Suggestions for teaching catalog for students

Three things that stand out.

1. Do not teach the use of Develop Presets. This is a crutch that, I think, prevents students from understanding the underlying develop principles. Once the develop principles are mastered, then teach the students how to create their own Develop Presets.
2. Instead of Exporting, replace this process with Publishing Services. Publish to a local file. HardDrive Publish Services creates a local file using the same export principles. The advantage of Publish Service over Exports is the the derivative can be LR managed inside the Publish Service. Additionally, the student is introduced to the Social publishing for places Like FB & Flickr.
3. Printing should be taught as a part of the Print Module. By understanding the requirements for printing your own image positions the student better for creating an image file ready to send off to a commercial printer.

I WHOLE-HEARTILY agree with you about development presets. In fact, I've almost forgotten to teach them! I explain to students that I almost never use them because I always look at an image and simply ask what it needs. I've been working with Lightroom since 2006 and just STARTING to be open to the ideal of presets, sometimes, but find them limited. For example, I thought I'd create graduated filter presets, one each for the top, bottom, left, and right, so if I needed more than one, just click the preset, right? Doesn't work that way. They aren't cumulative, so when I would add the 2nd, the 1st would disappear. Thanks Adobe! I think it's almost criminal the cottage industry that traffics in presets. Not that I have an opinion...

I don't teach Publishing Services extensively, as I and most of my students are over 30, and generally not interested. I rail against FB because of the abusive copyright stealing. And in Lightroom, you can't manage your FB site, so it's not like you can remove images from your FB collection, and have it removed from the site. Also Lightroom posts that the photo was posted by Lightroom. I also don't teach about managing derivs. I tell students that after they export and do something with their images, then trash them. I figure I'll be better at Lightroom next week then this week, so I might as well re-visit my settings.

I definitely teach printing, and the concept of getting your images out of the computer and showing them to the world. I started teaching a class at Stanford last night, and am requiring them the engage in a photo project by the end of the class to get their images OUT!

reidthaler said:

...I and most of my students are over 30, and generally not interested. I rail against FB because of the abusive copyright stealing. And in Lightroom, you can't manage your FB site, so it's not like you can remove images from your FB collection, and have it removed from the site.

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Age is not a limiting factor, I will see 70 in about 60 days. I use FB on images that are to be shared socially. Using, Jeffrey Freidl's FB plugin, you can manage your images at FB Flickr and other places. Publish Service are really useful for local derivatives that might be used and then discarded. LR Publish Services can do the discarding. I have a Monthly club competition and with LR I create monthly categories populating with the current months images and removing images that were in the previous month. All automatic, managed with keywords.

I figure I'll be better at Lightroom next week then this week, so I might as well re-visit my settings.

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Me too. A publish service manages this for me