File renaming made easy
An issue which I have struggled with was a file renaming scheme. I have tried different naming conventions to see which one works best and have finally came up with one that is easy to implement and use in Lightroom. What I came up with in the end is to sort all files starting with year, month, and lastly with a sequence number (for eg 1207-00001.jpg). In this way, I will be able to have a unique filename for my entire catalogue of images containing tens of thousands of files and still have space for more. In the past, I used Bulk Rename Utility, a dynamic little program, for renaming files, but I have found Lightroom to offer the same capabilities with a better and faster user interface. However, note that there is a bug related to the “Image #” renaming token. Read about how to get around this issue.
In addition, I sort all my images in physical folders by Year-Month (for eg 1207 for July, 2012), and within those folders, I create subfolders together with the “date shot” and “event name” (for eg 12.07.30 Singapore Kite Festival) as shown below.
Apart from physical folders, Lightroom allows me to create virtual collections to facilitate adding the same photos to multiple collections without making unnecessary physical copies. I do this for all my shoots and end up having virtual collections with same names as the physical folders. By so doing I have an entire list to refer to quickly using the date shot.
