[p38arover]

Your examples are more typical of collections. Keywords would be more like "motorcycle", "blonde", "dirt bike", "MX", "flowers", "blue flowers", "flower", "desert", "fisheye", "abstract", "Sydney", "Sydney Harbor", "harbor", "boats", and so on. After a short while, one tends to standardize, particularly if you often shoot similar subjects.


Steve

Yes, they often are. I have many directories named like that (rather than key worded) where there are many images taken over a period of years. Most of my directories are by year with sub-directories by date. I use YYMMDD to sort.

---------- Post added 19th Jun 2016 at 16:36 ----------

Keywords can be added both during and after import. I set the words in common for an import and go back after to add obvious additional to specific sequences. In some cases, I do what you describe and split the import into two or three batches of related images. They all end up in the right folders since I have them saved in by date.

I keep promising myself that I'll go back and keyword one or two directories a week but I never do.

[Oakland Rob]

For ex-Aperture users it's important to learn the differences between it and Lr. The biggest one is that folders/projects/albums in Aperture are all virtual containers; i.e. NOT real Finder folders. The folders you see in Lr ARE the Finder folders. Collections and collection sets are analogous to the folders/projects/albums in Aperture.

Folders in Lr are a poor choice for organization. Inflexible, since a photo can only be in one folder. But they ARE where you images actually (well kinda) reside in the filesystem. So use folder names and organizing that makes sense outside Lr. For example, I used folders for client images by name since I could assign permissions for those and sharing settings in the filesystem. Otherwise something like dates works well (and that's what Aperture used internally).

Think about what you have to find, and how you find it in deciding how to organize. Lots of info is already in the images; don't waste time replicating that. Like adding dates to filenames, since that's in exif. And the filename is a way of recording sequence.

Hierarchical keywords are one of the most flexible methods. But geolocation, captions, titles, etc can all be useful. If you use reverse geolocation, for example, you don't have to waste time entering the places in keywords. All that metadata is standardized and has been in use for a long time now; use it. Every photo application can understand it, and it's a good way to backup the info into the images so that it's always available, even if Lr disappears.

My preference is to use keyword hierarchies for permanent info, like identifying people, subject, characteristics of the photos (BW, pano), etc. And use collections for ephemeral organization, like "to be developed" or "for export" and so on. In part that's because hierarchies can travel with the photos, while collections are unique to use inside Lr.

But play around with it. There are usually lots of ways to accomplish the same thing. It gets easier the more you play with it.

[emalvick]

I'll echo some of the previous posts.

I organize my photos into date based folders, and file names are also date based with an element to identify camera and the original file number.

Keywording I think can be useful for anyone... I use a hierarchy with just 5 or 6 items at the base of it that essentially follow Who, What, When, Where, and How. To the person who says it is too hard when you are shooting odd photos, I'd say that you might be over thinking it.

I think the best way to begin keywording if you are just starting is to keep keywords as basic as possible. Keywords may not seem beneficial at first, but I'm glad I've done it. I am not a pro, and I randomly shoot photos here and there at a rate of about 3000 a year (2000 usually on a large vacation my wife and I take each year). 15+ years into digital photography, and I am nearing 50,000 photos. Keywording now lets me quickly find photos of any person or any subject matter I have without needing to remember when or even exactly where. I also quickly learned that too much details in keywords are challenging.

For instance, you could keyword something as Flower or you could keyword the same item as a Rose. If you use Flower, than you won't need keywords for each flower type, and the number of keywords would stay manageable. You could still search for flower and likely quickly find those that are roses without the need for a specific keyword. Now, if photographing flowers is your thing, you might want to add a sub-keyword. I do this for landscapes. 75% of my photos have been landscapes, so identifying something within the landscape helps a bit when I am looking for an image with a mountain range or the ocean or a waterfall or whatever. With hierarchical keywords, you could still search under just flower or landscape, even with keyword "subcategories". It's all about keeping things simple, perhaps simpler than you think you need.

Finally, I'll add that one of the more important aspects of organizing (more than using keywords) is having the location of my photos identified. This can simplify keywording later because as a landscape photographer, I find myself trying to find locations more than anything. Locations end up being like a keyword in LR, but you can also use the mapping module.