Photographers, this episode is for YOU. We get asked SO often about our workflow and systems with organizing our Lightroom catalogs and our hard drives in our photography businesses.

This is something that no one freaking tells you when you’re just starting your photography business and you’re kinda stuck to just sort of figure it out yourself. I remember when I first started my business and I didn’t have a CLUE what I was doing or how to work Lightroom, how to store my photos, where to put them for ease of finding old photos again, and ALL that jazz.

 

1. Using Individual Lightroom Catalogs:

Individual catalogs allow for easy sorting and editing down the road (technically this can also be done in single catalogs if sorted and filed correctly). Significantly speeds up your Lightroom when you both edit on individual catalogs AND when you store them exclusively on your external hard drive. 

How to create a new catalog: 

• Go up to file “new catalog”
• We change the title to something like “Joe & Sarah LR Catalog”

• Make sure to change the storage location to be specific on your hard drive (aka file it with Joe & Sarah)

 

2. External Hard drives

Your computer’s internal hard drive typically has limited storage AND processing speed. Meaning that when it’s using a massive program like Lightroom PLUS trying to work with RAW files, it gets slow fast. Not to mention you can fill up your internal hard drive with RAW files at the speed of light.

We highly recommend using a reliable external hard drive. It’s the ONLY way to do it in our opinion if you’re taking more than literally 3 RAW photos per year. 

Our favorite hard drives that we highly recommend:

• Lacie Rugged 
• SanDisk Pro Solid State Drive

 

3. How we internally organize our hard drives:

First: Main folders:

• Weddings
• Elopements
• Couples
• Personal

Second: under “weddings” for example:

• Couples name: aka Sarah & Joe
  • RAWs
  • Sneak Peeks
  • Catalog
  • Edited/final

If you want to get a deep dive into our backup systems (which is kinda the sister or cousin topic to this one!) and make sure all your hard work and files are protected for both yourself and your clients grab our backup freebie at www.theheartuniversity.com/backup. 

 

 

Show notes

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