Re: lightroom logic help

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At 3:47 PM -0500 6/5/08, Lea Murphy wrote:
I am a fairly long-time user and lover of Lightroom.

It pains me to say that I've never taken advantage of using it the way it really ought to be used which is to say as a cataloging program as well as a processing program and that is why I am emailing for advice. I'd like to change that.

I just purchased a new Mac Pro big beefy computer with scads of ram and heaps of hard drive space and I need some direction on how best to take advantage of the ability to catalog my images.

Hope you got scads of speed.

I have an internal 320 gig drive as well as two internal 500 gig drives. I have 8 external 500 gig drives. Storage space is not a problem.

In the past on my old computer, when I finished a shoot I would download the images to my one internal hard drive, import them into Lightroom from the desktop, have a look at them, make my picks, delete my bad shots and rank my keepers.

THEN I would move that folder to an external drive and back it up to yet another external drive then delete the images from my desktop.

This broke the link in the Lightroom Library to my images.

I'm trying to avoid that from happening again now that I have so much more internal space.

I can download direct to one of my 500 gig drives. Would that be the thing to do? What happens when that drive becomes full?

Lightroom has a pref somewhere where you tell it where your master catalog gets stored. But you might need a 4 or 5 terabyte drive, if you're really dead set on keeping them accessible.

When last I looked at Lightroom it did not allow you to use more than one drive as the master storage.

Here are my concerns: in less than a year I filled an entire 500 gig drive with client images. I am happy to continue buying more drives and swap out the old when it gets full but does Lightroom keep track of what drives images are on in the event I need to get back to an image on a drive that has been removed? If so, how?

I think I remember that it did. You give each drive a unique name, so it can keep track of that in its database. Try an experiment. At one point I tried to put my whole portfolio into Lightroom, all those 18M and 23M files and most of them were on DVDs and CDs. I think I recall that Lightroom could tell me which DVD the master image was on. It just stored a thumbnail in its database.

If I keyword images as I go and then do a search for images of say, "kids with hats" will Lightroom direct me to those images even if they are on different drives, one or two of them perhaps not attached at the time the search was run?

Pretty sure the answer is yes.  The keywords stay with the reference thumbs.

I really appreciate any help anyone can give on this. I'm certainly happy to read about how to set this program up to really take advantage of it if someone can direct me to a site that gives good advice.

Happy to help. My only caution is that you should never shut your computer down or quit Lightroom, because with that many files it'll take a week, even with the fastest possible processor to open and settle down.

--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.landsedgephoto.com
http://e-and-s.instaproofs.com/


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