The quickest and laziest way to organize your digital life is to dump an entire external hard-drive right over an open Lightroom 6 window and then click “import.” Lightroom will scroll through the entire thing and pull all photos and videos + valid metadata. You can then do all the nifty things you like such as build date-based smart collections, or search by camera. If you want to be less laissez-faire about it, group your images into some decent folder structure before the drag-and-dropocalypse.

tldr: You don’t need to attend (ehem pay for) a Lightroom workshop before you can start using Lightroom. Just drag and drop your external hard-drive in there and get working.