If you go to the filters of your observations there is a choice in the middle column to “Sort By” in two drop down menus. Pick “Date Observed” and if you want your oldest choose “Asc” (ascending). Alternately, the list view gives a choice of ordering the observed and date added columns.
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Hi Timothy,
In this old post you said
lease educate me by explaining how to set this up. I have created hysterical keywords, for example: >Nature >Animals >Birds >*Wading Birds >Lesser Yellowlegs with synonyms “Tringa flavipes” and checked all Keyword tag options except Person.
Now, INaturalist Plug-in Extra Lookup Name creates >INaturalist >Tringa flavipes without any synonym.
What is your process so that a search for “Lesser Yellowlegs” will also find “>INaturalist >Tringa flavipes”?
Thank you.
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Thank you, Bob. Soo much to learn and finding the right help is not easy.
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My hard drive crashed this year and with it I lost my stand-alone Lightroom program. Now I have to subscribe to the creative cloud. Now I can see that my more than 100,000 photos cannot rely on Lightroom to separate by topic, and although I have subscribed to it I am dedicated to creating “Collections” files on a large harddrive, exporting the edited best pictures from Lightroom, so I can find my many stock photos. That way if I ever lose the program again I can still find things by category. Moreover, Lightroom limits the number of keywords you can use (or else you can’t see the entire alphabet’s worth) so it has become impossible to use species names as keywords; now I wish I’d began Lightroom with a hierarchy of keywords. I’m hoping to learn how to re-key the catalog without a lot of trouble (OK maybe that’s dreaming since I’ve got so many pictures on it). Categories like “mushrooms” or “plants” could cut the keyword list down a lot. Interestingly, it appears that keywords added in Lightroom stay with the photo in its metadata once you export it into Photos on the computer, and you can search them using Photos. Using iNaturalist filters to search My Observations, I can identify all the species I’ve observed, or I can doublecheck which observations I loaded for a certain date’s outing.
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Oh lordy… I need to replace my ancient MacBook, and will probably lose my old Lightroom.
Does it not work with keywords? Can you explain more?
I use a 4TB Seagate external drive and I organize them like this. My camera cycles file names after 10k, so I have to create separate folders (date ranges included in folder names). Phone photos I just dump into one folder since they have the date in the file name.
I do it mainly by year and month, Further, i also organize them by tags in my photo processing program, both taxonomic and site tags. I used to do substrate tags as well, but found it too much a pain in the ass after a while 
I have nested folders: year/month/day. I don’t bother with labeling individual photos. If I need a particular photo of a species, I filter my iNat observations to find out the date, then go through my nested folders to find the date. I rarely have to find particular photos, so this simple system works for me.
One exception: For state-listed rare species, I make a folder under the date and name it for the taxon. I generally don’t upload my rare species photos to iNat, but I do upload them to the state’s online rare species reporting system, so this is a convenient way to find all such photos quickly.
Life is complicated enough; I let iNat do my taxonomic sorting for me.
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This workflow isn’t perfect, but it’s what makes sense best for me.
Recently I have started testing DxO Photolab and have been very happy with results, even with my modest camera set up, the machine learning based noise removal is quite impressive.
I generally cull photos into 3 categories, marked by color, red (1) for “good”, 4(green) great, and pink (9) delete, I will admit this was much easier to do in NX Studio because you could select the color from the keyboard, dramatically speeding up culling times, maybe there’s a way to program this in PL as a shortcut but I haven’t gotten to that just yet.
I finalize my organization by date/general subject/location after editing.( ie 2022.10.20.Birds.Lockhart.SchmittiesBBQ)
The final exports of my photos maintain a datestamp and the original filename from name camera, this way, after I drag my photos into iNat, I don’t have to wait for the metadata to load if I cannot remember a species, I can quickly reference the original file and find my notes.
I apply little editing aside from adjusting for exposure, cropping to 1:1, adding occasional notes on species and denoising, so my needs are somewhat limited.
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I do use Lightroom now, but that was only after I got my new camera which pretty much requires something like that if I want the photos saved in their RAW format. Within Lightroom, it feeds my photos into date folders and then I use keywords to find things thereafter (although I have used the date folder structure if I happen to remember when I took a series of photos with different subjects).
That aside–I’m assuming you don’t want to get into anything that complex or frankly, expensive in the longrun…
When I first started doing this with my Canon SX60 camera, I created folder structures on my computer that seemed to make sense to me.
Basically, I had a “Birds” folder and then within that, I had large groups of birds, e.g. Waders, Passerines, etc. Then within those, I had individual common name folders. So for example:
…/Birds/Passerines/Warblers/Black-throated Green
…/Spiders/Jumping/Some Genus/Some species
I kind of followed the structure most are familiar with from biology class, but I often truncated or shortened it to decrease the depth of the folders. I kind of used the way I think about critters to help keep the folders from getting impossibly deep/long.
And I generally used names, i.e. common names or my personal names, for many critters just so that I could more immediately find the photos I was searching for.
This worked pretty well for me for a long time and when I initially shifted to Lightroom, I continued to use that folder structure for a week or so when I copied photos from the memory cards to my computer, but I eventually moved to just letting Lightroom create folders in a date structure and using keywords to find the photos. That turned out to be more efficient than having to individually import a photo to get it copied to the correctly named species folder.
And I keep all my photos and catalogs on a separate USB drive which I then nightly backup to another USB drive (and I actually backup as well to the D: drive of my computer as a third copy). When my old computer crashed, this strategy was priceless as I just had to install lightroom, point it to the catalog on the USB drive and I was back up and running in less time than it takes to type this.
I should note that I do use scientific names as keywords in Lightroom and I did use a few in the folder structure before I used Lightroom, but I kind of limited it to species with no common name simply because I’m forgetful and hate to look up everything all the time.
But with spiders as an example, I did end up with something like this:
…/Spiders/Jumping/Phidippus/audax
For the Bold Jumping Spider just because I tended to remember their scientific names and it was okay. If I thought I might not, I’d lengthen the folder name to:
…/Spiders/Jumping/Phidippus/audax - Bold Jumping Spider
…/Spiders/Jumping/Phidippus/clarus
…/Spiders/Jumping/Phidippus/otiosus - Canopy Jumping Spider
That kind of worked for me and it sometimes helped to include the common name because it helped with searching if I couldn’t quite remember the scientific name.
SOrry this is so long. It probably doesn’t make much sense either.
:(
I’ve been slowly switching over my photos to DXO Photolab. The initial RAW converstion is far superior to any other program I’ve tried. Library management is pretty rudimentary but it works for me.
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I’m excited to try it with some underwater shots.
I just freedive with my TG6, no housing, so the jpeg quality is all over the place unless I’m somewhere like with truly exceptional water clarity, shooting raw and being able to perform full noise reduction will be a gamechanger.
I think it’s really neat a $200 software can enable folks with older cameras or with entry level APS-C sensors and lower resolutions to “keep up” with the pros and folks with pro gear.
if you’re shooting a lot of photos I don’t think $200 can be spent better to improve your photo quality unless you find a tremendous deal on a used telephoto lens or a good bridge camera that can shoot raw.
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Keywords are fine. There just seems to be a limit on the number it will list. The program does have a way to “drag and drop” keywords under categories (e.g. “mushrooms”) but I have yet to make it work well. No doubt just need some time on it.
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I established this pre-iNat, but: Folders for locations/projects, then sometimes additional folders for each date. File names have the date, the camera’s photo number (which I use to reference camera photos in field notes), sometimes a code for an individual (for research projects following individuals over time). IDs for everything are in giant spreadsheets, although given what I was mainly observing (plants without flowers and caterpillars), a lot of those are morphospecies codes. I plan to upload a lot of these to iNat eventually, but that’s going to be a project.
Phone photos are pretty much deleted as soon as I know they’ve been successfully uploaded.
I know this comment is a few years old, but I’m curious if this is something that you’d be willing to share and/or publish. I’ve contemplated doing something like this myself, but there’s a lot of inertia to starting a project like this from scratch. Especially consider the tens of thousands of images in my library that would need to be bootstrapped into this system.
Using the keyword feature in Lightroom seems to be working well for me. That way I can add all kinds of variations of names/words for later reference.
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Not at all, really… lol.
I have an album on my phone labled iNat and once my photos are on iNat I delete them (Unless I need the photo for something else or just like it)
How I organize my files is really much worse, I have a habit of keeping stuff I don’t need because I worry that I will need a pixel art butterfly or whatever for something important someday :-P
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I’m not at all too. My first thought “Organize Photos?” Like it’s a foreign phrase I’ve never heard.
Thanks for answering the question - I finally got back to this forum topic… a few years late.
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Hi Ann, I wondered if you figured out the workaround for Lightroom keyword limits? The fact that Lightroom allows you to put in unlimited keywords, then restricts what you can see as you scroll down is just maddening.
I found a few helpful suggestions. All my non-nested keywords are dropped into alphabetical order, A, B, C and so on.
I use nested keywords that exactly mimic the taxonomical structure on iNat. Then I use the “Keyword List” search bar to search for the species or genus. If I’ve already seen that species and have created a keyword, it pops up with all its “parent” keywords above it. If it’s a new species, I right click on the last taxa in my database and start adding the new keywords until I get to the species.
You can also export your entire keyword list in other formats to examine and/or edit them. I have had some interesting discussions on the Lightroom Queen forum about using nested keywords in Lightroom with iNat. The experts on that forum have been incredibly helpful.
I also suggest writing the keywords into the metadata, so that if iNat or Lightroom go belly up, the keywords are always with the photos.
Using a hierarchical, nested format for keywording is a investment (time). The payback is the ability to instantly search any level of the taxonomical structure inside or outside Lightroom and have all my photos instantly available. I’ve seen too many platforms be abandoned to rely on them to organize and identify my precious nature photos.
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