Picture Storage Question.

I am guessing that I am not the only one here that also takes pictures of family, friends and social occasions (son's 6th bday). My question is other than separating them into different folders for trips and such do you have all of these pictures in your Lightroom library or do you have a seperate location that you put these types of images?

I use collections in LR 2.0 to put all my friends and family stuff in. I also keyword each image so I can pull out whatever I need quickly. I probably should be using the new Smart Collections instead based upon the key words.

I just dump them into lightroom and keyword tag them. I've been doing this since 2004 with PS Elements 3, so its habit.

I maintain two catalogs in LR. I just switched to a new system because even with collections and keywords I got tired of having the happy snaps in my main portfolio. I tend to browse images by folder.

I pulled all of my images into a file area and catalog named "All Photos". I download serious and family shoots into this catalog and it is the master copy of everything. I'll do my sorts and selection for serious shoots there. For the picks, I run the raw files through DxO for geometric and abberation corrections and convert to DNG. Then I import the DNGs into another catalog called "Master Portfolio" that has all of my serious images. This way I have a working catalog where my best images are managed and another catalog that contains everything. If I need to go back to a source raw file I have it but it's not cluttering up my working catalog.

Good luck finding your own zen!

Basically what I am currently doing is putting it all into one place and having multiple categories, I was just wondering if anybody here had a different approach with it.

Thanks

I currently organize by folders by trip/family event, but am preparing to do something similar to Kalin's approach to separate out working files from source files.

I keep my family snapshots completely separate from my "real" photography. All my good stuff is taken with my DSLR, but snapshots may come from my phone, my P&S digicam, or my DSLR.

All snapshots are imported into Picasa, all the good stuff is imported into Lightroom. Managing family photos in Picasa is a breeze, and so easy to put online to share with everyone. In my mind, Picasa is the ideal solution for managing family photos. Picasa also lets me manage video clips as well, which I store right alongside my photos. The other reason I use Picasa is because it's something easy for my wife to use. No reason for her to learn Lightroom just to send a couple photos to her mom or something. (http://picasaweb.google.com/lisaandbrent)

Brent, I think that is the direction I am going to lean. I already have everything in picasa and I am transitioning to lightroom, I was considering doing the exact same thing for the same reason. No reason for my wife to learn lightroom.

Great suggestion

Thanks.