Lightroom Classic Image File Organization

Introduction

In the past few weeks, I’ve had a few people approach me about how to best get started using Lightroom Classic.  These are people who have taken thousands of photos over the years and now want to get a little more serious about their hobby.  In short, they want to move from “picture takers” to “photographers”. 

Typically, they have a spider’s web of photos lying around their hard drive and/or on external drives.  The first step, before worrying about Lightroom, is to get organized and come up with an organizational strategy that will work for them going forward.

In this post, I’ll discuss my approach for organizing raw photos, exported jpeg photos and Lightroom backups.  Before committing to any image organization strategy (and it is a commitment), I would suggest watching a few YouTube videos on the topic.  Understand what each one is proposing and determine the one that you think will work best for you.

I’m not asserting that my approach is ground-breaking or brilliant in any way.  But, most importantly, it works for me and will at least give you a framework for proceeding with your own approach.

Background

I started using Lightroom sometime around 2018.  Being a desktop-based product, I was responsible for my storage management (e.g. ensuring enough disk space) and my own backups.  A few years ago, my “Lightroom” started being called “Lightroom Classic” and there was a new “Lightroom” product.  Think back to the days of Classic Coke.  This post isn’t an in-depth discussion of Lightroom Classic (“LRC”) vs Lightroom (“LR”).  To be clear, I don’t use LR.  My limited understanding of LR is that it’s cloud-based which gives better mobility, less disk management hassles and, presumably, increased cloud storage costs. 

So, this post discusses my image organization specifically as it relates to using LRC. 

I use a PC, so my terminology will be PC-based, but all the concepts should apply to Mac users as well.

File Organization

Each of you has lots of pictures on your computer, USB drives, external hard drives and other electronic equivalents of shoe boxes.  These include your photographs as well as the plethora of images that magically end up in each of our “Pictures” folders.  Step one is coming up with a strategy to separate your photographs from all of the other pictures.

I have a single parent folder, named “ImageVault”, for all my photos.  I don’t remember why I chose that name, but it was probably because that’s what was used in a YouTube video I watched years ago.  The most important thing is that it separates my photos from all other pictures.  And I like the use of “Vault” because it reinforces how I like to think of my photos.

Under “ImageVault”, I have a folder for each year of my photos.  Then, within each year, I have a folder for each event.  An event is something like “Bob’s Birthday” or “Christmas Party”.  My event folder is always named “yyyy-mm-dd<space><space>Event description”. 

For example, my photos from the January 17 OCC outing to Lasalle Marina are found in folder:

       \ImageVault

              2026

                      2026-01-17  OCC Lasalle Marina

After editing in LRC, it’s necessary to export files, usually as JPEG so that they can be shared with others.  I intentionally do not include these exported JPEGs in my ImageVault folder. 

So ImageVault is reserved for “source images” only.  Typically, a “source image” is a raw file.  It’s not uncommon for me to have both raw files from my camera and iPhone photos for a single event. In these cases, the iPhone JPEG files are source images and, therefore, I include them in my ImageVault.  To do this, I sign into iCloud.com, navigate to the Photos section and download those iPhone photos to my PC.  These get downloaded to the PC as a zip file.  I then unzip them into the appropriate event folder under ImageVault.  From this point forward, I don’t make any distinction between my camera raw files and my iPhone jpeg files.  They are all source photos taken with different cameras.

For someone who’s just beginning the task of organizing their photos, it can be a hugely daunting task to get their ImageVault folder structure in place.  And it requires knowledge of how to use Windows Explorer to do basic tasks (only basic if you’re a moderately competent PC user), such as creating folders and copying folders of files.  It can be a little risky since an entire folder of photos can be inadvertently deleted if you’re not careful. 

So, it requires a methodical approach and may take several days to get right. But it’s worth it.

Where to Store Photos?

So far, I’ve discussed organizing all photos into a single ImageVault-type folder with the appropriate year and subfolders. But where should ImageVault be stored?

I strongly suggest that you store ImageVault on an external drive.  The reasons for doing this include:

• You could easily use up all of your PC’s internal hard drive capacity with photos.  Even if you don’t use up your internal hard drive with photos, you’ll inevitably reach the point where you’ll start to be cautious about rationing your photos in order to save space.

• Whatever PC you have, it will become outdated in a few years.  Such is the nature of technology.  At that point, you’ll want to get a bigger and better PC.  The effort to move your huge library of photos from your old PC to your new PC could be a big task.  Having the photos on an external drive may just require you to simply plug your external drive into your new PC.  Voila, problem solved.

Even when using an external hard drive, the time will come when you’ve exhausted the space on that drive.  It’s much easier to implement an approach to use a second external drive than it is to move from an internal drive to an external drive.

I wouldn’t recommend skimping on the size of your external hard drive.  A 1TB or 2TB drive may suffice for your current needs.  But if you’re going to be getting more into photography, you’ll be taking many (perhaps many, many, many) more photos.  So, your past picture-taking rate may not be a good predictor of your future picture-taking rate.  A 4TB drive can be bought for $200-$300 and bigger drives can be bought for a relatively small incremental cost.

If you’re buying a new external drive, you’ll be faced with the decision of SSD (Solid State Drive) vs HDD (Hard Disk Drive).   SSDs are faster, quieter, more durable, more power-efficient and have no moving parts.  And, not surprisingly, more expensive.  They are ideal for operating systems and applications.  HDDs are best for large, long-term storage where speed is less of a concern. I use HDDs and find them perfectly adequate for my needs.

Image Backups

You now have all your photos on your external drive in a nicely organized file structure. Now it’s time to be concerned with backing up those photos and to develop an approach for the ongoing backing up of those photos.

Without diving into an LRC discussion yet, it’s important to remember that LRC simply points to your photos and doesn’t “own” or “contain” them in any way.  This means that any LRC backup, made from within LRC, only backs up the LRC edits that you’ve made and does not back up any of your source images.  That is your responsibility.

You will want to have a second external drive for image backup.  The exact process to get files from hard drive 1 to hard drive 2 may range from you periodically doing it whenever you remember to having an automated process.  What’s important for now is to appreciate the need to have a second copy of your source images.  Others would suggest, not incorrectly, that you should have a third version of all your source images stored offsite or in the cloud.

FYI, I was recently looking for something in the 8-10TB range for long-term backup of photos and other PC documents and ended up buying a 26TB (no typo) drive on sale for a little over $300.  

File Organization with Lightroom Classic

Whenever I return home from a photo event, I’ll create a new “yyyy-mm-dd  Description” folder under the yyyy subfolder of ImageVault. 

It’s not uncommon for me to shoot over 1,000 photos in a one-to-two-hour outing.  One of the reasons for this is that I shoot a lot of wildlife and bird photography in burst mode.   Because I expect my keeper rate to be low, I don’t want to copy all my images to the hard drive and import them all into LRC only to end up rejecting the majority of them in LRC and then removing them from the LRC catalog and deleting them from the external drive.

This is why I prefer to use image viewing software to assist in the initial culling of images before importing into LRC. There are many choices (e.g. FastStone Image View, Photo Mechanics, etc) for this type of software.  Some have a cost, some are free.

Also, LRC now has “assisted culling” to help to cull images.  It uses factors such as image sharpness and eye focus to make its recommendations.  In fairness, I haven’t used this feature, and it’s possible that it could lead to a change in my pre-LRC culling routine.

My pre-import process:

• View images from the SD card using “FastStone Image Viewer” (https://www.faststone.org), which is now the default image viewer on my PC.   It is free.  I like this program because it allows me to tag images by just pressing the “Q” key.  I tag all the images that I want to keep.

• From within FastStone, I view only the images that I’ve tagged and then:

o   press Ctrl+A to select all

o   press Ctrl+C to copy the tagged photos

o   Alt+tab to Windows Explorer, which has my new event folder

o   Press Ctrl+V to paste the photos from the SD card to the event folder

• Remove the SD card either from the SD card reader or unplug your camera from the PC

• At this point, the SD still has all the images on it.  I never delete individual images off the card.  It’s not a bad idea to keep them on the card for the next little while until you’ve had a chance to back up the source images from hard drive 1 to your backup hard drive 2.

• Depending on the size of your SD card, you could keep several events' worth of photos on it.

• Eventually, you’ll want to reformat your card using your camera (reformat, don’t delete all).  And never delete images from your SD from your computer.

Importing into Lightroom

It should be noted that at this point in the process, I have the source images that I care about in the appropriate event subfolder.  Now it’s time to import them into LRC.

The first key decision when importing images into LRC is whether you want LRC to assist in the copying of the files from the SD card to a folder, and, if so, do you want LRC to copy them as DNG.  Note that a DNG file is an Adobe-specific raw file.  Since I feel totally confident in my PC file-copying ability and the expected low keeper rate discussed previously, I prefer to do this file copying myself outside of LRC.  Which means that my LRC imports always use the “Add” option instead of any of the “Copy as DNG”, “Copy” or “Move” options that all require LRC to do file manipulation.  It also means that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever encounter a file space error when running an LRC import.  And my LRC imports are very fast because there is no file copying happening.

When importing, ensure that the import source folder is your new event folder on your external drive.  If you still have the card in the SD card reader, then the import process may default to showing the images from the SD card, which is definitely not what you want.  This is why I recommend removing the SD card immediately after copying the images from the SD card to your external drive.

It’s interesting to note that LRC will not let you use the import “Add” option when the source is the SD card.  If it did allow this, then whenever you wanted to reference one of the image files in the future, it would need to look on the SD card to find it.  And SD cards are meant to be temporary in nature.  An image that was on your card today may not be on your card tomorrow.

There are lots of YouTube videos on different approaches for importing into LRC.  I would recommend that you look at these to better appreciate the benefits and costs of creating previews as part of the import.  Creating previews really has nothing to do with the file management things we’ve been discussing so far but previews could speed up editing time at the expense of bogging down file space.  Previews can also be relevant if you want to combine using LR and LRC.

Where to Store Lightroom Classic Exported JPEGs?

You’ve edited your photos, and they now look fantastic.  It’s time to share them with others, which means that it’s time to export them from LRC.  Export basically combines your source file (usually, but not necessarily, a raw file) and your edits and creates a single export file (usually, but not necessarily, a JPEG) that can be easily sent via email, text or WhatsApp and easily shared on social media platforms.

You can either export all of your images and store them somewhere or only export them when you need to get a JPEG.

I’ve started using a system where I have an “LR_Exports” folder at the same level as my “ImageVault” folder.  These main folders are both on the same external hard drive.  Like ImageVault, LR_Exports has year subfolders and event subfolders under those.  After completing the editing of an event, I export all the files as JPEGs to the appropriate LR_Exports subfolder.  The exported JPEGs are relatively minor in size compared to their raw file counterparts.

As a minor aside, all files in the LR_Exports file hierarchy are JPGs, but I intentionally don’t name the LR_Exports parent as “JPGs” or “JPEGs” since, as noted earlier, I also have JPEG files as source files.

Lightroom Catalog

I have two LRC catalogs which, for this discussion, aren’t overly relevant.  Focusing on the newest and most recent catalog, it is stored in the folder:

• C:\Users\<Username>\Pictures\Lightroom\LRC 2026

Note that the catalog is stored on my internal hard drive.  This is because it needs to be fast since it’s being updated all the time when editing a photo.  Also note that the actual source file is really only read at the beginning of editing a photo (and perhaps not even then, depending on your preview setup).  And this source file is not being updated during the edit process.

Lightroom Backups

Depending on your LRC preferences, you may be prompted to perform an LRC backup either every session or once a week.  An LRC backup will back up all of the edits that you’ve made.  It does not back up your source images in any wa,y which is why this was discussed separately in this post.  If you have a catastrophic LRC issue:

• You could lose all the edits made since your last LRC backup

• Your source images should be unimpacted

In the LRC Library module, the menu “Edit > Catalog Settings > Backups” contains settings used:

1. To specify where LRC backups should be written

2. To specify when LRC backups should be done

3. To see how many old backups you have and to give you the option to remove or delete old backups.  Removing a backup results in LRC not knowing about the backup, but it stays on the disk.  I can’t think of a reason (but haven’t researched it) why I’d ever want to remove a backup without using the delete option instead.  Note that you can delete or remove individual images, which is entirely different from this discussion.

My catalog backup settings are:

1. I store LRC backups on the main backup drive.  Note that this is on a different drive than where the catalog is stored.  The backup drive doesn’t need to be super fast.

2. I’ve instructed LRC to prompt me to back up every time I exit LRC.  It’s possible that I’ve just completed a marathon editing session and would be extremely frustrated if those edits were lost.  More often than not, I tell LRC to “Skip this time” and bypass the backup.

3. I don’t see a need to keep more than a few catalog backups.

Moving Images Outside of Lightroom

The LRC catalog does not own or have a copy of your image.   Instead, it knows the location of where to find your image when needed.

If you instruct LRC to move an image from one folder to another, or to rename an image, it will:

• Do the requested action

• Update the image location in its catalog

Later, when it needs that source image, it will find it in the new updated location because it knows about the new location.

But… if you move or rename a source image outside of LRC, then the LRC catalog will continue to look for the now-incorrect old source file name in the now-incorrect old location.  LRC will report a “File not found” error.  When this type of error occurs, it often involves a whole folder’s worth of images.  You can redirect LRC to point to the new folder to find these source files.

It’s just easier and less stressful to instruct LRC to do these types of actions from within LRC.

Conclusion

In conclusion, transitioning from a "picture taker" to a "photographer" requires a commitment to a methodical organizational strategy before you even touch an editing slider. By establishing a single "ImageVault" on an external drive, you protect your computer's internal storage and ensure your library remains mobile and scalable as your skills—and your file counts—grow. Remember that Lightroom Classic is a powerful partner in this journey, but it is not a storage container; it relies on you to be the gatekeeper of your source images and the architect of your own backup system.

While the initial setup of these folders and backup routines may feel like a daunting task that requires several days to get right, the peace of mind it provides is well worth the effort. Once you have a reliable framework for importing, culling, and backing up your work, you are no longer just managing files—you are protecting your creative legacy. With your technical house in order, you are finally free to focus on what matters most: capturing the next great shot.