Unravel Your Photos: Lesson Six

The final lesson of Life:Captured Inc.'s Photo Organization with Lightroom class is where you learn how to reap the benefits of all the time you spent importing, renaming, organizing, keywording and rating your photos. Ronnie shows us how to use Lightroom's Collections panel to instantly create a customized collections of photos from your library.

As I delved deeper into the lesson, the more I realized what a powerful tool Lightroom is. As someone who has thousands upon thousands of digital photos and wants to create keepsakes from those captured memories, I am now more willing and excited than ever to invest the time needed to organize my photos. The payoff will be huge as I will be able to easily create photo books and albums without missing photos I forgot about.

Ronnie shares the steps she uses to create photo collections for her photo books and life albums (her stunning version of Project Life albums). Learning about her workflow was immensely helpful for trying to figure out what my own personal workflow should be. 

The lesson concludes with Ronnie teaching us how to export photo files to their designated folders so that your final images are organized and ready to use for your memory keeping projects.

I'd like to thank Ronnie and Trish for hosting this generous boot camp and for this amazing class. I have learned so much from it! After many unsuccessful attempts to learn more about Lightroom, I am finally equipped to tackle and unravel my photos :) 

Unravel Your Photos: Lesson Five

Now that Ronnie has taught us how to use Adobe Lightroom to organize our photos, she now teaches us how to apply what we learned in a manageable weekly workflow for importing and organizing current photos. Once this weekly workflow becomes established and routine, we can then begin to work on our backlog of older photos. 

I always thought that trying to organize 15 years worth of digital photos would be way too difficult, so what would be the point of even trying? But now that I have learned how to use the powerful tools available in Lightroom, this monumental job actually seems doable. I tend to tackle projects like this by working like mad nonstop, but the enormity of this task will force me to divide it into manageable projects. Ronnie assures us that it's perfectly OK if we don't have time to work on our backlog every month, as long as we continue to work on it at our own pace and above all, be patient with our progress (this I constantly need to be reminded of).

Ronnie also teaches us how to archive older photos when our computer runs out of space, how to manage our existing Lightroom catalog, and how to create a new Lightroom catalog. Lastly, she talks about the importance of backing up our photos. Now, backing up my photos is one thing that I have always been religiously good about doing, since losing my photos has always been one of my worst nightmares. I currently back up my photos to an external hard drive and two online photo storage sites. I used to also back them up to two sets of DVD's, but I stopped doing this a couple of years ago.

I'm a little sad that the boot camp is almost over, but I am very happy with what I have learned from this class. Prior to these lessons, I thought learning Lightroom would be too daunting and difficult, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it is actually easy. The keys were having the right teacher and having the material presented in a user-friendly format. Just one more lesson to go...