Hide photos that have already been cataloged

[tic3]

Hi all.  New Lightroom Classic user here.  I've searched the forums, browed the reference guide and user guide but can't find an answer.

As stated, I'm a new Lightroom Classic user and I have around 52,000 photos, which I've imported to a main Catalog.

I intend to organize them by collection (People, Places, Birds, Flowers, etc.).  I've figured out how to create the Collections, select multiple files to drag them into the Collections.

But with 52,000 files, this is going to take some time.  Is there any way to hide photos that I've already added to a Collection so that my Catalog only shows the photos that have still not been added to a Collection?

Hope that makes sense.

Or, if not, is there a way to change the Collection a photo is part of?  For example, if I add all photos to a "Temporary" collection, select a group of photos and change the Collection from Temporary to Birds?  That should do what I need, but I can't figure out how to change what collection a photo is in.

[johnrellis]

"I intend to organize them by collection (People, Places, Birds, Flowers, etc.)."

I strongly recommend that you use keywords rather than collections for this -- keywords are designed precisely for this kind of organizing. While you can use collections, you'll find many rough edges in the user interface, and you'll never be able to share your organization with others (whereas keywords can get written into industry-standard metadata fields of exported photos and are displayed by other apps and online services).

You might consider a tutorial such as one of Victoria Bamptom's books: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/shop/

To see photos that don't have keywords assigned to them, do Library > Enable Filters and then use the Library Filter bar:

You can find photos that aren't in any collection, using a smart collection defined with this obscure criterion:

[cmgap]

When  you select images for a collection do you flag or rate them? In addition to being able to filter on keyword as mentioned by John, if you  use a flag or a color label for example  you  can use  the sort feature to quickly exclude images that have been  placed in collections.

[Jao vdL]

As John says below, keywords are a far better way to categorize subjects in your images. That also allows you to easily find for example photos of birds AND flowers as it is easy to search for multiple keywords. Collections are more useful for things like "Pictures from my July 2014 vacation", "Joe and Mike wedding", "Best images from photoshoot 10-2-19", "all-time best images" etc. i.e. looser associated images. 

[Just Shoot Me]

Whichever you chose. Collections or Keywords LR will place an icon badge on each image that you have eother placed in a collection or assigned a keyword to.

So that is one way to identify which images have been placed in either a collection or had a Keyword assigned.

[tic3]

Thank you everyone for your recommendations.  I will work with Keywords as suggested and see how that goes.