10. Managing your photos in Lightroom

Photograph: London Eye, Westminster, London © Martin Evening 2009 Canon EOS 400D | 400 mm | ISO 400 | f 10 @ 1/800th

How to use the metadata tools in Lightroom to manage your catalogs

Here is a quick test for you: Can you remember all the things you photographed in the last month? Were there any shots in particular that stood out? How about that same month five years ago? There are a lot of photographers who think they can successfully rely on their memory when accessing pictures from their photo archives. The fact is though that as we shoot more and more photographs this kind of approach is doomed to failure and as time goes by things are only going to get worse.

Lightroom can help you organize and catalog your images from the very first moment you import your images. It provides a flexible system of file management that can free you from the rigid process of having to organize your images within system folders.