My Lightroom catalogue is in a mess. Should I start from scratch?
No. Leave existing stuff as it is – sort it out later when you find such things easy – and add keywords to these images.
New stuff, get it in a simple date based folder structure as described. Do include the date at the start of folder and filenames using a convention like YYYYMMDD. You won’t always be using LR and dates/text help, and this helps sort by shooting date and also helps ensure no originals ever have duplicate filenames. Also do include very broad “shoot” description – eg “Charlottetown”, but don’t waste time including in the file name anything that’s more image-specific like “Charlottetown bicycle”, “Charlottetown seals” etc. Instead put that time into keywords.
John
Why not start from scratch?
I asked a very similar question earlier today. I have a lot of images (19,500) that are a mess, and learned in the last few days a much better way to organize my stuff. I have very few images processed. I want to delete the catalog and reload folders/files properly and less of them. What do you think?
Thanks
Pierre