1 platform to view, organise and edit

[Luke Drew]

Hi All,

Firstly I'd like to say that this website could save my life. haha This is my first post on here, hopefully the first of many. To have some where and someone to throw problems/ideas with ill be such a benefit.

I’ve been using LR and now LR2 for the past few years and recently switched from PC to Mac. So my post today is a very base level problem. I am re-evaluating my entire Photo catloguing.

Historically I’ve used LR to do all of my editing but not used it to organise my photo’s because I fear if I leave all of my photo’s in the catalog my editing speed will be slowed. So currently i’m using iPhoto as a photo browser and LR to do my editing. I’m hating this method. I'd love to make Lightroom the only photo app I ever open.

One specific (but broad) question; I'd like to keep all of my photo’s in one LR catalog? ie have 1'’s of thousands of photo’s in lightroom at any one time. Essentially I want to browse all of my photos at any given time.

Is this a common practice? Or once you’ve finished working with photo's do you remove them from your catalog?

And a smaller secondary question; Is the DNG fie format better to use as opposed to Canon's CR2 format. I understand DNG essentially eliminates the need for .xmp files. If I make changes to a Photo these changes are recorded in a DNG file, Correct?

And thirdly, Can someone walk me through the process of being able to import files from iPhoto into lightroom? As the new iPhoto is setup as a package and lightroom (as far as i've been able to figure) isn't able to access the folders inside iPhoto to import?

Any thoughts anyone has would be very much appreciated.

Sorry for this post if is a question asked often. All the googling i've done on this topic has unfortunately not returned anyone having the same problems...

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to the forums Luke!

Some here are working with Catalogs containing hundreds of thousands of images without any problem! If you ever feel this is slowing you down at some point on you system, you can just develop and work on a smaller Catalog and once the main work done, import from it in the big Archive Catalog.

To DNG or not DNG... :roll: That was discussed to death but your assumptions are exact.

Having switched to Mac recently and using Lightroom from the beginning, I never tryed iPhoto sitting on my Dock... :|

 

[DonRicklin]

VC's, in the LR Folder View, should already be Stacked (but open) with the Master Image. You can close the sets individually by Clicking on the lines in the left of the frame of the Master or hitting 's' in Grid.

Don

 

[Denis Pagé]

VC's, in the LR Folder View, should already be Stacked (but open) with the Master Image. You can close the sets individually by Clicking on the lines in the left of the frame of the Master or hitting 's' in Grid.

Don

I think you are answering to a nearby thread Don... :roll:

 

[dj_paige]

I don't think there's a good reason for deleting files from your Catalog if you want to find them at some future time. That's the whole point of having a Catalog (database), it makes finding and viewing photos easier. I can also understand using multiple catalogs in the right situation. Keeping files but deleting them from a catalog makes no sense to me.

Since the catalog is really a database, there isn't a global upper limit on how many photos you can have. The capabilities of your computer have more of an effect on the largest size catalog. So, the only way to find out if Lightroom can handle all of your photos is to see what happens...