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Made the move to Adobe Lightroom 2; some regrets
By Jacob Vorpahl | November 16, 2009
If there’s something I’ve learned from looking at the stats for my blog everyday, it’s that you guys (and gals) out there are interested in two things when you come here: softboxes and umbrellas, and the Canon G11. Specifically, there are a lot of you out there that are looking for macro shots from the G11. Sadly, right now I’m sitting on one pretty cool shot I took of a spider a buddy of mine and I snapped recently when we took some kids from our youth group out camping.
We woke up in the morning and the spider was a little under two feet from his head. I killed the spider with my knife (not as cool as you’d think) and then we proceeded to play with the dead remains, positioning it in all sorts of ways to try and get a cool picture. My G11 was on hand for the fun and we got a nice, close up macro shot of the little bugger that showed off his eight eyes.
So, I come back here and see all the Google and blog searches looking for macro G11 shots and I’m dying to put this picture up, along with some others, but I sadly don’t want to upset my carefully followed workflow for putting pictures on my blog and other online venues. And therein lies my problem: I’m now shackled to one computer for almost all of my photography work.
See, about… oh, I’d say a month of so ago, I tested out some trials for different photography database solutions. My cataglog was growing and I had everything roughly organized via Windows folders. Not by dates, mind you (didn’t seem concrete enough for me) but my own mentally devised numbers system. It worked when I was taking a couple of nice photos a month.
Well, when I started to get more involved with photograph my catalog was growing faster and suddenly I had filed up half of my 160GB external harddrive with just RAW photos. It hadn’t dawned on me that things weren’t organized that well until I spent a good hour looking for one specific folder buried deep within other folders. At that point I decided I needed something to get control of my photos.
I settled on Adobe Lightroom 2, as it was the simplest and most elegant solution for my needs, and I went to work on cataloging everything. If you’re not familiar with the purpose of programs like Lightroom, it’s to create a database of your photos. It catalogs everything you put into it (photos in the case of Lightroom) and you can then search through it with keywords or other criteria (camera, ISO, lens, etc.).
Unfortunately, along with getting all of the cool benefits of having a photo database, you also get the drawbacks. For me, this means that all of my editing needs to be done on my home computer. Why, you ask? Well, keeping track of photos edited outside of my Lightroom workflow ususally creates confusion. Did that photo get copied into the catalog? Did I upload that to online storage? Do I need to go back and recheck all of IPTC data to make sure they were keyworded?
In order to for-go it all, I just do almost all of the editing at home and take backup copies with me wherever I go. Sure, I could create an “import” folder and just take care of it when I get home, but I have a small fear of losing something between the cracks (it’s happened before). Yeah, I could also just do everything on a laptop, but I haven’t found one with a screen I like. So, the trade off is my photo needs are immobile, and that’s where the regrets come in.
I think there are some work arounds to getting the Lightroom catalog working on a portable harddrive (I know this previously was not allowed through the software), but other than that I can think of no solution that makes this any more pleasant or functional. I used to enjoying doing editing and uploading no matter where I was at, able to have my photos as fluid as need be. But, I guess that’s the sacrifice to make when you want to be able to find a picture or two out of thousands (tens of thousands now) without spending a ridiculous time pouring through folders.
What about everyone out there? What solutions do you use for large amounts of photos? Sound off in the comments if you feel so inclined.
Topics: Software | 1 Comment »
November 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Jacob,
check out thelightroomlab.com. I just stumbled upon the site and it looks pretty good.
There’s an article here about using an external hard drive for your images:
http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/05/my-photo-storage-system-two-external-hard-drives/
And one here about moving your existing catalog onto an external hard drive:
http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/05/how-to-get-your-lightroom-catalog-onto-an-external-hard-drive/