While speaking with Steve Yadzinski, a colleague of mine lately, who also happens to be a top Photoshop retoucher, it became clear just how important folder naming conventions are in Lightroom. I cannot stress enough how important it is to create some type of naming convention so that your folders and file names are all unique. And this is something you need to do before you get too far along in working with your digital images. It may not seem like a big deal now but poor file and folder naming can become a nightmare later on if ignored.

The reason I bring this up is that in Lightroom when you import images from a folder Lightroom will use the folder's name to reference those images. Hence, if you organize your images into subfolders and have all of your raw files in a subfolder that is labeled RAW IMAGES for every shoot then when you import multiple shoots into Lightroom you'll have a bunch of RAW IMAGES folders and it will be a difficult to figure out what is what.

The easiest way to create unique file names is to use the date - it will never again be February 16, 2008. I use a naming convention that includes my name_ location (or State and Location)_monthyear_image number (e.g. mclark_utmb_0406_1436.tif). I include my name first because many photo editors are overwhelmed with images and having my name in the filename makes their life a little easier. I know many photographers put the date first as in 20080218_france_032.tif.

I also use a similar naming structure for my folder names. I label the main folder wyoming_devilstower_0907 and all of the raw and xmp files are in this folder. I have subfolders with the same naming convention except they have a jpg, tiff, or psd ending telling what type of files those folders contain: wyoming_devilstower_0907_psd, wyoming_devilstower_0907_tif and wyoming_devilstower_0907_jpg.

I just use the month and year since it won't be September 2007 for another hundred years and I don't think I'll be here to see that date again. The nice thing about this file naming convention is that just by looking at the name I can tell the specific location, date of the shoot and the file type. And when I import my folder wyoming_devilstower_0907 into Lightroom it shows up in the Folders menu with that same name.

A feature that some may not know about is if you go in and change your folder names on the referenced hard drive, Lightroom will update those names in the Library Module and the catalog automatically. This is a very nice feature if you haven't dealt with the naming convention monster just yet and want to go in and start the process. Conversely, you can also double click (on an Apple machine) on the folder name in Lightroom and change it right there but this does not change the actual folder name on the hard drive you are referencing.

I am officially back from Patagonia today so I'll have much to talk about in my upcoming blog posts. That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark