reft

On a slightly different note, (so in a different post) one reason I haven't changed from Bridge to Lightroom yet, are a few questions still to be worked out, some of which are perpetual questions with no good universal answer.

One Lr Database or more than one?
It seems a lot of people recommend one large one as long as Lr performs ok, but more than a few folks opt for several. Some wedding photographers willl use one per Wedding. I'm leaning right now for around 4-6, to separate personal images from photos taken for work or for other people.

Import everything into Lr, or just the best stuff?
In a no-delete workflow, another consideration for Lr, is to only bring in images that are above the 50 percentile, and leave the poorer ones and rejects outside of Lr out of the index.

I think in Scott Kelby's on Lr, he said something along the lines of "You're only ever going to show your 4's and 5's, you deleted the 1's (and maybe 2's) and won't ever go back to the 3's to show to anyone." This makes a case for pre-processing outside of Lr, then only importing the better images.

Folders and File naming
I have a lot of folders with meaningful names containing files with meaningless names that are not unique. These are stored in a few master folders with names like "Organization" "Family" or "Dayjob" and other major subject headers. At some point in the future, I plan a bulk rename from /[My ]Pictures/MasterFolder/CCYYMMDD-Topic/Meaningless.raw to a much flatter one: /[My ]Pictures/MasterFolder/CCYY/CCYYMMDD-Topic-Sequence.raw. I haven't finalized on a naming scheme yet. I want to work this out and do all the renaming before I bring these into a Lr database.

Tying digital files to the physical world sources
Related to the above, is how to match the Digital files back to the physical world photograph items, either a box of negatives, or the backups made of the camera files before processing. A 36 exposure roll suggests a digital folder with 36 images in it, but the digital environment isn't restricted to 36. Rolls of film also get split over several days and topics and do not always have 'date shot' information that makes it easier to break up a 2 card - 7 day vacation digital collection.