Lightroom beginner: How to navigate the catalog?

[pxls]

Trying out Lighroom, having used Bridge for browsing my files and initiating ACR since many years. I get the basic difference - Lighroom being a database versus Bridge being a file browser. My question still though: How do I navigate the Lightroom catalog? Using Bridge it´s easy to select a specific folder on disc, containing a certain photo shoot to work with those images. Using Lightroom, am I supposed to bring up the entire catalog followed by using tags to narrow the selection? Is there a way to structure the Lightroom catalog into folders corresponding to my actual file system on disk?

[cmgap]

Yes... in Lightroom's Library module in the left most column, under Folders. Take a look at some of JKosts videos on Lightroom here  to get familiar with how to organize, navigate and take advantage of Lr's features and  functionality: https://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/lightroom-training-videos

Enjoy!

[pxls]

Thanks. I sure have to go through som Lightroom training, thanks for pointing me to those videos!

[cmgap]

Your welcome. Julienne is fast but thorough... and  you can rewind as many time as you like  : )

[dj_paige]

If you import the photos using the ADD option, then Lightroom Classic leaves the photos in their existing folder location, and you can then use the Lightroom Classic folder panel to locate your photos in folder. In my opinion, you ought to use metadata (keywords, captions, titles, etc.) to produce a more powerful organization and a more powerful search methodology that is not limited by folders. But to get there, you have to do the work of assigning keywords and captions and titles to your photos (but its definitely worth doing).

[pxls]

Thanks. I now realize the imports appear in the Folder panel. I do use keywords since Bridge, I guess they will be imported to Lightroom alongside the images.

[GoldingD]

Perhaps some tutorials:

https://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/lightroom-training-videos

[pxls]

Thanks!

[gary_sc]

One extra thought in here. 

I prefer to have all of my images inside one master folder. When you have your images in folders across your computer or extrnal trive, long term backup can be an issue — EXPECIALLY if a drive should die on you and you do not know where all of your images are located.

As stated before, if you ADD your images, they will remain where they were but the information will be added to the LR Catalog. If you MOVE the images, they will be moved to wherever you have them move to (and they will be added to the catalog as well of course). Fortunately, LR doesn't care where your images are, but for images management, I do.

I do not know the size of your computer's hard drive but it doesn't take long for images to start to fill up a computer's hard drive. Becuase of this, it's probably a good idea to consider keeping all of your images on an external drive. HOWEVER, since hard drives do fail, it's probably a good idea to #1: get a much bigger hard drive than you think you need, and even more important #2: get a 2nd drive of the same size that you can update from the first drive to the 2nd drive fairly often. That way, if/when the first drive fails, you do have a back up and nothing is lost. [FWIW, on my Mac I use the Syncing software "Chronosync" and use it at least once a week and more often if I've just ingested a number of images and/or have done a long session in LR-C. If you are on a PC I'm sure there are equal capable applications out there. I also subscribe to a cloud service (BackBlaze) just incase of a major catastrophy. If such a catastrophy were to occure I do not want to also be in depression about loosing all of my images.]

[pxls]

Thanks for your reply. Hard drives sure tend to be either new or filled up. I do use large internal storage drives which are backed up to external drives every two hours. For PC I use GoodSync syncing software. Useful advice regarding a single master folder for images.

[dj_paige]

This is good to hear, pxls. I am constantly surprised by how many people in this forum do not make regular backups, and its good to know that there are people who do make regular backups.