Tips for resolving photo chaos prior to installing Lightroom?

Question

I tried and really liked the 30-day free trial of Lightroom 2 and I intend to buy it (or Lightroom 3 if it is released soon enough).  The fast photo enhancement capabilities were convincing enough, but I am also looking for a solution for managing my photo chaos.
My problem is that I have photos scattered everywhere - on my work laptop, on my desktop PC, on external hard drives, on CDs.  And I have duplicates everywhere but not all photos are duplicated.  I have completely lost sight of where photos are located.   I recently bought a Windows Home Server to make regular backups of my desktop PC and have manually moved loads of photos to the Server to make sure they are in a safe place (the folder is automatically duplicated on a separate drive) and share them with other family members.
In future with Lightroom, I envision importing my photos from the camera via Lightroom to my desktop PC and having Lightroom save a copy of the original  to my server for safekeeping.   But I am unsure of the best way to handle the existing photos.  Are there recommendations on how to prepare the existing chaos for importing them into Lightroom?  And can Lightroom recognize if exact duplicate photos are being imported from different sources?
I would be grateful for any tips, or pointers to tips on the web or books.

Answer 1

I can tell you how I handled a recent and similar project.  I wanted to gather together copies of all of my digital imaes including camera images, scans, and multiple iterations of art images going back many years.  I bought a new 2TB external drive and set up a folder called "Photos" to put everything in.  Personally, I like a bit of folder organization.  I set up folders for my personal photographs, stock, and client work (weddings, portraits, commercial).  I use a basic date folder system for the actual images within those folders:  YYYYMMDD-short description (20091225-John and Susan's wedding or 20050601-Hawaii trip).  That is the system I have always used so it was easy to copy those folders and loose images from hard drives, CD's, DVD's, zip drives, and even diskettes.  Once that was all done and everything was roughly sorted into those master folders, I began importing the images into LR.  I would do smaller sections at a time since my experience is that LR can choke when importing huge numbers of images at one time.  I was dealing with hundreds of thousands of images. Once imported, it is easy to see duplicates in LR (since I did a rough sort as I copied them in).  If the image metadata had the date in it, then I drag images not in folders to the correct date folder.  I just kept plugging thru it.  In the case of client work, I did not care as much if I had duplicates since it is unlikely I will need to access most of it.  I just deleted obvious duplicates, and left the rest alone.  My stock images (140,000+) took more time.  Different rendering of the same art images just got stacked together.  It took a few weeks of part time work plugging through the images, but now it is all cleaned up.
At least set up a simple system for importing the new work.  The date folder, even if you don't separate into other master folders (like I do with weddings, portraits, personal, stock, etc), is a simple way to keep things organized.  Also, set up a simple naming system for your images.  The biggest problems I had was the really old images from my beginnings in digital where I named things:  "big blue butterfly.jpg" and "big blue butterfly w/blur.jpg".  It made things very confusing to sort out.  Now I have a simple alpha-numeric system and variations just have -01, -02 etc. added on.  Often with virtual copies, I don't even need to have multiple copies.
I hope that helps,
John
John G. Blair Studio