External drive arrangement question

[jljonathan]

Pre-LR I have been keeping all my images on an external raid ' striped drive (2-1.5 gb striped) with a 25'gb partition for PS scratch and the other partition of 1.5gb has 3-folders: RAW, JPEG and DERIVATIVE. This arrangement served me well while using Expression Media and PS,ACR to help keep the different types of files segregated for backups etc. Now that I am using LR and don't have the need for derivatives etc, would I be best to combine all types of image files into one image partition and let LR do the segregating? How do others handle this situation? And, would I continue to use the 25'gb scratch partition for PS and now add the LR preset cache to it for it's storage on this external?
Thanks
Jonathan

 

[clee01l]

When I started LR, I had a similar situation. I started using the LR import folder defaults (yyyy-mm-dd) in a clean parent for new images, I imported (moved) the RAW and JPEG originals from their pre LR location into LR using the default date named folders. That way all my RAW images and JPEGs from a given date were collected where LR would have placed them had I been importing from the camera card. That left me with several Derivative image files that were 'final' images from my previous Post Processing application(s). These I imported into LR to be cataloged, but I placed them in a special folder under the parent which I named "Derivatives". This allowed me to access these non reproducable derivatives in LR for printing or other uses outside LR. If you have a large quantity of older files, you might break this into smaller digestable chunks.

Some Keywords were imported along with the image files but I also reworked my keyword hierarchy and am gradually cleaning up the old image files. Again, none of this has to be done at once.