After I demo Lightroom to a crowd of die-hard Photoshop and Bridge users, or just show it to someone for the first time there is always a slight fear that they will start working with Lightroom in the wrong way. Everyone just wants to get it right the first time and I completely get that. Therefore, I thought I should share what I have started doing since a couple of weeks ago. You see, I am starting over again with my Lightroom library.
I have been shooting for many years now and I have been using Lightroom since the very first beta versions before version one. Not only have the software changed dramatically over these years, but so has my photography. For the first few years when I started becoming more serious with my shooting, I improved a lot. This led to me not wanting to keep or see the old photos that I had taken even just six months before.
My Lightroom library is a mix of different types of photography for different purposes and different levels of seriousness. Today, I find that to be utterly confusing and not helpful at all. Plus, in the past year or two, my photography has pretty much been at a stand still. There has just been too many other things going on in my life.
Now that I am beginning to pick it up again, I want a clean start.
So, what am I doing? Well, I will be starting with a brand new catalog where only photos from today and on will end up. These are however only photos that I set out to take as part of a photo shoot. No iPhone photos in this catalog. No photos from the family get-together. Just photos that had the purpose of beautiful photography (regardless of the end result though…).
I hope this new start will give me an easier time organizing all new photos coming in as well as helping me kick-start my passion for photography as I no longer have to wade through the mess that was my old photo library. It’s a fresh start for a fresh time.
The morale of the story is that you can just decide to start over whenever you want, keeping your old catalog files as reference, not having to go back again and re-add your old photos. Just archive and move on, be happy and keep shooting better stuff!