Adobe Lightroom 4 - Some Questions / Help Needed

Question

Hi everyone.
After advice from several experts, I've just purchased Adobe Lightroom 4. I've already got Photoshop CS5, but I was looking for something proper to organise my photos, plus I found Lightroom easier to do the sort of editing I am wanting to do. Now, I only really use photoshop for things like colour pops, or really in-depth editing. Anyway, I'm loving Lightroom so far, but there is some stuff I'm not very sure of, so I'd appreciate some help
1. Organising
Firstly, I'm not really sure how to organise. At the moment, I've just got lots of folders with random events in My Pictures on W7, so I might have a folder called April 11, which contains photos from that month but that might have been a wedding or an easter holiday or both. So it doesn't really work. \
I understand in Lightroom what catalogs are. But I know enough to know that I don't want to group mine into those, its getting too complicated. What I don't know though is the difference between a collection and a folder. Basically, I'm wanting to reimport and reorganise all my photos, so I want to put them into "events" as such like you can do on iPhoto on a mac, so I would have "France Summer Holiday 11" for example, or "Mia's Wedding". I'm not really sure on the best way to do this ...?
2. Editing
I've played around quite a bit so far, and I really like what I've seen. On a lot of photos, I've made a lot of changes. But from what I can see, these changes are stored merely in Lightroom itself. For example, at the moment I'm importing photos from my external disk into Lightroom, which then saves them in C://My Pictures/Lightroom/Pictures . When I go look at these photos in windows explorer which I know I have edited, it doesn't show any of the changes or editing I've done on them. Now I realise this is me being stupid, but why doesn't it? Supposing I then want to email that photo to a friend that I have edited? How would I do that? I don't want to have to open lightroom and export every single photo I edit? There must be a simpler way?
Likewise for backing up, because all my files are in subfolders within C:// My pictures / Lightroom / Pictures, to back up I was simply going to set up windows to copy that latter folder onto my external HDD everytime I plugged it in. This would be pointless however if it isn't physically overwriting the original photo with my edited version?
3. Editing 2
Something else I like to do is make lots of different edits to the same photo. For example, at the moment I'm editing a photo of a pier at night. I spent ages adjusting colours and lighting and so on, and now it looks great. But I would also like to save a copy of that photo with the "old age photo" effect preset on. Is this possible? and how do I do it? Other than obviously importing a duplicate?
4. & 5. & 6 - Misc:
4. Simple question - how do I add tags, keywords or comments if I haven't done it on import?
5. My camera doesn't have built in GPS. Is it possible for me to manually geotag photos (in a batch, say for a Summer Holiday to NY), could I manually add a geotag for all these photos?
6. I also forgot to add copyright information on import for some, is it possible to do this after import and how?
7. I normally shoot in JPEG. I probably shoot shoot in RAW as everyone tells me to do so. Are there any significant advantages in terms of quality, and for editing with?
Thanks for any help given. I appreciate this is a lot of questions, but I could really use the advice.

Answer 1

Hi William,
1. Organising
Firstly, I'm not really sure how to organise. At the moment, I've just got lots of folders with random events in My Pictures on W7, so I might have a folder called April 11, which contains photos from that month but that might have been a wedding or an easter holiday or both. So it doesn't really work. \
I understand in Lightroom what catalogs are. But I know enough to know that I don't want to group mine into those, its getting too complicated. What I don't know though is the difference between a collection and a folder. Basically, I'm wanting to reimport and reorganise all my photos, so I want to put them into "events" as such like you can do on iPhoto on a mac, so I would have "France Summer Holiday 11" for example, or "Mia's Wedding". I'm not really sure on the best way to do this ...?
I am not so sure if you understand *catalogs*.
You need a catalog, exactly 1 in my opinion. A catalog is a database. The Lightroom database, where records about your images are stored, including the pointers to your images, which are not inside a catalog! LR backups just does the backup of the catalog (i.e. a file ending .lrcat). You need to take care separately that your real images are backed up !
Inside your LR database the best way to organize is via collections - this will give you what you want with "France summer holiday 11" etc.
Folders are relatively unimportant, just storage buckets. They should be *handy portions*, I would prefer them with below 3000 images each, as there currently some bugs to those bigger ones.
Before you start with LR, you can organize your pictures in Mac Finder / WindowsExplorer.
Or you could do it with the help of LR, by copying your images over during import into the destination folders (and deleting today's folders afterwards after having verified that everything is fine).
A simple date-based structure will do, I'd recommend  a root parent folder like "LR images", underneath one folder per year (\2010\, \2011\, \2012\...) and underneath them either
just one folder per month (LR can auto-create them for you)
or you create the folders in import dialog as e.g. "YYYY-MM-DD description of shoot", to have a mini-diary overview also in your OS.
Apart from that you create collections, either *dumb ones*, where you drag images into, or smart ones, where you specify criteria according to which they get auto-filled.
2. Editing
I've played around quite a bit so far, and I really like what I've seen. On a lot of photos, I've made a lot of changes. But from what I can see, these changes are stored merely in Lightroom itself. For example, at the moment I'm importing photos from my external disk into Lightroom, which then saves them in C://My Pictures/Lightroom/Pictures . When I go look at these photos in windows explorer which I know I have edited, it doesn't show any of the changes or editing I've done on them. Now I realise this is me being stupid, but why doesn't it? Supposing I then want to email that photo to a friend that I have edited? How would I do that? I don't want to have to open lightroom and export every single photo I edit? There must be a simpler way?
Likewise for backing up, because all my files are in subfolders within C:// My pictures / Lightroom / Pictures, to back up I was simply going to set up windows to copy that latter folder onto my external HDD everytime I plugged it in. This would be pointless however if it isn't physically overwriting the original photo with my edited version?
LR will never overwrite your original photos.
You can save most of the catalog content into the xmp-part of the original photo, which is either a sidecar-file (.xmp) or part of the file format, like for DNG, TIFF, PSD, JPG. To do so you select the image in LR and hit <ctrl> s. Or you set it up for continuous update, which creates a lot of operations while you play back and forth in develop.
I do that on my own, typically twice per file: once I am done with develop, once I am done with keywording and other metadata update.
LR contains records about your images, i.e. a set of instructions how they are to be interpreted. That is all.
So of course you need LR to export the result of these instructions, which is actually pretty quick.
To backup your images you need to do that just once, plus you backup your LR catalog. Or if you save xmp to the files, you can do another backup once xmp is ready.
I would not consider this pointless. You just have to think that there are 2 places with data for your images: the images themselves and a database with interpretation instructions.
3. Editing 2
Something else I like to do is make lots of different edits to the same photo. For example, at the moment I'm editing a photo of a pier at night. I spent ages adjusting colours and lighting and so on, and now it looks great. But I would also like to save a copy of that photo with the "old age photo" effect preset on. Is this possible? and how do I do it? Other than obviously importing a duplicate?
Yes, this is one of LR's beauties: you create a so-called *virtual copy*, which is just a 2nd record for the same original image file with different interpretation settings, like black-and-white, a different crop size, different development etc. You can have as many virtual copies as you like, and you'll see them as additional thumbnails.
Virtual copies are not saveable into xmp, though. There is another concept which is saveable into xmp: snapshots. but these are different states in develop history, and you do not see outside develop module that you have several.
If you export virtual copies e.g. to jpg one file per virutal copy will be created.
4. & 5. & 6 - Misc:
4. Simple question - how do I add tags, keywords or comments if I haven't done it on import?
5. My camera doesn't have built in GPS. Is it possible for me to manually geotag photos (in a batch, say for a Summer Holiday to NY), could I manually add a geotag for all these photos?
6. I also forgot to add copyright information on import for some, is it possible to do this after import and how?
7. I normally shoot in JPEG. I probably shoot shoot in RAW as everyone tells me to do so. Are there any significant advantages in terms of quality, and for editing with?
Thanks for any help given. I appreciate this is a lot of questions, but I could really use the advice.
ad 4: you use the library module, metadata panel to enter.
ad 5: you use the map module. Either you manually drop your images on a map, or you have a separate GPS track to load and have LR assign via matching time-stamps.
ad 6: like 4
ad 7: You don't need JPG from your camera, you can achieve better results viy LR from RAW. Yes, there are significant advantages as to editing headroom.
Overall, may I suggest my favorite learning material for LR? First watch Julieanne's Tutorial Videos.
Then go play and use Victoria Bampton's eBook or paper copy of her "Missing FAQs to LR4": http://www.lightroomqueen.com/books/adobe-lightroom-4-missing-faq/
Have fun,
Cornelia