Hello everyone. I hope somebody on this knowledgeable forum can help me.
I know this subject has been discussed many times but I'm still searching for a clear answer.
Here's my situation: I have a lightroom library on my main computer that has about 25k images and is about 300GB. Even though I've got a 2.66 dual Xeon Mac Pro with 4GB of ram, it's still a little slow and I was thinking if I could keep a much more refined library on my desktop with say 5k images, it might run a little faster and wouldn't be such a behemoth.
So I've got a number of questions:
1) If I want to backup my entire database and images to an external drive, can I just copy the whole "Pictures" folder which contains my library and images to another drive? If so, how would I get lightroom to look at that library if I need it to in case I need to find another image? And will the metadata/keywords be transfered over?
2) When I slim down the database on my computer but continue to edit the metadata/keywords, can i export that new information to the much larger database on the external drive?
3) If I import new photos to my desktop hard drive, then keyword those, can I then get those photos and keywords (created after initial import) into the larger library on the external drive before deleting all of the non-keepers from my desktop hard drive?
I've watched at Michael and Jeff's videos and that has helped but I still have these qustions. i'm going to Scott Kelby's seminar on Monday but I don't think he'll get into real specifics on these types of issues.
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Eli