Lightroom Workflow - How I Process Photos in Adobe Lightroom

I've been learning Lightroom over the past few months, after years of using Photoshop Elements Organizer to organize and manage my photos. You'll find many articles online from Lightroom users describing their workflow, and most of them are from the perspective of a professional photographer. I'm not a professional photographer, but I do take a lot of photos and I find that Lightroom meets my needs better than Photoshop Elements Organizer these days. With that in mind, I thought it would be helpful to describe my Lightroom workflow process, from the perspective of a non-professional. I've also included useful shortcuts and tips for each step of the workflow.

Import

During the import process, I add my copyright information to the metadata and apply any keywords that pertain to the entire batch of photos I'm importing. I append a prefix for the camera model to the front of the file name (because I've had so many Canon cameras over the years, it helps to avoid duplicate file names). I put the pictures in a folder - one folder for the year - on my local hard drive, with the date and a few words describing the import batch. So for example:

2011\2011-01-06 New Haircut
2011\2011-01-19 Park
and so on...

My import settings are saved as a preset so I don't have to re-enter them every time I import from my camera.

Useful Shortcuts:

• Import = Ctrl-Shift-I