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File Organization and Archiving

Lesson 17 from: Mastering Lightroom Classic & Photoshop Fundamentals

Andrew Kearns

File Organization and Archiving

Lesson 17 from: Mastering Lightroom Classic & Photoshop Fundamentals

Andrew Kearns

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Lesson Info

17. File Organization and Archiving

Simplifying a tedious part of every photographer’s process. Andrew teaches you how to find your images easily and quickly, across every shoot and backup hard drive.

Lesson Info

File Organization and Archiving

One of the most important things you can do to set yourself up for the long run is have a great organization system for your photos. And I think the best one you can do is the simplest one which is how I do it. I'm a little biased, but I think mine has worked and it's been worked flawlessly for me. Honestly, if a client from years ago says, oh we need these photos. I know where I would find those photos. Here's my hard drive right here. If I go into projects, you'll see this list of dates. And if I'm gonna, I'm just gonna order this by name. So it's an alphabetical order which makes it a numerical order. And it's really important to order it by the year, the month. And then the day, because if you, for instance if I had a shoot in here that was 2020.1.5, and then I had a different shoot that was 2021.1.4. And I had those ones before the 2020, it would totally put it in the wrong order, and just it would just, It would just be so confusing and your years would not be in order. So here's...

my projects folder. And at a glance, I'm gonna make this a little bigger. You can see everything that I did. So if I wanted to refer to my Thunder Mountain Lakes hike, I did with my friends it's right there along with an organized system within it. So yesterday we shot Eli in Montana. There's the date, and I titled it Eli in Montana. Easy. I opened that up and I have three folders here, photo video and working. Photo and video are pretty self-explanatory. I'll go through the working one first. In the working one I open that up and I have Eli Lightroom catalog and I have all that stuff. All the Lightroom catalog data right there. For me personally, I will usually have a altogether Lightroom catalog for all these projects. I'll have it be hard drive specific, just because if I'm trying to jump between different shoots and I'm editing different photos to maybe share later on Instagram, I don't wanna have to open a new catalog every time. for this specific scenario, I just created a new catalog. So number one I could show you what a working folder would be. And then also so it would just run fast, for the workshop purposes. Also in the working catalog. If I was making a video like a premier file that would fall in here too. So you'd have the premier document, and all that. For the video, I didn't shoot any video on a shoot yesterday, but let's say I wanted to use some of Tucker footage from the C200. So I might hit new folder and I could say C200 Tucker, and then I could drag and drop all those files in there all the raw video files and call it good, but I'm not gonna use those. So delete that out of there. And then the photos, same exact thing. These are just what I shot. So I did 5D mark II, and all the raw files are in there. And a7 III, all the raw files are in there. Really simple system. There's really not much to it. And you can see why it's not hard to find my images. One thing I'll do across hard drives if I'm creating like pitch decks and stuff like that is just have a folder with a just ton of selects from over the years in a massive Lightroom catalog that I can just access and it'll have, I think it has like five or 6,000 photos in it right now, just random selects from the years to where I can draw from, like let's say I'm pitching a car shoot. I can open it up and find my car photos across any hard drive that I'm currently using. And that took a long time to set up. It was like a week of just going through all my photos and throwing them into like a just like a motherboard folder essentially. And now I can transfer that folder across to the next hard drive, and all the files that I'm editing are all there. All the exports I've done are all there. Yeah, I think it's just really important to have that available no matter what hard drive you're using. and that's just gonna be that's just gonna provide a faster workflow if you're creating pitch decks, and if you're trying to share images on Instagram, or whatever it may be I'll also do that with things I'm doing for video work. So music across several hard drives. I have a music folder for all my video music files as well as just random video assets. Yeah. It just keeps it clean, keeps it simple, and that's really what you should take from this whether you use my system or not just keep it simple. You wanna be able to access the files you're looking for at a moment's notice and not take more than 30 minutes to have them found not even 15 minutes. Just keep it simple moral of the story.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workshop PDF
View Andrew's Selects
Sonora Edit - Before and After
Mountains Edit - Before and After
Edit 01 - Before and After
Edit 02 - Before and After
Edit 03 - Before and After
Wildist-Kearns-Edit_File-01.ARW
Wildist-Kearns-Edit_File-02.ARW
Wildist-Kearns-Edit_File-03.ARW

Ratings and Reviews

Ratul Dutta
 

This class is really like a good investment. It's gonna help you step by step and you can come back to it multiple times when you need to. Been watching Andrew Kearns on YouTube since 2018. Massive fan of his editing style. I wanted this class as soon as I saw the discount rate. Being a student from a different country, I probably wouldn't have been able to afford it at it's original price. This workshop goes in real depth towards the "approach" of editing a photo. I learnt a tonne of cool stuff. So many new things. Subtle yet so powerful.

Mack Woodruff
 

Incredibly Eye Opening This workshop truly opened up a whole new world of editing techniques that I didn't fully realize existed. I'd recommend this workshop for anyone who has a basic understanding of LR and PS already and are hoping to take it to new levels. I will keep coming back to it for a long time!

Veronica Ettedgui
 

Very very nice!!

Student Work

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