You gave me a shout out a few years ago with my ” Top 10 Reason Not to Convert to DNG” handout.

After a challenging session with a client that felt like being brought into open heart surgery at the 11th hour and taking the heat when the patient isn’t tap dancing in 10 minutes, I thought I’d come up with my own Best Practices handout and share it here with the hope that it will save lots of grief. Having worked with Lightroom Classic since beta in 2006, and teaching it since 2011, I think I’ve seen it all…

Lightroom Classic Best Practices:
IGNORE AT YOUR OWN PERIL

Lightroom Classic (LrC) is the industry standard, state-of-the-art program for organizing your images. For a long and prosperous relationship with Lightroom, you need to know and abide by its rules to keep both of you happy.

• Learn how the LrC catalog system works. LrC uses the unfortunate term “import,” but your photos don’t reside in the Lightroom catalog, it merely references them where they are stored on a hard drive. Lightroom never overwrites your original images with edits.
• Back up your LrC Catalog, your Photos, and Presets and Templates to a separate hard drive and preferably to a cloud storage service. Set up to do so automatically each day or continuously.
• Designate one folder, Lightroom Photos, on one hard drive, where all your images will permanently reside. There is no reason to move your images either inside or outside of Lightroom once they are imported unless you are migrating to a different hard drive.
• Create an Import Preset to Copy your images from a memory card, generate Standard Previews, downloaded chronologically, with metadata assigned identifying you as the creator with only your phone, email, and website, if you have one.
• Download your personal images chronologically, usually by year and month, (or year, month, and day). If you shoot for clients, download by Year and Client. Let LrC create folders for you automatically. The less you input manually (like creating new folder names), the more likely you’ll stay organized.
• Identify your better images with a Picked Flag and assign to one or more Collections organized by Collection Sets. I only append Folder names when travel. Put your organizing efforts into Collections and Collection Sets. Lightroom wants you to put your better images in Collections: Folders are only visible in the Library module.
• While keywords can be extremely helpful, you can be perfectly organized in LrC using an Import Preset, Collection Sets, Collections, Smart Collections, Flags, Stars, and Color labels and never use a single keyword. If you use Stars, be consistent in what they mean to you.
• Do not re-import images your exported images and don’t export them into your Lightroom Photos folder. After you’ve exported files, used them as intended, delete them. There is no reason to keep derivative files and you can always create them again.
• Do not rename, delete, or move files outside of LrC once they’ve been “imported.”
• Use one catalog.
• When you quit LrC and it asks to back up your catalog, do so, don’t skip.
• When you delete photos from LrC, choose Delete from Disk, not Remove from LrC. You want all photos in your Lightroom Photos folder to be visible in Lightroom, otherwise there is no way to keep track of your images.
• When you travel, using Lightroom (Cloud-based version) on an iPad or laptop by be easiest. In LrC, go to Preferences|Lightroom Sync and enable sync and mimic your folder structure and location as by your Import Preset. When you return home, simply open Lightroom Classic and your images, edits, and Collections will download automatically. You may need to increase your Adobe Cloud storage on vacation, then revert upon returning home. Another travel option would be to create a travel catalog with images and the catalog stored on a USB drive with the computer used as a backup, or just one hard drive with your catalog and images updated continuously.
• If you use Lightroom on a smartphone or iPad, do not delete images if they are syncing to LrC. Instead, Rejected them in Lightroom, let them sync to Lightroom Classic, and then Delete them.
• Test your backups once or twice a year by actually opening your catalog backup and verify that backed up images are readable and seem to have the same number of images as the real set.
• In Preferences|General, under which catalog Lightroom should open, the default is “most recent.”. Change this to your specific master catalog so you don’t inadvertently work in more than one catalog.