Lightroom Secrets

Get Ready for 2009

Well here it comes! 2009!!! Are you ready? Yeah, me neither!

While you are formulating those New Year’s Resolution why not take a look in Lightroom and finish up 2008 getting ready for 2009. Here are a few tips:

• Look again at how you are organizing your image files on your disks. If you have been prone to spraying folders of images all over your drives and relying on Lightroom to keep it all straight now is the time to bring some order. Try organizing all your images under one main folder. You can do this in Lightroom’s Folder panel or in your OS. Once everything is organized you can resolve missing indicators in Lightroom via Find Folder or Synchronize Folder commands
• One of the example smart collections that is installed with Lightroom is Without Keywords. Take a look at the image count for this collection. If it’s anything other than 0 then get in there and add some keywords!
• Utilize the new filter bar capabilities to gather together groups of images and then create collections to further organize your catalog.
• Review your keyword list and delete any unused keywords. Look for duplicate keywords (like cat, Cat, and CAT) and correct them down to one version.
• Go through your 2008 images again and remove any that really aren’t keepers. You can still keep the files if you don’t like to delete anything, but consider removing them from the catalog.
• If you don’t have a regular and reliable backup procedure WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??? Backup, backup, backup! I can’t stress this enough. Your images are unique and irreplaceable. ALL hard drives will fail. Don’t delude yourself into thinking yours is special and will run forever. Make sure that you keep one backup offsite at all times. Whether it’s at the office or in Mom’s china cabinet get it offsite. The best backup in the world does you no good if your house burns down and takes your computer and the backup with it.

Enjoy 2009 and remember Rule 5!

Related posts:

1. You Do Have a Backup…Don’t You?

    Print This Story     Email This Story

Tags: Lightroom

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Lightroom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.