Organizing Digital Photos

I recently had a need to reclaim some space on my laptop and that need coincided with the need to better-organize my digital photos.

For years I used iPhoto, the app provided by Apple with all of it’s machines but recently Apple moved away from iPhoto in favor of the Photos app. And while Photos is a perfectly acceptable app for photo management, I figured if I was going to do a major overhaul of my image organization, I might as well take the leap and graduate to a more robust solution.

Several photog-friends have recommended Lightroom so I gave it a go. Below are the steps I took to get organized:

1. On external storage, created a “Photos” directory with subdirectories per year.
2. Sorted and exported all of my original photos out of the Photo App by year (getting rid of unneeded photos like screenshots of Shazam, etc).
3. Ensured my Photos database was backed-up.
4. Migrated it off of my laptop to an external drive.
5. Deleted the old iPhotos database
6. Installed and configured Lightroom based on this page: How to Organize Photos in Lightroom
7. Started importing, tagging, and sorting photos into Lightroom.

Some things I did to take advantage of the situation:

• Revamp my tagging system, which had evolved over time and wasn’t cohesive or all-inclusive
• Settled on a unitifed naming convention for all of my photos (no more of that IMG_XXX crap!)
• Moved my photo library to external storage to free up significant space on my laptop (just be sure to back it up!)

Things I still need to figure out:

• How to conveniently sync photos between my laptop and iPhone.