Hi peas. I'm here today to share with you how I organize my photos... and more specifically how I organize and use my photos in relation to Project Life.
I use Lightroom for my photo organization. Whenever I'm ready I import the photos from my SLR and my iPhone into Lightroom. (I mix my SLR photos in with my iPhone photos) I don't have a scheduled time when I do this... just whenever I think of it. I import my photos into dated folders. Lightroom does this for me automatically. Photos from the current month just stay in their dated folders. Dated folders from previous months go into Monthly folders (when I remember to make them and move them over). I only store the current year of photos on my iMac. Previous years are stored on an external harddrive. I can easily access these in Lightroom when I need too (but obviously for Project Life I don't really need to).
I add keywords when I remember so I can find things easier.
That's a quick overview of how I store them. Now... how I use them for Project Life.
I'm pretty current with project life and can easily find which days I'm needing to pull photos from by looking in my Project Life planner. I go through the photos in those seven folders and mark photos I like or think tell a story so that they go into the Quick Collections folder. This folder doesn't move your pictures over or anything... it just places a copy of them in there. Once I've gone through all the daily folders I can open the Quick Collection and see all the photos I've chosen in one glance. From here I can "unclick" on the ones that I don't think will work, or just eliminate some due to space.
For this particular week (you can find a video of me putting this week together in the Project Life Video Series) I'm only dealing with three days so I don't have a lot of photos.
While I'm here I'm looking at my planner and memorabilia... marking photos down and narrowing things down and making adjustments in my template. When this is all done I'll have the photos I need, a spot for memorabilia and maybe even a calendar and a week in review card.
From here I edit the images. Usually I do this right in Lightroom and just brighten them up a bit. Sometimes I drag them into Photoshop and run some actions. I usually leave iPhone photos alone because I've already edited them in my camera.
I like a border around my photos. To do this I made some custom cropping measurements right in Lightroom. I'll resize them with once click into either 2.75x3.75 or 3.75x5.75. If I want it a square I'll just select 1x1. This just really changes the ratio of the photo. When I'm getting ready to print I'll have to enter the correct amount.
I print the photos I'm using for scrapbooking in Photoshop, but I print my photos for Project Life in Lightroom. This is because I can drag in multiple photos and move and resize them all on as many pages as I want and with ease. No layers. No new canvases.
I start dragging my photos into the "Print" section. Here I can quickly add more pages, rotate, resize, and so on. This is a HUGE timesaver for me. HUGE!
Once everything is good to go I hit print. Usually I'll use three 8.5x11 sheets of photo paper for one week of Project Life.
A quick trip to my paper trimmer and I'm all ready to go.
I'm happy to say I've found a system that works for me. I have it streamlined enough that getting ready to create a Project Life spread does not seem like a chore.
So, how about you? How do you organize your photos?
