I keyworded 12,394 scrapbook supplies in one day in Lightroom!

[vfleslie]

I imported and keyworded 12,394 scrapbook items by designer name in Lightroom last Saturday! I was a Lightroom newbie 2 months ago. I bought LR after several of you here recommended the program. I signed up for Kayla Lamoreaux's Finding Photo Flow class and started reading and studying all the tutorials I could find online.

I read several accounts of how others imported and tagged their scrapbooking previews using Kayla's methods. I decided to import all of the photos inside my main scrapbook folder. This brought in all of the jpegs, tiff and psd files which means I got all of my previews, papers and templates imported into Lightroom.

I decided to keep my designer/class folder structure so that I can continue to navigate visually in ACDSee or in windows explorer when I choose. In the LR Navigator panel all I had to do was to make sure all of the little triangles beside every folder and sub-folder were toggled down inside each designer's subfolder when I was selecting files to import. This revealed the entire folder structure for the designer. I clicked on the topmost folder containing the designer name and shift-clicked on the bottom sub folder name. This brought in all the jpgs, tiff and psd files in by designer subfolder. For example, I imported 38 images (mostly previews of word art) for Ali Edwards at one time. I created a master designer keyword, right- clicked to create an Ali Edwards keyword inside of designers and applied it to the 38 items I brought in all at once. Then I went on to the next folder and repeated. I was able to do this in one day between light household chores. I'd set up one folder to import and go fold a load of laundry, come back and keyword the import and go on the to next folder and household chore.

I have a little fine tuning to do with my store and class folders. I have to go into those folders and keyword those items by designer. Then I'm going to take 15 minutes a day and tag items by theme, template, preview type. I'm still thinking about how to structure this and how much detail I want. I was able to keyword 1,902 previews and 2,847 papers simply by searching for those file names after my main import was done.

I now have my 44,991 digi supplies and photos in my main Lightroom catalog under "All Photographs" and in the Folders section of the Navigator pane you can see I have 32,597 photos in my Pictures folder on my D: drive and 12,394 scrapbook photos in my Scrapbook folder on the D: drive.

This is SO COOL!!!!!!!!!

Carbonite is merrily churning away with the changes I made to the metadata of almost 13,000 files. I still have my ACDSee organizational tags embedded into the files but I may quit doing all the ACDsee tagging for future purchases if this works out well.




Leslie

[blhdvm]

WOW! That is awesome!! Big job accomplished!

[iUma]

Dang, Leslie!! That sounds great. Keep us posted on how it functions. As a Mac user I was delighted with the new app (for the Mac) of ACDSee. I have the original ACDSee Pro for Mac but the lightweight app is quicker and easier.

You've made great progress with this method.

[Jen D]

Great work! It is so much easier to scrap when your supplies are in order

[maureenreynolds]

Holy you-know-what! That's one amazing job Leslie! I'm only on Lesson 2 of Kayla's class but right now thinking I'm going to stick with the ACDSee. My system isn't broken and I'm not sure I've got the time and energy to start with lightroom. But you know us scrappers...you never know what you'll want to play with next!

[anke]

That is a lot!!! Good job

[esther_a]

That sounds incredible!! I don't know how I could be that fast in ACDSee!! Over the years I've developed a few techniques to speed things up. It's all about being systematic and efficient. But I'm super impressed by your efforts. I'm sure other LightRoom users will benefit from your description!

[mugsbigsis]

OMGosh, I feel like such a slacker. Good for you!

[dfwest]

Yikes!

[vfleslie]

I am a long time user of ACDSee and love the program. If it weren't for that pesky metadata issue, I wouldn't have made it a priority to try out Lightroom keywording. (and yes, I embedded my ACDSee tags and backed up my database) The only reason my folders were in such good shape for importing into LR was due to ACDSee. I am going to use my ACDSee catagories for quick LR tagging. For example, I searched for "Christmas" in LR and tagged a bunch of supplies. Then I looked in my Christmas tags in ACDSee and saw some files had names that did not contain "Christmas" but rather the names "Merry" or "December" or Holiday". I have 500 (ish) Christmas keywords done already.

I'll keep y'all posted but not sure when. December is getting ready to get really busy around here.

[Aino]

Wow that is impressive! I am a non-tagger myself and stick to using Adobe Bridge and my own memory on where things are and what I have....

[b2halter]

Well, you all just have WAY more ambition than I have. Mine are organized more like they come from the store, and I don't do keyword searches for things. Maybe if I started really small.........

[maureenreynolds]

Every book is written a word at a time, and every digi stash is organized...well, in lots of ways!..but still it's a chunk at a time. It's the doing it that makes me realize, I too have slacker status in this department. You're not alone Kelly.

[kikimama]

Oh well done!! So great when your supplies are tagged, I use way more of my supplies now. Though I also have, um, 1000 items in my 'new purchases' folder waiting to be tagged before I move them to their folders. Dang Days of December and quarterly sales lol!

[kathie02]

I am impressed, great job. I am sitting on the slacker bench with Kelly!!!

[mommydawn]

Congratulations! That is wonderful because I LOVE LR!
I'd love to use a lightroom catalog for scrap supplies...I use it for all of my photos. But I notice lightroom can't import/read png files....what do you do with those?

[justmp]

I'm impressed!! I could scrap much more quickly if I had all my supplies cataloged like that!

[vfleslie]

I am slowly working my way through the designer folders and keywording previews in Lightroom. For example, I assigned keywords such as "vacation" ,"Christmas", "Summer", "School" to Ali's word art previews. When I get a folder done, I go to ACDSee and right-click on the folder and have ACDSee catalog the files. Then I can search in the ACDSee search bar by keyword. You can also use the ACDSee search window sidebar for more detailed searches and the ability to save them. It?s not quite as elegant as the LR search function, but offers the ACDSee convenience of being easily able to get to a folder and see everything (png, pdf, psd, jpg, abr). I love the visual look in ACDSee and they keywording function in Lightroom and now have the best of all worlds!

I have so much stuff I may never get done with more detailed keywording but I am doing my favorite folders first and it is really helping a lot. Kayla Lamoreaux has a free Lightroom class on her blog where she walks you through converting pngs into a format LR can read (TIF). I didn't want to go that in-depth but it's definitely worth a read. When I read of several digital scrappers keywording jpg previews that was the way I decided I wanted to go. When you right-click on a preview in LR you can select to "Show in Explorer". (Windows) The jpgs and pngs show up in the Explorer window. The abr brushes do not but you can either use a brush viewer (Tumasoft) or right-click in the Explorer window and open with ACDSee.

I think this combo of LR and ACDSee is going to workout well. I had to buy a new laptop since my first post. When I transferred all my data to the new laptop every single LR keyword came over in the metadata. I didn't lose a thing! Make sure you have selected the option to have LR automatically write metadata to the files.

The Finding Photo Flow class now has a forum dedicated to questions about organizing scrapbook supplies in LR. You can also check Kayla's blog and do a google search about organizing scrapbook previews and see how several scrappers have done it. Spend a little time thinking about how you want to set up your keyword structure. It's pretty cool.

[sarahdg]

Wow! That is a lot of files tagged! I used to be a tagger, but I'm not anymore. I recently did something very simple that makes it easy to browse my supplies. I tagged all the preview images (the ones that show everything in the kit all together) as "preview." Now when I search for "preview," all my preview files come up and I can scroll through and see a thumbnail of every kit I have. It certainly makes for easy browsing. I did my (very minimal) tagging in Picasa, BTW.

[mugsbigsis]

YOU are a rock star! :O)

[KimR+]

Wow!! You've been busy!! I didn't even know you could do this in LR!! I've been really bad at tagging in ACDSee, maybe this should be one of my goals this year!

[anke]

I'm with you Kim, I haven't tagged anything in ages, I really need to buckle down and use that dang program more. I use it for the stuff I did tag in the past, but it's getting pretty limited, so I need to add my thousands of things that are not tagged yet

[blhdvm]

Originally Posted by sarahdg

Wow! That is a lot of files tagged! I used to be a tagger, but I'm not anymore. I recently did something very simple that makes it easy to browse my supplies. I tagged all the preview images (the ones that show everything in the kit all together) as "preview." Now when I search for "preview," all my preview files come up and I can scroll through and see a thumbnail of every kit I have. It certainly makes for easy browsing. I did my (very minimal) tagging in Picasa, BTW.

This also my method for browsing. Only I just copied and pasted a copy of the preview photo into a separate folder named PREVIEWS.
Having everything tagged would certainly be a plus - and I applaud those of you who do it!! - I'm just not willing to spend the time.

[anke]

you could still tag just the previews in ACDSee, but at least then you could right-click on the particular preview and it would take you right to the folder tree where the kit is rather than having to go and search for the file that contains the kit... just sayin

[vfleslie]

True, and I had ACDSee tags and catagories that worked well for years (other than the ones I lost 4 or 5 years ago in a computer crash). I even had embedded my current ACDSee catagories into the files but I was unable to do a complete scrapbook files catalog restore. ACDSee kept crashing when I tried to catalog them all on the new laptop. I could probably go in by folder and recatalog them one by one, but I decided to switch to metadata keywording instead.

I think it boils down to the fact that keywords (thru LR, Picassa, even ACDSee) are written forever into the metadata and go everywhere with the product. It's just that keywording in LR is much, much faster than keywording in ACDSee (which you can do somewhere in the properties pane I think but it is very, very clunky from what I remember).

I'm not spending tons of time on this. The big push took most of day between cleaning the kitchen and switching loads of laundry. Since then I spend 10-15 minutes a day and what gets done, gets done and what doesn't, doesn't. But it's done forever when I do a file.

[blhdvm]

Originally Posted by anke

you could still tag just the previews in ACDSee, but at least then you could right-click on the particular preview and it would take you right to the folder tree where the kit is rather than having to go and search for the file that contains the kit... just sayin

This IS a great idea Anke. And I have seriously thought about doing this in the Elements Organizer. I did take the time to rename the preview copy by Website-Designer-kit name so once I see a preview, I do know EXACTLY where to go find it.