Organizing A Personal Project
PHOTO CHALLENGE | Organize your 30-day photo challenge into one easily accessible folder.
There are plenty of options to organize your photos, and the greatest decision will be based on what editing software you use. At a minimum, create a folder just for your photo project so you can see all the photos selected at a glance. Remember that you can save multiple copies if you want them chronologically ordered in your usual saved files, but it helps to have a copy saved specifically in relation to the project.
If you use Lightroom, here is how you can organize your photos within the program:
Start by creating a new Lightroom catalog for your project.
Each day (or every few days), import images directly into this Lightroom catalog.
Cull through the photos marking the ones you want to keep with a "B" to put them into the Quick Collection and an "x" for the images you plan to delete. After culling through, hard delete the images you don't want (Command > Delete). Don’t keep photos that don’t make the cut or are chosen in close comparison to others, there’s no need for a bunch of similar shots that you likely won’t bother with again.
After you have culled through, select the image(s) for your project and mark them with a Keyword for quick search access. Photo a day 2021, Daily photo challenge, 30 Days in January project, etc.
At the end of each month, finish editing all the images you’ve saved in Quick Collection, if you haven’t already. Once they are edited, move these images out of the Quick Collection and into a regular Collection that I name by year/month, such as January 2021 (this clears out the Quick Collection to 0 images so you’re free to start fresh and without cluttering that folder).
After saving the images in their collection by month, then export all of your personal images from that month and back them up to an external hard drive. I would also recommend saving your RAW files in a separate folder so you always have the original and edited copies. This way if your LR catalog is ever unrecoverable, you always have the hard copies saved.
Then, repeat the process for the new month, saving current images into the, now empty, Quick Collection, editing your project photos first, and polishing up the whole Quick Collection within a week or two of the month ending.
With this process, you can quickly view all of your project images at once within LR simply by sorting by the project keyword.
Then at the end of the month or year, simply export all the images with the project keyword, and you have a collection ready to put into a video or album of all your photos.