Question on Lightroom Image Cataloguing

[John B Walker]

Hi

I am just about to purchase Lightroom 3 following excellent comment on forums. Member have mentioned in particular how good the cataloguing is.

My question is....

At the moment all my images are in folders in Windows Explorer. What happens to these folders and images when using Lightroom?

Regards
John

[bambleweeney]

Your files and folders should stay where they are. Lightroom creates a catalog of your images and just keeps a reference to them. It kind of works like this :-
You upload some shots of some .... trees for example and save them in let's say C:\images\January2010\
You run Lightroom and import the shots from here and in doing so you can add tags to them (trees for example or winter shots ... or whatever) in doing so Lightroom gives you the chance to copy the images to another location OR leave them just where they are. Once they're imported into Lightroom you can see the thumbnails and set new tags, copy references to other tags - whatever.
Worth looking up on the web how best to arrange/classify/tag your shots; get a few thousand images in the catalog and it can become a bit of a rat's nest that you will live to regret if you don't think about it first. (like I didn't )
My version of Lightroom is older but I can't see Adobe making such a fundamental change.

[John B Walker]

Thank you Paul. I was hoping the answer would be the one you have given me. Didn't fancy moving all my existing work about but it will be nice to have it catalogued.

regards
John