Today’s Question: I was watching your video about importing photos into Lightroom Classic, and you mentioned the option for automatic date-based folders. What I’m confused about is why there is even an option to have folders with the name of the month, since those folders would then not sort in chronological order. Shouldn’t the only available option be to use folder names with numbers for the months?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In general, I recommend using numbers to represent the year, month, and day (as applicable) for date-based folders, so that the folders will sort in chronological order when sorted in alphabetical order. However, some users may prefer using the names of months if they prefer to sort by name rather than number.
More Detail: I am not personally a fan of using date-based folders for organizing my photos, in large part because I don’t tend to remember the year (let alone month or date) that particular photos were captured. But many photographers do prefer to use date-based folders for a variety of reasons.
When using date-based folders, I recommend using numbers to represent the year, month, and day. For example, I would recommend using a folder structure of ” 2024/11″ rather than “2024/November”, so that the folders for the months will sort in chronological order when sorted in alphabetical order. If the names of the months are used instead of numbers, then when sorted alphabetically within a year folder the December folder would appear before the January folder even though December comes after January chronologically.
Of course, not everyone is comfortable with scanning folders where the months are represented by numbers rather than the name of the month. Therefore, for some it may be preferable to use the month names for the folders instead of numbers, so they can scan alphabetically looking for the name of a particular month.
So, in general I recommend using number-based names for folders in a date-based folder structure, rather than names. But for those who find it easier to locate a particular folder by having the names of the months spelled out, that is perfectly reasonable as far as I’m concerned.
Note, by the way, that while there are limitations in terms of the folder structure options available for date-based folders when importing into Lightroom Classic, it is possible to later rename the folders to add additional information, such as to add the name of the location for a particular month-based folder to reflect where the photos in that folder had been captured.
