In this series of Lightroom articles, I will be looking at the “Why” more than the “How”. So many tutorials show you how to work with Lightroom but they leave off the reasoning behind the actions. I have always been one of those who wanted to know the “Why” things work the way they do.  This dissertation is not a  “how to” manual. You will probably need a book or tutorial to actually follow along and do the action. The purpose of this series is to give you the background information so you can make intelligent decisions when you use Lightroom.

Lightroom #5  is divided into 7 Modules. Each Module or section allows you to work on your picture files for different purposes.  If you ask yourself, “What do I want to do in Lightroom?”, the answer will be one of the modules.  Today, I will talk about the Library Module.

Let me start out by saying, “Lightroom does NOT have a folder for storing your picture files!” It has a CATALOG file for keeping track of your picture files. STOP. Think about that a minute.  Lightroom DOES NOT make a second copy of your pictures when you add pictures to the Lightroom Catalog.  If you have a folder for pictures on your Hard Drive in your computer, perhaps called “My Pictures”, you can tell Lightroom to catalog those pictures. Lightroom, called LR from now on, does not move those pictures into a special LR picture folder; nor does it make a new copy of those pictures; rather, it just makes a notation where the picture is and stores information about that picture file in the LR catalog.  That was a long sentence, you might want to read it again and think about it. It is very much like an old card catalog in the Library; where each book has a card that tells where the book is on the shelf.  This analogy is so close that I will use it may times during this explanation of LR.

When you first start up LR, you will be telling it to look for picture files in a folder on your computer or on an external hard drive. Then, you tell it that you want it to add information about those pictures into its catalog.

You will use the IMPORT button, while in the Library mode, to bring up the import screen.  First, You will tell LR where the files are stored. You do this by pointing out the location in the left column where drive folders are listed. By going to the location of your picture files you want to add to the catalog you are telling LR the current location of the pictures.  Then you will choose the ADD button at the top to to perform this action.  At that point, LR will go through all the picture files you have stored at the given location and create cards for the LR card catalog for each picture (file).  The file will not contain the actual picture file but it will save a small preview picture and meta data (date of picture, camera settings and other information added later) but most importantly, it will store the location of the picture file.

Let’s go back to the library analogy. When the books are stored on the shelf in the library, they are stored by subjects.  If you know your way around the library, you can skip the card catalog (now on computers) and go directly to the stacks because you know that the photography books are  all together in a specific place in the library. You can go there and look through all the books on the shelf and find a title you want to read.  Imagine now, what it would be like if the books were just stacked randomly without any groupings. What if the books were just added to the shelves in order of when they were purchased.  At this point, you would HAVE TO go to the catalog first to see where your book might be.  When you went to the shelves to find the book you looked up, you would not find any other books similar in nature close by for comparison. This process would be very unproductive.  What if you went in and the computers were down? The library, full of information would be worthless! The more books the library had the more worthless they would be without proper organization and a card catalog.

Lightroom is the same way. To make LR as useful as possible, your pictures should be stored in an organized way.  My pictures are stored by subject matter.  The first thing to do is have one folder with  ALL other picture folders in it. If you are on a Windows PC, the “MY PICTURES” folder is an example. That works just fine. Inside that folder, you don’t want to just  dump the pictures randomly. That would be like storing snapshots in a garbage bag. Sure, they are all there together but how can you find Uncle Bill’s wedding picture?

I have my pictures divided into  19 sub folders inside “my Pictures”. Mine start with “FAMILY” then “FRIENDS” followed by “TRAVEL” and 16 other folders.  The “FAMILY” folder contains more folders; like a folder for my wife and I along with our kids (“Our Family”). Then there is a folder for my wife’s family. In the “OUR FAMILY”, you will find folders for each of us and each of our kids.  While LR makes it easy to find pictures with the various search methods, I can find pictures even without LR.  This means, if I lost the LR catalog and just had my original picture files, I would still have the access of all my pictures.

If you are just planning to install LR, I recommend organizing your pictures first in groupings of folders nested inside larger folders. I know some people who sort their pictures by date.  With a small quantity of pictures, this might be workable but as you collect more and more pictures, dates are hard to remember. Remember Uncle Jim’s wedding picture? When was that?  Sure, you can call someone or look in your date book to determine the date but for me it is easier to go to: Family > Pat’s family> Bill> Bill’s wedding> wife #4.

Once you install LR and have the catalog set up, it is VERY important to make all future changes to the organization from within LR. As long as you do this, LR will keep track of the new locations. If you just go to “MY PICTURES” and move files around, LR will not know where they have gone.

Most of the Hype about LR revolves around the Develop Module because that is the part that makes pictures look good but the real value of LR is the cataloging.  When you have tens of thousands of pictures, being able to locate them is of primary importance.  LR makes it easy to organize them.

Next Lightroom post will talk about keywords and other importing options.

Once upon a time, far away in the land of Awesomebeauty, there was a beautiful lighthouse.  The keeper of this lighthouse was named Canon Wealder. He was a rather short  and obviously was well fed by his wife Nikon.  Canon was better known to his friends by his nickname Photog. He was the town photographer and his pictures were known far and wide.  He loved his town and he loved his lighthouse because both gave him the opportunity to take many beautiful pictures.

Every day, he would scour the countryside for beautiful sights to capture with his lens. If there were a storm brewing, he might spend the day up in the tower leaning on the outside railing with his trusty camera hanging at his side. As a new and unusual cloud or squall line formed, he would raise his camera, compose the perfect shot and slowly push down on the shutter button.  CLICK, went the shutter and another slice of time was imprisoned on his film.

At night, he would go down in the basement level to his darkroom and carefully develop his negatives. He was a true artist with his camera and also in his darkroom. He would hang out his negatives to dry and when dry, he would put them in a folder with a note about each shot.  As the years went by, his collection of photos grew larger and larger. He had multiple file cabinets full of pictures.  He had to devote an entire storage room next to the darkroom for the storage.

One day, when he was looking through the files for a particular negative of his niece’s wedding, he thought to himself, “There must be a better way!”  He thought about the County Library and the way they sorted their books and had index cards to tell where the books were on the shelf.  “That’s it,” he thought. You will remember that he made notes on every picture taken and attached those notes to the pictures in the file folders. “Why not make a card catalog with these  notes.” came a voice in his head. He went down to the storage files and put a descriptive name on each file cabinet and a more descriptive name on each drawer. Then he went through his thousands of file folders. He would take a file folder and remove the page with the picture notes. After determining the content of the folder, he would find the descriptive cabinet and drawer and place the folder in the drawer but not before he had named the folder. Next he made an additional notation on the the file page he had removed. As an example, he might find a folder with pictures from the city garden and place it in the “landscape” file cabinet and in the “city” drawer. He would then mark the folder “city garden”.  On the folder note page, he would note the location; Landscape > City > City Garden.  Success! It took several weeks to get the folders all organized but when he was finished, finding a picture was easy.

The next step was to make the index cards for his catalog.  For nearly a month, he sat at his desk transferring the information from the note pages onto the index cards.  Each picture had a card.  The heading for the card was a short description of the picture. An example might be ” Michelle’s wedding – kiss at alter” . Below that, was any notes he had made about this picture like date, location, and people in the shot. The most important part of this note card was the location of the negative.  Portraits > Family > Michelle’s wedding.

 It was a work of art, this newly devised cataloging system.  His picture negatives were safely stored in the basement storage room next to the Dark Room. There were even signs over the door; “Dark Room” and  “Light Room” .  On his card catalog, was a plaque, “Lightroom Catalog”

Now you might think that this would be the end of the story but it is not because at Photog’s death, his estate was distributed and some things sold. The Lightroom Catalog was separated from the negatives.  The negatives were kept by the Photog’s wife but somehow in her grief, she sold the catalog case.  She was never able to retrieve it. The only salvation was that Canon had sorted the negatives into descriptive files.  Nikon spent the rest of her life trying to rebuild the Lightroom Catalog with the limited information she had. The notes about each picture were lost forever But at least, she had the pictures.

The moral of this story is:  Drives crash and files are lost. Always store your picture files in descriptive folders to make recovery possible. Back up your Picture files regularly and back up your Lightroom Catalog as well. Make sure both are stored in a safe place.  As I think about it, while it is not practical for me to try to store my more than 125,000 pictures to the cloud, storing a copy of the Lightroom Catalog might be a good idea.

Lightroom is a miraculous software.  Don’t underestimate the value of the “Library module”. The “Develop Module is great to make your pictures look better but if you can’t find the picture you want, what good is it?  Also remember that all the revisions to your picture files are stored in the Lightroom Catalog.  If you lose the catalog, you lose everything you did in the “Develop Module”. You are back to the original files!  That’s how non-destructive editing works. Yes, you always have the original file to go back to which is very important but all the revisions are stored separately unless you export the revised version to be saved. One option might be to shoot in RAW, make your changes and then export the new  optimized file to  jpeg in the same location.  This might give you the best of both worlds if the Catalog is lost. Best solution; Back-up, Back-up, Back-up!

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