Help with Lightroom Classic

I installed Lightroom Classic on my desktop computer and am trying to figure out the very first thing that I need to do before I create Collections for my photos.

I appreciate any help.

Thank you.

By @Johnny31980363ycuv

I'm going to advise you to use keywords as your primary organizing tool rather than collections. There are plenty of benefits to using keywords instead of collecctions as your primary organizing tool, a major benefit is that (if you want) the keywords can stay with the file and be available and readable outside of Lightroom Classic, while Collections are only available inside of LrC.

Back to your original question: the first thing to do is to decide how you want to organize your photos both inside and outside of LrC. Outside of LrC, I use folders by Capture date, this is a LrC default, set it once and use it forever, takes no effort on your part after the first time. If your decision is to use Collections (or keywords) to organize, go ahead and import your photos and ask LrC to create folders by Capture date. The whole system is very flexible, and there are many ways to do this, there is no "best", but figure out what will work for you.

Regarding collections, I suggest you have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-rF5O6kqog by Julieanne Kost (Adobe's Lr Evangelist).  It's a bit dated and some elements of the UI will have changed since the video was made. Nevertheless, it should prove useful.

If new to Lightroom, then have a look at Julieanne's other video tutorials at https://jkost.com/blog/lightroom-training-videos