Lost In Lightroom

Last week I was going to talk about this but was side tracked in a different direction. But that was cool anyhow.

So here we are talking about Lightroom. Adobe' premier photographers management software. I say management because of all of its capabilities. Sorting, Developing, Presenting in Slide Show and Web, and Printing. It seems to do it all, and for most photographers it does up to 90% of the heavy lifting in their workflow. Probably the biggest deal in Lightroom is as long as you stay within the Lightroom environment, it is totally non-destructive editing. Ok... Great! What is non-destructive editing. It is the ability to make as many changes as you want as often as you want and whenever you want while retaining ever stinking pixel in its original value. In other words you can't mess it up unless you delete the file.

How it does this is to take the original file and make a thumbnail of it and a entry into a database which Lightroom terms as a Library. Everything you do to the on screen image is really just information entered in the database and not actual pixel pound on our image. Hence non-destructive editing. Ok... That's the really cool stuff. There are a couple of flys in the ointment though. One being file handling.

So there I was with this really great photo management software a couple of years ago with little to no direction on where to put my files. I understood the concept of collections because they are like play lists in iTunes. No big deal there. As far as location there are two thoughts. The Mac way is to dump everything into one folder and let-er rip and use your collections to keep them organized. The Windows side is to put each download into a separate and unique folder (directory if your a DOS dinosaur).

Well... I am an amalgamation of all three of these so Library files went one place, files went another, and backups a third. Then came the external drives where things became more scattered. Ug! So now (last week) I am in the process of consolidating all my photos onto two drives dedicated to images only. I picked up two 1 TB drives just for Lightroom images and named the LIGHTROOM and LR BACKUP.

I still have separate upload folders by date as this is how Lightroom names the folder. I do segregate these into more global folders. NATURE has Landscape, Seascapes, Animals etc. As part of my workflow on import I set the import folder and backup folder the same with the exception of the drive designation. My libraries are all in one folder on my internal drive and the back-up libraries are in one location on the LR BACKUP drive.

This is great for moving forward but it has become quite the task to move currently stored images and reset the folders in Lightroom. Some I can do right in Lightroom which is the easiest way and other are via the operating system. The problem there is the ling between the database (Library) and the fold of images is broken and you have to re-direct Lightroom to where the files have been moved. Dual monitors is a life saver here.

So what is the lesson learned here. Before you start blasting images onto hard drives, find someone who has a workflow and file structure established. Embrase the concepts in their logic and apply it, then do it the same way every time you download a card.

Don't bother reinventing the wheel. They all go around and why not use what someone else has already proven that works.

Cya... Doug