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Folder Naming Conventions
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
Changing folder names in lightroom also changes them on my mac hardrive.
Cheers
Rob
Actually it will never ever be September 2007 again. Obviously you meant to say that the 0907 date sequence will not occur again for another hundred years; but September 2007 will never return.
Also I really don't see the usefulness of using descriptive names to folders; a format like 02-08, or 02-29 is more that adequate for sub-folders of a 2008 folder, for example.
It is far more useful, and better leverages the power of a DAM like Lightroom, to add the descriptions to the images' metadata than to the folder name.
I'm using Lightroom and other database programs to find images. With IPTC data into the images, every image database program can (re) build it's database. I think, it's a waste of time to create folders and filenames which contains in their names some of the image's metadata (shooting location, date etc.).
My convention to generate unique names: Every year has (exactly) one folder with the digits of the year, this year's images stored in a folder with the name "2008". The image names are YYYY-MM-DD-XXXX.nef (-edited-XX.tif). YYYY are the digits of the year, MM of the month and DD of the day. XXXX is a growing number starting with 0001 and the increment of 1. The first image has the number 0001, the second 0002 and so on. The first image of this day has the name "2008-03-03-0001.nef" and the first edited version of this file "2008-03-03-0001-edited-01.tif".
To rename all images of a shooting after deleting the bad ones I chose in Lightroom a renaming template. It does the job. After a second shooting session at the same day I change the start number from 1 to e.g. 105 (the last plus 1).
I am I right to understand that you're not importing your new images _directly_ into Lightroom? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you move them into these manually named folders and then import into LR from there. If that's true, what are your reasons for taking what seems like an extra step?
thanks,
waywest
Waywest -
My reasoning for not importing images directly into Lightroom off the cards is that 90% of the time I am downloading from my Epson P2000 hard drive and this isn't possible. When I do download from CF Cards I tend to use the auto import feature.
After several hours of search for the answer to the question of filing images with the same name but different extensions, you have provided the best answer. Thank you.
Although stacking sounds appealing on the surface, I see problems down the road.
Thanks very much for this logical approach.
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So it is possible to rename a folder that lightroom is referencing without disturbing the link to the photos within, but is it possible to move the photos to another directory and maintain their data in lightroom?
I have mine set to auto import in the year '2008' and then into month day folders '09-22' or whatever.
But it makes more sense to group the photos by location or shoot as well as date, than just a year with a huge string of nearly identical subfolders. Also I have a bunch of old film scans that, despite my changing the capture time, still appear in the 2000/12-31 folder.
How do I rearrange these folders without disturbing my database?
Thanks
I need to re-name my files with the files convention as 0001, 0002 instead of 1,2,3,4,5,6, etc. but not sure how to go about doing that. I need to do this due to when putting images in descending order I have found that the images would be places in 1,2,3,4,5...10,20 IT does not go into chronological order.
Ha, I've just run into this problem.
I just started a trial of Lightroom 2.2, and my current structure is a very descriptive name like "2009-2-20 Maggy", but then all my RAW files are in a sub-folder named RAW. I would put my finished JPG files in the main folder.
Now with Lightroom I have to change this around I guess. Too bad there isn't a way to change the lightroom folder name, or have it use the upper level folder for the name.
Peter, while inside Lightroom, you can rename folders (and files) and move them around which also changes your mac or windows drive. To move, you can drag and drop. Use right-click to create new folders. Also while in gallery view, highlight the pics you want to move to a new folder, then right-click on a mother folder and choose "create new folder" inside and "include selected photos" to move chosen (highlighted) pics into them.
Hope this helps. ;)
What if I don't want to deal with folder? What if I want to import files on my HD as if I were importing them from the card or camera. Seems real stupid to me to have 2 ways of importing image. I want to use lightroom to get away from dealing with folders, not to continue the practice.