Organizing Pictures from Vacation

I am back! Sorry I have not been posting recently. Mike and I did a 12-day vacation for our 30th anniversary which is this October. The vacation included 3 days in Prague, a Viking River Cruise along the Danube River, and 2 days in Budapest. Between the both of us we took over 2,000 photos. Since we have been back I have been working on organizing the photos in order to start scrapbooking this wonderful vacation. I thought that I would share with you how I organize my trip photos to make scrapbooking them easier. 

I currently use Adobe Lightroom to organize my photos. I created a new Lightroom catalog for the trip so I can work with just the photos from the trip. I do have a general catalog which I use to organize all my photos. I have found using this temporary catalog makes it a lot easier to tag, select for printing, and edit just the photos I want to use for a scrapbook layout.

I imported all the photos into the catalog - it is important to note that I do not Copy or Move the photos into the catalog. I only Add them which keeps them in their original location on my computer. I like to have more control over my photos this way.

Once I do the import, I start tagging the photos using Lightroom keywords. The first tag I assign is the date the photo was taken. From there I add tags like location and tour or excursion it was part of, if applicable. I also add tags like - food, travel, hotel, us, etc..

Lightroom has a great feature called "Smart Collections" where you can group photos together by using things like dates, ratings, and keywords. I created Smart Collections for each date from the trip then some additional ones for food, selfies, and the places we stayed.

After adding keywords to the photos in Lightroom I go through each Smart Collection and start to "cull" the photos by adding ratings (stars) to each one. I use this to help me weed down the photos I want to scrapbook from a place or event. I will remove the unwanted ones from the collection by changing it's selection criteria to only keep those with 3 or more stars.

Once I have done this I am ready to start scrapbooking the vacation. I will go into the Smart Collection for what I want to scrapbook and send those photos to print.

Now, you may be thinking - "I don't have Lightroom, what can I do?". Well, I have another solution for you. Before I worked in Lightroom I use to use the file folders and tags on the computer to organize my photos. I would store the photos by date and then create sub-folders by tour or event from the trip. I also used the tags and ratings functions on the computer to help whittle down my photos. You can search by tags and ratings to select those photos you want.

I have tweaked the process a bit in recent years but this is how I have been organizing my vacation photos for quite some time and all in all it works pretty well for me. How do you organize yours?

I hope you got something from my system. Thanks for stopping by!