Lightroom Tip

[akdrone]

For years I kept my Lightroom catalog (not images) on an external HD because it was big enough that my small internal drive wasn't where I wanted it. Later I put it on an external SSD. That helped a lot with the thumnails loading but there were still many times when I would sit a wait a bit for thumbnails to load. I have roughly 100,000 images. Recently with my MacStudio and an 2TB internal drive I moved it to that. Boom! I can now open LR and scroll through all 100,000 images with exactly 0 wait for any thumnail to appear. Just thought I'd mention this because for me, this is huge. I'm going to have a hard time justifying trading in my M1 Studio Max 2TB/64GB for an M3 when they come out but I'll find a way.

 

[StevenBrodsky]

For years I kept my Lightroom catalog (not images) on an external HD because it was big enough that my small internal drive wasn't where I wanted it. Later I put it on an external SSD. That helped a lot with the thumnails loading but there were still many times when I would sit a wait a bit for thumbnails to load. I have roughly 100,000 images. Recently with my MacStudio and an 2TB internal drive I moved it to that. Boom! I can now open LR and scroll through all 100,000 images with exactly 0 wait for any thumnail to appear. Just thought I'd mention this because for me, this is huge. I'm going to have a hard time justifying trading in my M1 Studio Max 2TB/64GB for an M3 when they come out but I'll find a way.

I had similar issues. I have a highend CPU and 64gb memory in a Desktop. I had two 1 terabyte drives , but I had installed so much software they were getting full and I needed more space. I too bought a 2 terabyte SSD with a fast USB3 connection. It was sufficient. The thumbnails appeared at an adequate rate, but I wanted faster. I added a 2 terabyte internal drive in addition to the 1 terabyte drives. I moved all my image , video and other data files to the 2 terabyte drive. Now thumbnails and just loading files is much faster.

 

[twickers14]

You’ve got more TB and GBs than the City I live in! Seriously I second what you are saying although I don’t have an HD to back it all up to……yet? But I have just upgraded from a 27” Mac (13 years old) to a Mac Book Air 16” with M2 chip and wow my pix and iMovie (which I know is a bit low key) loads in nano seconds. Probably time to upgrade my editing capabilities but don’t want to spend on Final Cut Pro.

 

[akdrone]

You’ve got more TB and GBs than the City I live in! Seriously I second what you are saying although I don’t have an HD to back it all up to……yet? But I have just upgraded from a 27” Mac (13 years old) to a Mac Book Air 16” with M2 chip and wow my pix and iMovie (which I know is a bit low key) loads in nano seconds. Probably time to upgrade my editing capabilities but don’t want to spend on Final Cut Pro.

I used to do tech support for a living and can't count how many people lost everything when they turned their computer on and the drive had crashed. For some it meant their job, for others a lilfetime of pictures. I do hope you will get some backup going. External HD's is all you need and they can be had in terabytes under $100.

 

[StevenBrodsky]

I used to do tech support for a living and can't count how many people lost everything when they turned their computer on and the drive had crashed. For some it meant their job, for others a lilfetime of pictures. I do hope you will get some backup going. External HD's is all you need and they can be had in terabytes under $100.

I backed up most of the software I use (installation files) and data I want to preserve, but I don't backup everything.

 

[akdrone]

I backed up most of the software I use (installation files) and data I want to preserve, but I don't backup everything.

To each their own but in my experience people that backup now and then invariably lose important stuff when it's been a month or two. The only safe way I know to ensure it's all good is to have an external drive with something like Carbon Copy Cloner backing up regularly and if that's the case it's a worry free and time-free backup of everything. To each his own but it's why I always tell people "buy external drives in pairs. One for your data and one that backs up the data on the other". best of luck.

 

[AlanL]

To each their own but in my experience people that backup now and then invariably lose important stuff when it's been a month or two. The only safe way I know to ensure it's all good is to have an external drive with something like Carbon Copy Cloner backing up regularly and if that's the case it's a worry free and time-free backup of everything. To each his own but it's why I always tell people "buy external drives in pairs. One for your data and one that backs up the data on the other". best of luck.

Nice choices - I spent 37 years in IT before retiring and it always came down to a simple truth: there are those who have lost drives and learned and those who are about to. Every hard drive is going to fail and the only question is when.

All of my drives are mirrored using Carbon Copy Cloner as well.

 

[Richard R]

@akdrone I guess you have a lifetime worth of images. I take a lot of pictures too but what I do is immediately after uploading to Lightroom (Classic) , is go through them and delete most of them except for the ones I think I will use. I use Lightroom's star or color filtering system to whittle them down considerably. Oh and I backup
(images only; not Video) to the cloud with my Google Workspace account and locally as mentioned above.

 

[akdrone]

@akdrone I guess you have a lifetime worth of images. I take a lot of pictures too but what I do is immediately after uploading to Lightroom (Classic) , is go through them and delete most of them except for the ones I think I will use. I use Lightroom's star or color filtering system to whittle them down considerably. Oh and I backup
(images only; not Video) to the cloud with my Google Workspace account and locally as mentioned above.

I am deleting thousands of images taken of my grandson's soccer days and TaeKwonDo days when I shot him and all his friends endlessly. The horror...

 

[DARKSeifer]

Why delete when you can just convert to DNG (a bit lighter than RAW files form the camera) and save them in external 2.5" 5TB HDD which are quite inexpensive? You are basically deleting your life.

You want an internal M2 SSD as a cache to work on it, but when you finish editing, you can move those files to an external HDD and forget about them.

I buy external HDDs in pairs and mirror them using freefilesync, so in case one gets destroyed, I have the other.

Digital cameras run free of any cost, If you take in account the running cost of analog photography the HDDs are basically free, You can fill TB and TB, and it's still cheaper than analog, but everyone seems to have forgotten about it.

 

[akdrone]

Why delete when you can just convert to DNG (a bit lighter than RAW files form the camera) and save them in external 2.5" 5TB HDD which are quite inexpensive? You are basically deleting your life.

You want an internal M2 SSD as a cache to work on it, but when you finish editing, you can move those files to an external HDD and forget about them.

I buy external HDDs in pairs and mirror them using freefilesync, so in case one gets destroyed, I have the other.

Digital cameras run free of any cost, If you take in account the running cost of analog photography the HDDs are basically free, You can fill TB and TB, and it's still cheaper than analog, but everyone seems to have forgotten about it.

Why delete? Back in the day I would shoot rapid fire trying to catch a kick here or there and come back from an event with hundreds of images. Rinse and repeat without me bothering to delete anything leaves me with thousands of meaningless images interspersed with a great shot of my grandson. Those are often color coded but it still takes time to go through. i've wiped about 256GB of meaningless nonsense thus far .