There are many ways to organize your files, this is how I do it.

First off I am not a Lightroom user. I bought LR 6 before CC/Classic came out. I have it installed to make use of the Negative Lab Pro for my color film scan conversions and a few presets I may have purchased in the past. I don’t take catalogs and LR into consideration when I am ingesting new files or moving them around.

I have a Drobo that holds my main storage. And I have a working storage drive on my desktop. Using Bridge I will import my photos to a working folder on my desktop machine and name the folder YYYY-MM-DD and the a descriptive name for the folder. This is something that I have to get better at since I often take photos in the same place or with the same people or doing the same activity.

Once my photos are done converting to DNG and are in my working folder if I’m doing my edits I’ll keep all the new files in the same folder. I used to have a capture folder for RAWs and a master folder for PSDs and an output folder for JPEGs but that made it hard to view all the files from one capture in Bridge. So now they all live in one folder and I use the filter in Bridge to pick from the different formats.

So since all the files are living in the same folder I can view the differences once they’ve been edited and sharpened and cropped with just a few clicks.

When I’m done editing or if I didn’t have time to edit when I was ingesting files I move them to the photo storage partition of my Drobo. I have a backup service that backs up any new files.

I really find using the native Windows explorer to manage my files more intuitive that using LR. But if I’m scanning color film I do have to bring it into the mix since Negative Lab Pro is a LR plugin. The steps are similar but once the conversion is done and I have my positive version TIFFs I can move them to the Drobo once I’m done doing any tweaks in Photoshop.

If you want to learn to use Bridge (it’s free with and Adobe ID) I can’t recommend enough taking a Damien class. I’ve taken all his classes and he’s really helped me understand PS and Bridge better.