1. How to Get Started

1.1 Introduction

Welcome to organize your images with Adobe Lightroom. This short course is all about getting organized with your digital images. I'm Andrew Childress and I'm your instructor. For most of us, our digital images are nowhere near as organized as we'd like for them to be. They might be strewn all about our hard drives or disorganized and we often can't find the ones that we're looking for. This course is really for anyone who wants to solve that problem using Adobe Lightroom. Some of the things that will cover in this course include learning how to store your images safely so they're easy to back up and we never lose them. We'll also scratch the surface on metadata which is a way we can explore image collection and always find the one that we're looking for. This is a short course with byte size lessons that are designed to help you get started quickly and easily and provide solutions to your image library issues. Because they're sure lessons, I encourage you to check out all of the links in the description to keep learning more but there's plenty of power inside this course alone. Let's go ahead and get started.

1.2 Physical Storage Suggestions

It's tough to decide how to store your images. They can definitely be large files. Especially if you shoot in RAW, and we want to make sure those images are nice and safe. So in this lesson, I'm going to talk about how to store your images. My recommendation to every photographer is to keep their images on an external hard drive, separate from their computer where all their apps and OS live. The ideal set up for an image collection follows a 3-2-1 philosophy. That means we have 3 copies of our images on 2 different media and 1 copy off site. 3 copies of our data means simply that our files are in 3 places in a given time. Two forms of media means that we diversify our files between drives such as keeping one copy on an external drive and one copy in the cloud. And having one copy off site just means leaving a copy of our images in the cloud or with a friend we trust. I like using external drives because they're pretty inexpensive, easy to back up and you can always add more later as your collection grows. My set up looks like this. I have a Synology disk station as the main storage device for my images. These things are pretty cool and are a popular choice for many photographers. This is where all of my images live. It's my hub for everything image related. You can connect this to your router or directly to your computer as I often do. I don't store any images on my laptop, instead they all live on the disk station. Inside of it are two hard drives that mirror each other exactly, if one goes down the other still has a full collection of my images, but what What about working in Lightroom. You might be wondering if you're using an external drive how you'll keep editing when you're disconnected. Later, we'll learn about Smart Previews, which let us keep working when we only have our computers with us and not the original external drive. That's it for this lesson. I hope you're thinking about how to store your images. With a 321 setup, you can always rest easy knowing that you have a backup.