Lightroom Work Style

Lightroom 2.1 File Menu – Catalog Import/Export Controls

When I recently took note of the Lightroom Forums community, I was seeking an answer to the complex question, "What is the difference between Main and Multiple Catalogs?" At that time, I've been reading along the digital photographers trail. That is: shoot them, import them, keyword them, and the job gets done with a main catalog.

At the same time, I was working my way through integrated workflows, trying to make Lightroom an integral part of my paradigm; shooting and writing! For me, writing occurs around an image. But it's more than that. Writing is the way where conscious and subconscious come together to express and mature unrecognized feelings and reorder awareness.

Disorder

Needing to create a six part Lightroom, Photomatix, CS3 workflow for February, 2009, I fell back to years of working in Windows. I'd start off with an idea, put an image in Word, pick up a microphone, and begin to talk... on screen, words and feelings would appear around the image. Now, most writers I've read say writing is very hard. For me, it's a process which may take days; it's a process where I constantly have to edit - therein lies the problem. I've developed a habitat where it might take 5 or 10 edits to get a piece written. After a night of sleep, I might come back, make a change to an image, and keep on truckin’.

Since this is a description of a tumultuous, non-planned process, the pieces, the changing images - all appeared with Roman numbers for each edition and all appeared in folders (sometimes different folders depending on either capricious mind or state of progress).

Now, that tumultuous process is exactly what goes against the neat main catalog you see in digital photography books for Lightroom image organization. Here I was, creating multiple images in multiple versions with multiple folders. I'd begun to realize the laptop was a very creative environment whereas the desktop is more of a storage environment (particularly after I finally calibrated the laptop screen for CS3).

So I needed to gain control of this wretched tumult, consolidate images in one form and Word documents in another, and get on with my real-life ~ an abiding love for wild things and wilderness photography.

Order

So I patiently drilled back into Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers. I could not find an exact solution to the problem which vexed me. So, it took more digging to reach a satisfactory answer. To my surprise, in the Library module lying under Import from Catalog and Export as Catalog, lay a very powerful set of answers.

Tongue-in-cheek, let me quote Scott Kelby, referring to his laptop, "The file structure you see here stinks. It's the one I use when I'm writing books, which has never been, nor sadly will ever be, very organized." Scott just didn’t bother to tell us exactly how he solved the disorder problem…

To make a long story short, I've consolidated all images for each phase of the six part workflow into their own folders. I've exported them to a main catalog, then sent it by ethernet to the studio computer. I've collected all writings, thrown away earlier edit versions, and etherneted that folder to a project folders on the studio's external hard drive. Others may use USB 2 or FireWire external hard drives instead of ethernet.

Thanks to Adobe engineers design skill and a little discipline on my part, I'm trying to be a bit more organized...