 Today we're going to talk about the third biggest mistake that new Lightroom users make. What's up nerds? Welcome back to another Fuller Nerd University tutorial. My name is Adam and today we're going to talk about the third biggest mistake that new users make inside a Lightroom. This one is in relation to folders and it's really comes down to two things. We either make too many folders or not naming our folders correctly. Now I could talk about either of these in any order so I'm going to just talk about naming them correctly first and the reason for that is because I think it ties into the making too many folders in the first place. So if we jump into Lightroom and I show you an example here I have a folder and inside that folder I have more folders but the naming of these folders is the thing that makes me a little confused because all I'm doing here really is giving these folders category names. If you are like a lot of our students you might be creating folders based on categories. You might go on a trip and then you might come home and you start divvying up your folders based on the things that you shot things like maybe you took pictures of animals or your friends or a flowers or whatever but creating folders based on categories is really unnecessary because one of the tools that you have inside of Lightroom to do this very thing is key wording and key wording is a much better way to search for categories than using folders. Why you might ask? Well the reason is simple. You can only search one folder at a time so if you go on a trip and you make a folder for flowers you can only look at the flowers that you've put inside that one folder. Instead why not use a keyword you can apply a keyword to any picture from any trip with the word flowers and then if you want to see flowers from all of your trips you just pull up the keywords tag and it'll pull up all of those images. This is a much useful much quicker way of finding things based on category types and it keeps your folder structure much simpler. So if you are someone who's naming your folders based on categories stop doing it there's really no need use your keywords instead and this brings me back to the other thing that New Lightroom users are doing which is making too many folders in the first place and you really can simplify this down to just a few things but before I get into that now that we have categories out of the way this brings me to the second thing that we are doing incorrectly and that's how many folders are we making in the first place. It's really easy for this to get out of hand you can have a sub folder inside of a sub folder inside of another sub folder and so forth and so on and this will drive you crazy because at the end of the day you really should be able to get to your photos within three clicks you should have the main folder which talks about basically where you were or what you were doing whether it was a vacation or a festivity or an event and then inside there you have three things you have your original files that came off the memory cards you have any files that you have since edited and then you have any miscellaneous files and then in there you might have a third rooted file and this should be the final file which is what type of edited file you have whether it's a photoshop file or a tiff file or even a video file and then in your miscellaneous folder this is where you'll have things like your iphone photos or other random images that you might have accumulated along the way and that's really it three folders to get to your photos and that's all that's all you really need now you can break this up if you have been on a trip that has taken multiple days you might have your trips organized by the amount of days that you were on a trip but there's really no need to make any more than just these three layers and by then you're touching your photos and getting on to the editing process so stop organizing your folders based on categories and try to get to your photos within three clicks hopefully you found this video useful if you have other ways that you like to organize your files go ahead and leave us a comment down below we'd love for you to share those tips with the community as always thank you so much for watching my name is adam have a great day everybody