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/
