Organizing your Lightroom catalog?

How are you keeping your Lightroom catalogs organized and where you can actually find things?  

Mine look like this: 




Dates only and PITA to find anything!

Help please

It took me three tries to arrive at (briefly)

Personal/Work/Other meta categories
>> Year / Sorta-meta Categories
    >> Date / Other Identifiers

And there are other subdivisions that make sense to me.

You have to figure out how you think/organize, and follow that same paradigm. That's the only way you'll be able to relate to how you've managed your photos in LR.

That said: Use keywords if you can't remember where you put things. It will help you, even if it takes effort to enter them.

   good post 

Don't ask, mine is a MESS!

Hoss wrote: Don't ask, mine is a MESS!

Guilty as charged!  

Same here.  

I was just reading about that Excire software and how that is supposed to help find photos when you don't catalog your photos in a organized way. 

I know many probably wouldn't like my organization, but it works for me and I've never seen a reason to change. Note that I am not a professional, so I don't need to worry about clients, events, etc. But I do shoot a lot of local HS sports, so end up with a large quantity. 

I simply organize by month and year: 

2018 
  01-2018
  02-2018
  03-2018
2017
  01-2017
  02-2017
  03-2017

etc

I shoot RAW and then export everything after editing to JPG. So I have a RAW directory to keep RAW and JPG separate. So I actually have the following structure, where I keep the RAW files and export the JPGs to the other set of month folders. That way I don't have RAW and JPG side by side in the same directories. 

2018 
  01-2018
  02-2018
  03-2018
  RAW
    01-2018
    02-2018

As mentioned by Gary, I do a lot of keywording to help is searching. In many cases, I'll have multiple keywords, such as: 

Central Sports (the name of our school)
Varsity Boys / Varsity Girls / JV / etc
Basketball / Baseball / Football

Or for personal stuff, things like: 
Family member names
Christmas
Birthday
Presents
etc

Create and organize using keywords that you may want to use to find pictures down the road. And those keywords don't matter in terms of your physical organization. 

I know my method isn't for everyone - and maybe even no one but me.  Use ideas you get to come up with something that works for you and you can reproduce consistently. 

There was another post in the last month or two with a similar question that has feedback. 

Stefan-Olsson wrote:

Is this under one date range?  If not, that is nearly A-Z and that would show you have less than 5000 photos (guessing)?  

that is all from 2018.......I delete everything that im not happy with or stuff I dont plan to work with at some point. Dates mean nothing to me. The names brings back the memories for me.

Stefan-Olsson wrote: that is all from 2018.......I delete everything that im not happy with or stuff I dont plan to work with at some point. Dates mean nothing to me. The names brings back the memories for me.

And to me, the "what" is a categorization to keyword and find via filters and not a basis of organization. Just shows that everyone has different thought processes about even something like this. Obviously many of us use very different processes. No right or wrong, just whatever works for you.  

I organize photos by date also.  Since most of my shots represent an emotional spark of some type, I tend to remember them by how old they are to my memory banks. I still give them names which helps sort out which file they might be in.  Things like "beer" or "baseball" and each photo with that name comes up for me to narrow it down.