Lightroom 4

[dasuess]

Aperture does exactly the same.

Ditto on Aperture. I have my own folder structure on disk. While first learning Aperture, the structure within Aperture mirrored the folder structure on the hard disk. I have now started re- arranging within Aperture, but the external folder structure on disk has not changed.

 

[robert blu]

In my postprocessing I try to do what I did in the wet darkroom times. Since LR3 I can do it quite well, but specially for my B&W an development via Photoshop is sometimes necessary. I was told LR4 adds some more possibilities. Not yet tried, personally.
robert

 

[kbb]

As someone who is new to both digital and to LR, I'd like to get started early on a rational filing/organizing system before things get out of hand.

Can someone offer suggestions for a digital newbie?

Harry

Welcome to Lightroom.
Here are my simple suggestions, based on what I have learned-- and been doing-- since 2007.

1.Create an überfolder under which all your photo files, be they raw, TIFF, JPEG, etc, will live. Name it something imaginative, like "Photos."
2.Inside "Photos", place folders containing the actual files. I name these folders by date, e.g.: "120629". 12 for 2012, 06 for June, and 29 for the day. I name them with the date of the day ingested into the computer, but you could name them for the date shot or anything else.
3. When you start with Lightroom, in the Library Module use the Import control to locate, then import the überfolder; this import action will import the überfolder and all the dated photo folders inside it, in order.
4.If, in the future, you choose to change the physical location of the photo files--say, to a different hard drive--you can easily re-direct Lightroom to find the überfolder in it's new location.

I recommend Victoria Bampton's "Lightroom 4 FAQ" book for well-indexed, plain explanations of all the various choices and functions within Lightroom. Cheers...

 

[hteasley]

As someone who is new to both digital and to LR, I'd like to get started early on a rational filing/organizing system before things get out of hand.

Can someone offer suggestions for a digital newbie?

If your images have correct capture times or file dates, then Lightroom can automatically sort by that and store them in folders like that. But I never look at the folders of images outside LR, I use LR to view everything.

The one thing I stress is to keyword your photos on import. Don't wait to have several thousand images without good keywords, because that's a huge pain, to go through a lot of old images to go through later, when you may have forgotten details you may want to remember.

I keyword a lot: camera, lens, city, state, subject matter, known people with visible faces, whatever. Good keywords help me do searches later, so that again, I really don't care about my folder structure anymore, because I can see what I want through intelligent filtering of my library.

If you have a folder structure that's important, that isn't easily replicated by LR's own sorting functions, then it's easy to import a folder at a time, and assign specific keywords right then, that have your folder info.