Importing/Organizing Existing Pictures...

I'm really struggling with the best way to import all my old photos and organize them to where it's easy to find them. Historically I have downloaded photos from my camera to an external hard drive (thus creating a 'backup' first) then imported from there into iPhoto. Now that I have LR, as I import the old folders, I am choosing copy from current location, and am getting a long list of folders named by date. This really isn't useful to me--I'm going to have hundreds of photos for 2007, one for almost every day.



I am in the process of tagging photos, and trying to put them into collections, but before I go any further, can anyone offer a tip of how I can organize imports differently? What happens if I choose the One Folder option? Does that leave things too unorganized? I would hate to clear my library and start over, but I'm not far enough into the import that I couldn't do that if absolutely necessary.



Does the problem go back to saving the original photo downloads by date?
Importing/Organizing Existing Pictures...
I'd be inclined to run Export in iPhoto, then organize in the Finder, then import into LR. I really dislike the iPhoto library.
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Importing/Organizing Existing Pictures...
Yes I too gave up on having LR Import and save to another LR generated named folder specifically because of all these umpteen date folders which I can quite live without. I have all my images saved on an EHD and then later backup to DVD/2nd EHD and my folder structure is such.



Root Library Folder 2007

Events

xxx

xxx

xxx



Places

Germany

Hockenheim

Original RAWs

Deviants

M眉nchen

etc etc

Italy

Venice

etc etc

France

Paris

etc etc



Should I visit Spain or somewhere else I then add another folder to this structure independent of LR. I then Explore my CF card and drag and drop the images into the relevant folder. I find this much much quicker than using LR or any other application that I have to do the import for me. I also feel I have more control over where the images are going and that no strange names are going to be generated etc that would entail me starting over.

Then in LR I go to import and select only the main folder i.e. 'Places' and leave in original location. LR recognizes that images are already contained within some of the sub folders and if I choose to ignore duplicates LR will only then Import the new images and/or folders. I am also attracted to this method because my chosen folder names appear in LR's folder list as named by me. Previously I was given the entire folder structure including Drive path which I found unnecessary because I know where my images are.

This method works just find for me - may not be everybodies cup of tea but we all have to find a way that works for ourselves.