How can I organize and revisit 10 years of favorite photos without endlessly scrolling Lightroom collections?

Question

I’ve been photographing seriously for about 10 years, mainly landscapes, macro, and wildlife. My workflow is to shoot, then select the best images and store them in Lightroom collections. Over time, even those collections have grown to hundreds of images, so it’s hard to get a satisfying overview of my strongest work across all the years.

I no longer use Instagram, and while I have some prints on my walls, they only represent a small part of the trips and projects I’ve done. Most of my favorite images still just sit on hard drives.

What are good ways to summarize, organize, and revisit a decade of photography so I can more easily enjoy my best work and see my development over time?

user31874 · Answer

After years of photography you can look back on your work thematically and discover periods or area’s in your development as photographer. I think this is interesting to document.

Once you find “closure” of an area or development, or you take it to a next level, consider documenting that period of time in a photobook.

This creates a series of thematic books, in which you can see or show your development as a photographer.

I tend to organize my Lightroom catalogs in such a fashion in collection sets. My “current” collection set is open for addition, until I look back and see a natural period. Once I see that, I put all the underlying collections in that new set, making room in my “current” collection set.

Picking one or two “seminal” photo’s from each collection in a set is relatively easy done. And putting them all in a photobook creates a nice overview of that period.

Hope this helps.

How can I organize and revisit 10 years of favorite photos without endlessly scrolling Lightroom collections?

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