Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: zackwoolwine on January 18, 2008, 10:51:28 am
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I've got a kind of confusing Lightroom Workflow question....here goes....
My wife and I are moving to West Africa. Part of my job is going to be taking pictures. I am going to be working on a laptop (Macbook with 250GB HDD) with two 500GB external HDD's at the house. Here is what I want to do....shoot in the field and save my photos either to a portable storage device or directly to my laptop if possible. I want to have a LR catalog on my laptop so that I can edit on the go and not have to be tethered to my external HDD. So far, so good....now, I don't want to keep too much on my laptop in case it is lost or broken so I want to back up everything to the two ext. HDD's. I know how to do that as well. Here is where I get lost. I don't just want to have backups of my photos, I want to have all of my sidecar files in tact so that if I lose my laptop I would not lose all of my edits. Here is another angle....I do not want to keep to much on my laptop to keep it running quick. So every once in a while I want to take the photos off my laptop and start afresh. I assume I would import those photos into a catalog on my ext. HDD's. But then, what about the links between the catalog and the actual photo files. If I import the images into a catalog on the ext HDD the actual photo files do not go with them, so when I try to look at my catalog on the ext. HDD wouldn't I get a bunch of broken links? I want to have fully operational catalogs on multiple HDD's so that I can hook anything up and work seamlessly and be able to take photos off my laptop and put them into a catalog on the ext. HDD ad not have to manually transfer the source files all over the place and tell the catalog where to look every time. So basically, I want to be able to edit my photos on the laptop in the field and then come home and put the photos on my ext HDD's and be able to work with them from the ext. HDD as well without having to build new catalogs or something like that every time. I feel like I'm leaving out some details that were confusing me...but that is what I want to be able to....any one got any ideas for a good workflow. Do I need a secondary app to help me with backing up and syncing it all or can I do it all with LR? I would really appreciate your help.
Zack Woolwine
www.zwphoto.com
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Others probably have a better solution than this, but it works for me. I have my photos and Lightroom catalogue all on a 160gb usb powered external drive which travels in my coat pocket, or in my backpack with my laptop depending on circumstances. So when working in Lightroom the little harddrive has to be plugged in (no big deal).
I download the photos to the external drive and backup to the laptop.
I have a second larger external drive which travels in my suitcase and in the evenings I sync the two external drives and delete the laptop backup if I want.
To sync the two external drives I use a program called GoodSync (lots of programs out there will do the same job). I like it because it will sync in both directions, but you have to be real careful if doing this.
Cheers, David