Managing offline media & default sharpening

[JoeTree]

I've just started using Lightroom 1.0 and decided to give it the duration of the demo to see if it's going to work for me.

Overall, I'm very impressed with it's abilities so far but have a couple of annoyances that I can't seem to find out about through the help tool or by searching this forum:

1. Is there a sensible way to manage a large collection of images when I'm not connected to the drives that hold them?

I have a pile of hard drives at home that store all my original RAW files from the last three years (about 57,000 images) - I imported all of these into my LR library and can search and browse them with ease so no problem there.

However, when I disconnect my laptop from the drives and run LR in a remote location, it  spends a considerable amount of time comparing the library with (un)available media, slowing down all other operations. This makes importing newly shot images onto the laptop's hard drive kind of impractical.

Similarly, when I get back to base and plug in the firewire drives, LR takes quite some time once again checking files against the library.

Is there a better way to manage this situation where I have a large volume of images but am often not connected to them?

2. Is there any way to set the default sharpening value to 0, like you can on a camera-by-camera basis in ACR?

Thanks in advance for any help given!

[JoeTree]

I did a lot more reading after making the above post and it does seem that LR isn't particularly well-suited to portability, which seems kind of strange.

Surely it's fairly standard for a photographer's laptop (particularly the type of photographer LR seems to be aimed at) to travel with them on a shoot, storing images locally as they go and transferring back into their main storage when they get home?

Does anyone else have a sensible way to manage this?

I understand about the separate / merging libraries issue but that doesn't really affect me as I use the same machine all the time so always have access to my library. Problem is that that library spends an awful lot of time looking for things that aren't there.

Ah well... back to Bridge?

[David Mantripp]

Unfortunately, at the moment Lightroom really is frustratingly crippled as an asset manager.  The only way to handle the "disconnected" situation is, basically, to maintain one database per "chunk" (might be a shoot, a week, a month or whatever) and to use something more suitable to manage your full archive. Ironically, especially given some snide comments from certain authors, effectively LR is very, very similar to CaptureOne in terms of actual, realistic functionality at present. The main difference being that CaptureOne knows it's limitations and is built around a session metaphor.

iView is a good option for heavyweight cataloging, but it has some limitations especially when to comes to managing different derivatives of a master. There are workarounds, but they're fragile and mind-numbing.

Hopefully Lightroom will be updated to manage this better in the (near) future, but if not, then I do wonder what real advantages it really offers over Bridge CS3. It seems to be designed very much for studio-based photographers at present.

[rrdphoto]

2. Is there any way to set the default sharpening value to 0, like you can on a camera-by-camera basis in ACR?
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Not currently.  It's easy to do though with the Lightroom import paradigm and a Preset that simply sets the sharpening to zero.  I elaborate more on this in my blog: [a href=\"http://blog.rrdphoto.com/2007/04/disable-default-sharpening-in-lightroom.html]Disabling Lightroom Sharpening[/url].