I’m new to Lightroom and I want to follow your advice and move all my photos to a single external drive. Here is where I need help. I have photos in My Docs, My Photos, My Videos, My Downloads. Is there an easy way to find them and move them without doing a manual file-by-file search? I did a search and came up with hundreds of gif files any other images which are not my photos.

Also, I may have saved some photos directly to Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive. What’s the best way to identity them as originals, not copies, before I move them.

I am sure I have created duplicate copies of my most valuable photos. Is there an application I can use to distinguish original photos from duplicates?

Will

Lightroom has a plug-in to import your photos from Aperture/iPhoto libraries. It brings over a fair amount of information and can copy your photos. The directory structure is date based. Some things like Albums and Projects are converted to Collections in Lightroom. Some of your tagging and meta data comes over. Individual corrections are not. The best thing I know of for that last limitation is to be sure to import the full-sized Previews of corrected images in Aperture so you will have something with your last changes applied. Also be sure your Previews are up to date in Aperture before you import. There should be tutorials and links out there for settings used with the plug-in.

my pictures>>year>>month>>maybe subjects + keywords. But I’m just a happy snapper these days with lots of unimportant files but I can find [most] of them.
But still have to worked out that collection thing!

Colin/Egidio – while some people disagree, I keep all of my images in ssubfolders filed and named by date (such as Macintosh HD>Pictures>2015>20150129 for a shoot the other day), where the date comes from the EXIF data on the CF card from my camera. I do not (usually) keep images in folders by subject, primarily because those images could go into multiple categories (like “Vacations” +'”Travel” + “Family” + , etc,). for the rare times I use a subject title for a subfolder, like a multi-day vacation, I’ll create date-based subfolders beneath that for each day’s images (such as “Alaska Vacation>20140814”, with additional subfolders for each day of the vacation). That said, I use keywords religiously and then use Collections and Smart Collections to partition images, knowing they could be (and are often) in multiple collections. Thus I use the OSs file folder system only for storing images and nothing else. Since I almost never have to find images by date (and because the date shot is part of each images metadata), keywords are critical; the image’s location on a hard drive is almost irrelevant because I can find it by keyword. Hope this helps….