Digital Photo workflow

[Clide]

Hi All, of those who are downloading their photos thru Lightroom Classic are you downloading thru LRC: 1. To your hard drive on your computer? 2. Downloading to an external drive? 3. Any other ideas or experiences you may have had? I am going thru the process of correcting years of errors and am starting from scratch. I have collected all my photos onto two external drives which I will save and a third external drive that I have deduplicated all photos and will now slowly download into LRC. I have set up a cloud backup and an external drive backup. My PC computer has 1.8 tb hard drive. I ask the question because I am shooting in raw and taking photos almost every day. My sense is I will use an external drive to download my photos to going forward as it will give me more flexibly in managing storage going forward. Thank you for your help!

 

[etiennescamera]

Hi All, of those who are downloading their photos thru Lightroom Classic are you downloading thru LRC: 1. To your hard drive on your computer? 2. Downloading to an external drive? 3. Any other ideas or experiences you may have had? I am going thru the process of correcting years of errors and am starting from scratch. I have collected all my photos onto two external drives which I will save and a third external drive that I have deduplicated all photos and will now slowly download into LRC. I have set up a cloud backup and an external drive backup. My PC computer has 1.8 tb hard drive. I ask the question because I am shooting in raw and taking photos almost every day. My sense is I will use an external drive to download my photos to going forward as it will give me more flexibly in managing storage going forward. Thank you for your help!

I struggled for years to find a good workflow and made many mistakes along the way, until I watched a series of tutorials by Janine from Pangolin Photo Safaris, which really helped me to find a proper workflow. Link to one of the tutorials: https://youtu.be/5MJ-iwVje0g

I now download to an external hard drive and then back up to a second external drive and to the cloud. I reorganised my hard drives, but the poor organisation of my cloud backup remains unchanged, except that I have started uploading the new photos in a properly organised manner.

 

[Clide]

Thanks Etienne! I have Reviewed Janine Krayer's you tube videos, and she is very good and has helped me tremendously. I think I am going to take the two external drives approach. Downloading to the computer would result in faster communication with LRC but I am willing to give up some speed for more flexibility. Thanks!

 

[Scooter]

Yup. Just came here to comment on Janine's 11-part light room tutorial. It helped me tremendously. What really surprised me, is how hard I have to cull my photos. Only so many can be saved. Picking only the best in a sequence, is hard for a beginner. I do, oddly, also save some of my worst, as I can review the metadata to figure out where I went wrong. I transfer all the images to the external hard drive, and keep only my favourite images on the Mac. ( I'm sure that will catch up to me too )

 

[Deleted Member 5003]

Absolutely save your images(after culling) to duplicated external drives as a first step(suggest SSD drives if it fits your budget). Traditional hard drives (spinning disc) are notoriously unreliable in my experience against even the slightest accidental knocks or drops, with a third working copy to your PC.

As a past user of licensed photo mechanic, to cull photos, suggest looking at FastStone Image viewer as one of the better free software packages for fast image review, culling and copying/moving keepers between your PC and external drives.

 

[Clide]

Absolutely save your images(after culling) to duplicated external drives as a first step(suggest SSD drives if it fits your budget). Traditional hard drives (spinning disc) are notoriously unreliable in my experience against even the slightest accidental knocks or drops, with a third working copy to your PC.

As a past user of licensed photo mechanic, to cull photos, suggest looking at FastStone Image viewer as one of the better free software packages for fast image review, culling and copying/moving keepers between your PC and external drives.

Thanks! Very good input. Photo Mechanic had been recommended to me for culling photos first. I will look at Fast Stone. The culling issue is one of the reasons I got into trouble. I am going to follow Janines and Mark Galer workflow with my new set up. Thanks for all your input!

 

[AlphaWorld]

I have two external SSDs on my desktop and I use those as my working storage. I don't want my images on my system drive.

I get home, and unload my memory cards to one of the SSDs (memory card -> SSD is fast). Then I back them up to two external magnetic drives as basic backup, and upload them to be in-house NAS as a third backup (not so fast - sometimes I start that and take a break!)

I work on the external SSD, backing up work files every so often, or at the end of processing the shoot. I process with Photoshop, so I don't work on each image. I look at the directory on the SSD using Adobe Bridge, and use bridge to colour code and star images.

When I consider a shoot done, I back up the SSD version of the directory, and clear it.

Is that what you were asking about?

 

[Clide]

I have two external SSDs on my desktop and I use those as my working storage. I don't want my images on my system drive.

I get home, and unload my memory cards to one of the SSDs (memory card -> SSD is fast). Then I back them up to two external magnetic drives as basic backup, and upload them to be in-house NAS as a third backup (not so fast - sometimes I start that and take a break!)

I work on the external SSD, backing up work files every so often, or at the end of processing the shoot. I process with Photoshop, so I don't work on each image. I look at the directory on the SSD using Adobe Bridge, and use bridge to colour code and star images.

When I consider a shoot done, I back up the SSD version of the directory, and clear it.

Is that what you were asking about?

Tony, thanks for sharing. Your answer is exactly what I was looking for. When you say work files is that your entire computer files and system over and above the photos? Are you backing up to a cloud service at all? Sounds like you do not need the cloud service as you have 3 backups.

 

[AlphaWorld]

Tony, thanks for sharing. Your answer is exactly what I was looking for. When you say work files is that your entire computer files and system over and above the photos? Are you backing up to a cloud service at all? Sounds like you do not need the cloud service as you have 3 backups.

By working files I means .psd files, sometimes TIFFs if I take an image to another processor for noise reduction, that sort of thing. Basically files I create on the way from .ARW to .JPG :-D My system drive is backed up independently.

No, I'm not using a cloud service. The only thing it would offer me is off-site backup, and I take external drives off-site every so often.

 

[Clide]

By working files I means .psd files, sometimes TIFFs if I take an image to another processor for noise reduction, that sort of thing. Basically files I create on the way from .ARW to .JPG :-D My system drive is backed up independently.

No, I'm not using a cloud service. The only thing it would offer me is off-site backup, and I take external drives off-site every so often.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Gaz]

Are there any useful Post Processing apps that read and write to Apple Photos?

Good grief, I'm no pro, but I thought all this was behind me. I used to use lightroom, photos, appature, lightroom, the pentax specific app etc - a trial 20 years old... Then when I got around to trusting iCloud for syncing, my old Pentax DSLR was all but obsolete, and I "permanently" changed to jpg format and using iPhones alone.... And hence today, my 80,000 Photos collection is backed up on google photos for safekeeping, and my vulnerable electronic gadgets are no longer archive critical.

Until I purchased a new sony camera with two SD card slots last month.

Now I'm shooting to RAW again backed up with a jpg record on the cam, but I gave up using the Sony Imaging edge mobile app after a week or so because the connections kept dropping out of my iPhone. It's a Bluetooth thing, I expect.

So now I whip out the SD card, plug that into MBP, and Apple photos will identify and quickly import the new images as RAW, upload to iCloud clear off the HDD but for thumbnails, & then wipes up the SD card, leaving all the jpg copies on SD card #2, just in case.

So, with RAW, Post Processing questions start to arise.

I don't want a subscription service, so I've loaded Imaging Edge Desktop. It's not that bad. Intuitive.

But now I find that I have to export from Apple Photos to a local MBP drive, manipulate the raw image, export a jpg, then import it back to Photos. Suddenly, I have copies of RAW, & jpg on MBP, AND soft copies in iCloud drive, Photos and Google Drive, and Google Photos. Multiple copies - thus begging for a disaster if I am ever looking for that last edit in a hurry, which is almost always.

Why can't Imaging Edge Edit read and write directly to Apple Photos like Photoshop express does on my iPhone?? I don't want to go back 20 years and start another image database on an assortment of HDD that eventually I can no longer access, and, please shoot me if I ever use Adobe imaging cloud again; the regular subscription upgrade train and adobe's daily new release is a train wreck. 404 my bank and my patience.

Help please. Are there any recommended Post Processing apps that read and write to Apple Photos?

Gaz