and pick stuff I do want.
Once I have done this, I will put the photos I am going to edit into a folder called picks and remove the flags. The photos marked reject are deleted.
And I have never regretted deleting a rejected photo – once they are gone, they are gone.
And this means there are no photos with flags in my catalogue. Flags are saved for a specific sorting job.
Stars
This is how I categorise my photos, by stars. These are assigned to photos, and I do not remove them. I update them when appropriate, but these are how I categorise my photos. You can change the words to whatever you want, which is incredibly helpful.
- 5 – Best – Portfolios
- 4 – Edited
- 3 – To edit
- 2 – Working stuff
- 1 – My stuff
- 0 – To sort
I have changed these over the years, and as part of going through my entire collection, I am assigning a star rating to every photo. This is the info that I need, and I can instantly look at the Smart Collections for each of these ratings. This helps me with how I work, which is what this is all about.
I regularly want to get to my best photos, and this is how I do just that.
Colour labels
I used to use color labels, but I don’t anymore. You can assign these to Smart Collections, too, which I used to do. I have just got rid of them from Lightroom as I don’t need them anymore. I’m doing more tidying as I go.
Metadata
Metadata is what is written into every photo we take. You can search in Lightroom by Metadata, such as camera, lens, date photo taken, and all that good stuff.
But the way my photos are organised, I don’t use this much.
Duplicate images
I hate duplicate photos. I used to have loads of them in different locations until I got my act together. In an image catalogue, there shouldn’t be any duplicates apart from virtual copies.
Virtual copies
What is a virtual copy? You can use a virtual copy of the photo to do different edits. But you can’t change the filename of a virtual copy; it has to be the same as the original, albeit with the words Copy1 and Copy 2, and you get the idea after the filename.
You can edit a virtual copy just like you can an actual file without affecting the original file. Virtual copies take up very little memory, unlike actual files, which are quite large. This is super clever and super useful, and I use these all the time to see what different edits look like.
Edited photos
I export photos from Lightroom as JPEG files when I share them with someone else. I don’t want to share the RAW files; they are too large, not everyone can open them, and I don’t want someone else doing more editing—not that anyone would, of course!
Other Lightroom tools that can help
Plug-ins
You can buy loads of Lightroom plugins and other photo editing software. I have in the past, but I got rid of them all as I never used them and, being honest, didn’t need them. Fortunately, I know what I am doing and am happy to do it myself.
Presets
You can buy presets to give your photos an instant look. Many modern cameras actually allow you to set presets in the camera, which is very clever.
But I use presets that I have created myself.
A preset is a range of adjustments in Lightroom that you can apply instantly to one, two, or 10,000 photos.
Take fewer photos
Now, this is a great way to keep on top of your digital photo catalogue. Take fewer photos, and you have fewer photos to manage – what is not to love about that???
Online or hard drive?
You can use a cloud version of Lightroom, which I believe keeps all your photos in the cloud, too. I don’t want to do that; I want my photos with me, under my control. But I get why people would want everything on the cloud, which we are doing more of year on year.
Side note: Where is all this stuff? Where are my cloud backups? Where actually is cloud storage? I do worry about things like this, so having my photos right next to me works for me.
Backups
Backing up photos is so important. What do you have if you only have one copy and lose that? And photos should not stay on a memory card. They need to be part of something more secure. Very quickly, I have my photos on an external hard drive, which is constantly backed up to the cloud. I also have another external drive stored off-site that has my most recent catalogue on it. Lightroom is on an internal hard drive on my PC by the way.
There are three copies of all my photos in three different places: photos on an external hard drive, a copy on a separate external hard drive, and a third backed up using a cloud service.
That is backups done.
That was the answery bit
The talky bit
I want to say here that what I do can be applied to any other software, albeit in slightly different ways. And the principles won’t change—organise your photos to help you and keep on top of them—treat this as a job to be done every time you add some new photos, and you are sorted.
And another thought comes to me – don’t overcomplicate this. This is what I have done before. There are so many options and so many variables, making it hard sometimes to know what to do. But we don’t have to use every feature; just find the ones that help you.
As an example, facial recognition. I don’t really need this for my photography, but if you are taking photos of people and using it from the start, I can see huge benefits. But I just don’t need facial recognition, as clever as it is.
One last thing – you need storage devices that will look after your data – and there are lots of inexpensive options these days so no excuse to not have a backup!
What do you think professional photographers do? Their photos are their living, their livelihood, so we need to learn from them. The look after the photos so carefully and have three backups minimum.
What if I use a phone to take photos?
OK, I don’t know. I must get my act together first—one for a future episode.
What do I do?
You know my folder structure. And I work on a PC. I did try Apple Photos, but did not get on with it. Maybe I have just been using Lightroom for so long……
I have a lot of photos, but not as many as lots of other people.
When I import photos, I use flags and picks to sort them, which helps me sort the good from the rubbish. I assign keywords and star ratings to photos and then put them in folders. That is how I keep on top of my photos. It is that simple.
And I use virtual copies to give me different edits that I can compare.
I also have a permanent cloud backup and a separate manual backup, so I always have three sets of everything in three separate places.
And I have to sort out everything I have done badly.
I have done a bad job managing my digital photo catalogue, and I am about 15% of the way through doing what I say in this episode that you should do.
I should have done this a lot sooner, but I didn’t know, so I have lots of stuff to fix. Hopefully, I can help you and save you time now and in the future.
And I have tidied up my catalogue structure – I told you about that last episode.
I am deleting the rubbish—starting with about 85,000 photos. I am using the reject flag to quickly identify and delete rubbish, and I am using Collections to help me.
I now do what I am telling you to do.
That is what I do.
Some thoughts from the last episode
Well, this episode contains the thoughts from the last episode, so I will move on.
Next episode
Episode 200—Photography Composition Tips and Techniques—According to Spotify, this was the most popular episode of 2024, so it’s well worth revisiting.
The taking photos bit is the most important part of photography and requires some real quality time, which I will spend on in the next episode. It’s also a perfect way to bring up episode 200. How utterly splendid.
I am really looking forward to spending time on this and adding my new thoughts to what I said last year, so this is not a repeat episode, far from it.
A quick plug for me and what I do.
Well, why not? If I can’t plug myself on my own podcast, where can I?
You have found this podcast, so why not check out the podcast website photographyexplainedpodcast.com? I have another photography website, rickmcevoyphotography.com, where I write blog posts about my photographs of buildings and other good stuff. On my courses page, you will find my course, How To Become A Real Estate Photographer. You can also find me on YouTube talking about my podcast and my blog – just type my name in, and you will soon find me.
And if you want a weekly email me from me just fill in the box on any of my websites and every Friday you will get to read what I am thinking about photography wise.
That’s enough of the self-promotion.
Do you want to ask me a question?
If you have a question you would like me to answer, or if you just want to say hi, email me at sales@rickmcevoyphotography.co.uk, visit the podcast website, photographyexplainedpodcast.com/start, or text me from the podcast feed.
It is always lovely to hear from you, dear listeners.
This episode was brought to you by a coffee I consumed before settling down in my homemade, acoustically cushioned recording emporium. This is a pre-lunch recording, with a cheese and pickle sandwich to follow; no crisps.
I’ve been Rick McEvoy. Thanks again for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast (it says here) and for giving me 27 minutes of your valuable time. After I have edited out the mistakes and other bad stuff, this episode will be about 33-35 minutes long.
Thanks for listening
Take care and stay safe.
Cheers from me, Rick
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.
Let me send you stuff
I send out a weekly email to my subscribers. It is my take on one photography thing, plus what I have been writing and talking about. Just fill in the box and you can get my weekly photographic musings straight to your inbox. Which is nice.
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
