Just Signed Up for LRC

[MKuran]

I have been doing wildlife photography for many years. But new to LRC not sure how to add all my past images to lightroom for viewing and possible editing. I have them in folders by Year/Month/Day.

Also not sure if it's advantagous to create a catalog called Wildlife Photography and then add key words and collections. Can someone explain this to me or point me to a video that covers these topics? Using the latest LRC just fyi.  Thanks

Mike

[Rob_Cullen · Accepted solution]

In simple terms- You Import the photos using the [ADD] option in the import dialog.

This leaves all your photos exactly where the are located in their dated folders. And it creates previews in the catalog that you can select for editing, keywording, collections, etc.

You only want and need one catalog for ALL your photos. You can use Collections and Keywords to easily identify all "wildlife" photos.

I suggest you download the free 'Quickstart' guide for Lightroom-Classic from- https://www.lightroomqueen.com/

Then you can find some good tutorials at- https://jkost.com/blog/lightroom-training-videos 

And also on YouTube - ! Lightroom Classic - The Complete Picture - YouTube 

[MKuran]

Thank you I will do that and I will check out those links and videos as well. 

[Bogiebooo]

There are lots of You Tubes on how to use LRC…I can be a challenging program to you. I took a one week course years ago that got me going….but if I were you I only start with a few test photos and she how you like it…It can be very tricky...

[KR Seals · Accepted solution]

The essential concept to keep in mind is that your photos are not in the Lightroom Classic catalog. The catalog contains all the information it knows about your images, camera metadata, processing instructions, etc, etc, etc. 

I find it very useful to create folders and file names in this format:  2025-05-26-Memorial Day Service, the files have the same name with a sequence number. That system includes both the date and keywords in the folder and file names. Easy to search for in Lightroom Classic and the computer operating system.

Backing up your catalog is just a important as backing up your photos.

Catalog tips:

Locate the catalog on your very fastest drive

as @Rob_Cullen said, you only need ONE catalog. Any more than that is just a source of confusion when you are trying to find specific images. Especially when you eventually may get hundreds of thousands referenced in the catalog. (The only time I ever used more than one catalog was when I was working on images that were not mine. I was doing image processing and wedding album design for another pro photographer and didn't want his work mixed with mine).