As a professional shooter, I use Lightroom as a standard part of my workflow. Over the weekend, I turned Lightroom loose on a long-overdue, personal project. I’m now more fond of Lightroom than ever. The reason? Lightroom found photos of my kids that I haven’t seen in years.

Do you know the old saying about “the cobbler’s kids having no shoes?” Like a lot of photographers, over the past decade, I’ve stuffed photographs and scans onto many drives. As one drive would fill up, I’d add a new, larger drive to the system and keep going. Then Amy will ask a simple question like “did you find those photos from Tom’s graduation yet?” My reply before today was “They’re here somewhere… in triplicate, I’ll find them soon.”

It’s not that I’ve actually lost data. I run all my drives as mirrored RAID pairs in separate enclosures (using SoftRAID). I also have a rigorous backup system that copies all of that data onto external drives for long-term storage. [Check out Peter Krogh's DAM Book site and Image Mechanics' blog Death To Film for ideas and resources.]

My problem was the logic behind my file structure changed over the years and I never stopped to re-organize the legacy folders. I can easily locate images that I’ve shot within the past three years. Finding pix from five, seven or nine years ago… there’s the challenge.

Consolidating the old photos was always one of those non-critical (aka “non-money making”) tasks that I never got back around to dealing with. Eventually, I lost track of where I’d stuffed our earliest digital snapshots and scans. Now that I’ve found a new use for Lightroom, I’ve shed my Catholic-guilt about all of this.

How did I use Lightroom to find all of these old photos? Simple. I created a new catalog “All Pix”. Then I pointed LR to one of the six master drive pairs on my system. I did not point to specific folders on the drive – just to the drive. I then told Lightroom to “Import From Disk”. Lightroom surveyed the drive and imported all the images that it could. As the import from one disk was completed, I did the same for the next drive on the system. By the way, the importing can take hours for a large drive (like the one shown above). So it’s best to do this when you won’t need to do any other work in Lightroom.

Do I care that Lightroom is cataloging tens of thousands of images that I already have in other Lightroom catalogs? Not at all. I can edit the catalog later. What I do care about is that I can now quickly sort images by specific date ranges. Tom’s graduation? Early June, 2003. Bingo. Here’s the pix, love.

As you can see in the photo above, the catalog has more than 107,000 images in it. The current import has brought in over 28,000 images. That little 1998 family portrait has been MIA for years.

I know that when Lightroom completes it’s task of creating the master catalog, I’ll have many hours of work ahead in keywording, sort