Work Flow

[Hinfrance]

I didn't think you were making that implication Andrew.

No, I'm going to save up for Bibble. I'll buy the lite version when it comes out and eek out the pennies for an upgrade in due course.

Meanwhile, I assume Magic has been shopping for a suitable ehd?

[ABERS]

How do I find out how much space L/Room is occupying on my hard disc?

[picsfor]

Assuming you're on Windows, Lightroom normally creates a folder in your My Documents folder or the My Pictures folder within the My Documents folder.
If you go to that folder and open it, i think at the bottom of the window is some info telling you about the folder contents - how many files and combined size of files.
It is this figure that tells you how much Lightroom is taking up on your hard drive.
Also, i think if you right click on the Lightroom folder and select About it tells you the same info.

I've had another thought on Tringles issue - and that would be the option of importing pictures into Lightroom.
I only let Lightroom add them to the catalogue from their default location.
So basically, all files are downloaded to a folder called "To Process" and added to the Lightroom Catalogue whilst leaving the files in the folder and mapping their current location.
When i delete or move a file in Lightroom, it also gets the OS (Windows or Mac) to action similar moves on the hard drive - so pictures are either deleted or moved from one folder to another on behalf of Lightroom and its catalogue information is updated to reflect the new location of the file or the fact that it has been deleted.

Lightroom 2, i think, by default imports the pictures into the catalogue and its folder - thereby having a duplicate copy of the picture on the hard drive. Were i to allow it to do this - then Lightroom would currently take up some 70-80gb of hard drive space, and when i initially started, some 170-200gb of hard dive space. And that would be on top of the hard drive space taken by the original copies of the pictures.
Yes- that would have been a real drain on the system and i think i would have uninstalled it as well.

[magicrhodes]

Is this a bargain?

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=323559

Or they have a Seagate 500GB for £49.99, would two of these be better than one of the above... (I am aware one of the above is more for less but 2 spreads the risk.)

[Oldboy]

Is this a bargain?

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=323559

Or they have a Seagate 500GB for £49.99, would two of these be better than one of the above... (I am aware one of the above is more for less but 2 spreads the risk.)

It's a very good price for a external drive, and that company are well known for their floppy disks of 1.4mb. 

[picsfor]

i personally would recommend you get the 2 x seagate 500gb drives.
As said, i'm now running a 5D MkII and i'm a year or two away from filling up my 1Tb hard drives - and my files comprise RAW images at between 20-29mb per image. Your D40 is not gonna come anywhere close to that!

So, the 2 Seagate 500gb drives will give you pretty solid redundancy for now, and a few years to save up for fresh ones once they fill up (in a few years 2Tb will be the same price as 500gb is today).
Also, by having the 2 drives - you can empty your computers hard drive of all the images (except for when you import them) which will give it more h/d space to work with and maybe work a bit faster.
Finally - and this is the crucial bit - the second ehd can be left switched off except for when you transfer files to it, thereby making it nigh impossible for it to be caught be any viruses or trojans etc that like to destroy images for fun!

the 1.5Tb is a great price - but i can't find a use for it at this time and would be buying just for the sake of it. For the semi pros and pros it would be a good purchase but for the rest of us...

[magicrhodes]

Okay so that is storeage sorted...

Organisation and viewing... am I best off simply down loading into a file e.g. External DriveA>2010>Spanish Holiday
or importing to Elements 5

[Hinfrance]

Okay so that is storeage sorted...

Organisation and viewing... am I best off simply down loading into a file e.g. External DriveA>2010>Spanish Holiday
or importing to Elements 5

Personally I use Picasa as my image DRM. It's fast, auto scans for changes, keeps backups of original files, and has some very effective one click corrections. But above all it's free.

Andrew, I did notice the LR default and changed it to leave the files where they are. I think it was the LR catalogue backups that took up all the space - when I came to remove it there were literally hundreds upon hundreds of LR catalogue folders and subdirectories.

[magicrhodes]

Personally I use Picasa as my image DRM. It's fast, auto scans for changes, keeps backups of original files, and has some very effective one click corrections. But above all it's free.

Free?! Whats the catch?

[Hinfrance]

Haven't found one of any consequence yet. But because it is from Google you don't get to upload directly to flickr, you'll need the flickr standalone uploader for that. And you don't get to create image stacks - sounds bad but it is so fast and easy to use you'll wonder why you ever did such a thing (assuming you did).

It's just what I've grown used to I suppose.

You can directly open files in Elements; always save the Elements edit with a different name (or create a duplicate to edit) to avoid mucking up the source file.

It's horses for courses, you have to decide what works best for you personally.

[picsfor]

There is no catch. It's a very good program and it really is free  
Many on here use it - i think Clacton Dave   is another fan as are a few others.

For work flow - i would download your pictures to your hard drive a and hard drive b (assuming you're going with the 2 hard drive option)
Then open files from hard drive a to process - saving processed pictures as jpg to your computer hard drive (my pictures) if you want the convenience - or just straight back to hard drives a and b.

My pictures are all stored in 1 of 2 main folder.
They are downloaded into a folder called "To Process" - and that's where they stay until i have had a chance to view them and delete them or process them.
Once they have been processed - they then get moved to a folder called "Processed" which is further sub divided by subject as a simple back up in case key words get lost along the way.
Those sub folders can be further sub divided so for example my folder structure goes Processed - which contains several subject based folders of which one is UK Locations which is further sub divided by County.

So a directory structure would be Processed/UK Locations/Sussex/Brighton - i have added a further sub division for Sussex because this is where i live and take most of my pictures. Suffolk is also the same because that is where i come from - but all other counties including London only have the County sub folder.


Hope that gives some idea on how to file your images - and Picassa really is not bad, and would have used it myself had i not got Lightroom - though i also have the Canon software which is actually preferred by some pros to Adobe offerings.

As for Tringles issue with Lightroom - you clearly weren't meant to get on with it. Hope you can get your copy of Bibble soon - it has some rally nice features and were i not deep into Lightroom would probably choose it as a second choice

[Forseti]

I've had another thought on Tringles issue - and that would be the option of importing pictures into Lightroom.
I only let Lightroom add them to the catalogue from their default location.
So basically, all files are downloaded to a folder called "To Process" and added to the Lightroom Catalogue whilst leaving the files in the folder and mapping their current location.
When i delete or move a file in Lightroom, it also gets the OS (Windows or Mac) to action similar moves on the hard drive - so pictures are either deleted or moved from one folder to another on behalf of Lightroom and its catalogue information is updated to reflect the new location of the file or the fact that it has been deleted.

Lightroom 2, i think, by default imports the pictures into the catalogue and its folder - thereby having a duplicate copy of the picture on the hard drive. Were i to allow it to do this - then Lightroom would currently take up some 70-80gb of hard drive space, and when i initially started, some 170-200gb of hard dive space. And that would be on top of the hard drive space taken by the original copies of the pictures.
Yes- that would have been a real drain on the system and i think i would have uninstalled it as well.

Andrew - as you're probably as experienced with Lightroom as I am (if not more so), then this has been badly explained or, more than likely, not being interpreted correctly by me. Lightroom as you correctly state 'maps' where on the hard drive(s) your images are - it doesn't Import them. By default, on first installation Lightroom links to the 'My Pictures' folder (Windows) because that where it thinks most users will have their images. However, this is easily changed and the user can locate their images on any drive/folder they wish to - even multiple drives. It's simply a case of telling Lightroom 'where' the images are to be found. Even if the user chooses the Import option to copy the images from a CF card the images will be copied to a location/folder of choice. Either way, only one copy of the images appears - leaving aside the option to create a backup of course and this is a seperate issue. This is the point that I am having difficulty in understanding in your post when you state 'imports the pictures into the catalogue and it's folder thereby having a duplicate on the hard drive.

All that aside, there can only ever be a 'fixed' size in terms of Gb/Mb in respect to your collection of images/catalogue. For example, and using very very simple numbers here - you have a folder on Drive X containing 100 images and is 100Mb in size. Lightroom creates a catalogue to 'map' these files and let's say this is 10Mb in size. Add a cache folder and preview folder of 10Mb each and you are now looking at a total of 130Mb. Yes I know these figures don't equate to reality but have been kept to units of 10 for simplicities sake. Now if you think about it, it doesn't matter if you start juggling these various folders about placing them on different drives and the like, the fact remains that you still end up with 130Mb of data.

As concerns the possibility of Tringles catalogue file being unreasonably large then I believe that in part this is as a result of possibly incorrect terminology being used. With the number of images stated it is impossible to have a Lightroom catalogue file (lrcat) of that size. I think what was possibly meant was the Lightroom 'folder' containing not only the lrcat file but also the cache file and Preview files. Even then it would be difficult to explain this 100Gb folder size unles of course he was also choosing the Lightroom folder to save his catalogue backups - not a very wise thing to do for obvious reasons.

I realise of course that for Tringle non of this is of any importance anymore having chosen to give up on it, but for other casual readers perhaps an understanding of how Lightroom works might go some way to avoiding disappointment with the application at a later date.

[picsfor]

your grammar is better than mine  

As an Englishman - you would think i would have a better command of my own langauge than some one living i Germany!  

[Forseti]

@ Magic - here's my setup. Yes it appertains to Lightroom but it gives you some background info as to how I have my PC/Laptops set up in terms of folder structure and backup methods.

1. The PC has a RAID (mirrored) drive C  (2 x 250GB) which has nothing but applications located on it. This mirrored setup (not employed by many I admit) means that I always have a copy of my main drive (C) in the event of one of the drives failing. I perish the thought of having to reinstall all my applications from scratch including application updates etc etc.

2. A second drive - Drive D ( 250GB) contains all my data files etc, in fact most things bar applications and images but including the Lightroom catalogue file (lrcat).

3. EHD - Drive K (1TB) contains ALL my image files. Lightroom installs by default the lrcat file to Drive C along with the application itself but this I copied and pasted onto Drive D followed by deleting the original in it's default location. Lightroom, as well as most applications, runs quicker and more efficiently when it is not having to jump backwards and forwards on the same drive in trying to run both the application as well as find the associated data.

Along with having a backup of the Lightroom catalogue file (.lrcat) on this drive I have one parent folder called unimaginatively, Parent Image Folder - more on this in a moment. Within this parent folder are sub folders and sub sub-folders e.g. Parent Image Folder > sub folder > Germany > sub sub folder > Black Forest > sub sub folder Munich etc etc. Sub folder > Italy > sub sub-folder > Toskana > sub sub-folder > Umbrian etc. - you get the drift?

4. Second EHD - Drive J (2TB) is an exact copy of the first EHD (Drive K) and these 2 drives are synced using the freeware application called SyncBack.

ABERS. How do I find out how much space L/Room is occupying on my hard disc?

Navigate to the .lrcat file and hover your mouse over it - the size will be indicated. The Cache and Previews file can be ignored and/or deleted as Lightroom will rebuild these as and when necessary. In fact, some say that this is good practice as a rebuilt Cache and Preview folder will clean out any rubbish that may have accumulated within them. As you've probably gathered by now, it is the .lrcat file that should be backed up frequently - lose this to corruption and........

[picsfor]

err - in a nutshell.
I'm going with Forseti (well almost - i use the Mac equivalent)