Migrating into/out of LR, Collections vs Keywords

Rhuarc

Ok, so I know this question has been asked a thousand times, but I wanted to explain my situation and get people's feedback here. First a little background...I am a hobbyist photographer and I probably shoot 5 to 10 thousand shots per year, keeping probably 3 to 5 thousand of those. I have been using IDImager for several years, and have my catalog of about 10,000 images fully cataloged using IDImager Catalog Tags. I use a complete DNG workflow, utilizing Lightroom for the majority of my RAW processing

I was recently introducing my Uncle into the world of RAW and showed him Lightroom, and he loved it. As I was showing him more and more about how easy it was to manage his photos and edit and export, etc... using only Lightroom I suddenly started to realize that I wanted to be able to use one program for my whole workflow as well, instead of one program to catalog and one program to edit.

IDImager can export all of my Catalog Tags as Hierarchal Keywords to the metadata of the DNG files. I know these can then be imported into Lightroom and the HKs should stay intact. I am trying to figure out if I should stick with HK in LR for organization, or if I should manually move all of my HK over to Collections/Collection Sets? Is there an easy plugin that can accomplish this or is it a totally manual process? Also, if I do decide to go the Collection route (which I am leaning towards incase I ever want to do stock photography I don't have the keywords cluttered up with personal information) is there an easy way to get the Collections back into HKs if I ever want to migrate away from LR? I like the LR implementation of Collections, but from all the research I have done there is NO way to get that information back out into the file metadata so you could transfer that organization to another program.

Does anyone think there will ever be a plug-in for LR that will be able to accomplish this transfer both ways? HK to Collections and Collections to HK?

I know this was a long and drawn out question, but I really want to do my homework before I commit to a system in LR that may keep me locked in if I want to keep my organization information.

Thank you all!

Thunder Rabbit

Howdy.

Hi, Wendell.

Collections is just a list of images, like a playlist. Putting an image in a collection has no effect on metadata at all.

I would definitely preserve my keyword structure. Collections would be a secondary way of grouping images. You can make smart collections that will automatically accumulate images with specific keywords, star ratings, color labels, etc.