A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.

I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.

A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.

I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.

For me, one catalog works best because I want a single place for all of my photography, both personal and professional. I can still organize those parts of my library differently without separating them into completely different catalogs.

Organizing a Lightroom catalog can quickly become an exercise in folders, keywords, ratings, and metadata. Before deciding how to use those tools, step back and ask a more important question: What do you eventually want to do with your photographs?

A useful workflow begins with those goals. Once you understand how you want to find, revisit, and share your photographs, you can build a Lightroom system that supports the way you actually think and work.

Snow in shadow often picks up a strong blue color cast. Some blue belongs there—the area is in shadow, after all—but too much can overwhelm the photograph.

In this video, I’ll show you how I use a targeted Lightroom mask to reduce that blue cast while preserving the depth and shadow in the mountains. The same approach can help with many other color-cast problems in landscape photography.

Sometimes you commit to a landscape composition, but the moving elements never come together perfectly in a single frame. The best wave might be in one photo, while another has better texture or movement elsewhere in the scene.

In this video, I’ll show you how I selected three seascape photos and blended their strongest elements using simple layers and masks in Photoshop. The masking is straightforward, and the same idea works in any editing software that supports layers.

Have you ever subtracted an object from a Lightroom mask, only to find a thin ridge left behind around the selection? Cleaning that up usually means reaching for the Brush tool and carefully painting along the edge.

Lightroom Classic’s new Feather and Edge controls give you a faster way to soften, expand, or contract many AI-generated masks. In this video, I’ll explain how the controls work, which masking tools support them, and where Edge is already saving me cleanup time.

What happens when Lightroom’s AI landscape masking doesn’t recognize the subject you want to edit? Sometimes, the missing selection is exactly what you need.

In this video, I combine Lightroom’s vegetation and mountain masks with inversion, subtraction, and a radial gradient to isolate the architecture at Machu Picchu. The result adds depth to the scene and guides attention without requiring painstaking brushwork.

Lightroom may correctly find every person in a photograph and still make a mess when it tries to remove them. That’s what happened with this image from Machu Picchu—the AI rebuilt so much of the scene that walkways and structures no longer made sense.

The better approach was to keep the removals that worked, then break the difficult areas into smaller, more targeted pieces. The AI still does the heavy lifting, but you give it a more manageable problem to solve.

Most edits are finished long before they're truly complete. In this video, I'll show you a simple masking technique I use to bring out important details in black and white photos—the final 5% that helps guide the viewer's eye and strengthen the image.

Harsh light doesn’t have to ruin a photo—it can shape it. In this quick edit, I show how a simple radial mask turns a Denver alley into a strong, guided composition.

Flat light doesn’t have to ruin a good composition. In this new Lightroom tutorial, I show how I use masking to shape directional light, guide the eye, and create more drama from a dull scene.