Lightroom Test

[wolfpackmars2]

Hi all,

This is my first post, so be gentle. I've just started with Lightroom (still on the trial, but it looks like I will be purchasing very soon) and I'm fairly new to photography. I have a job that sends me all over the country, new location every week. Usually, I am visiting a few small towns in the middle of nowhere. I figure "What a great opportunity to get out and take some pictures!" I have struggled with managing photos, and I researched lightroom when 2.' was still in beta and 1.' didn't quite fit my needs. 2.' looks to be an amazing product!

Anyways, I hope to grow and develop my skills through this and other communities. This week I will be travelling to my company's factory in BFE Kansas. I have organized all of my photos and set up a dedicated hard drive for storing and processing them on my SBS server. I have already setup a couple of albums, one for my pentax photos and one for my photos from my old P&S. In my off time at the hotel, I hope to continue to go through my photos, Picking and Rejecting and organizing as best as I can. This will be an important test of the stability and features of LR for me... how easily can I pack up all of my photos and catalogs to a USB drive and take them with me. And, how easily can I synchronize my changes to my server and my main computer when I come back home...

I have ~2''' Pentax photos to go through, and ~2''' other photos from various P&S cameras--total about 8GB of photo data.

I guess the important part of this will be to see how easily I can synchronize the changes in the catalog file from my portable/laptop catalog to my main catalog, given that the files will be stored in different locations according to each computer. ie - My home computer sees photos in \\server\Media\Photos\PentaxPhotos whereas my laptop will see them in J:\Photos\PentaxPhotos, where J: is my USB drive.

I'm certain I'm not the only person who takes part or all of my gallery with me. Any tips or suggestions are appreciated. Anything I can do to make importing the changes I make while on the road will also be welcomed.

 

[Braders]

Steven

Welcome to the forums, and may i say nice to see you have your signature up and running from post 1.

Running LR catalogue on a server is not recommended, see below post.....

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/showthread.php?t=1595

And then having more than one catalogue can be done but has some warnings to go with it too..

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/showthread.php?t=1917

Do i understand you correctly - you want to make a catalogue while on the road and merge when you return. That would be the safest way to ensure the main catalogue does not corrupt.

Here is a couple of posts for merging catalogues.

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/showthread.php?t=23'7&highlight=merge+catalogues
http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/showthread.php?t=2826&highlight=merge+catalogues

 

[Brad Snyder]

Steven, I don't work that way, so I've got no advice to offer, but I did want to take a second to Welcome you to LR Forums.

While, I'm sure someone will have some advice for you, while you're waiting, you may want to take a few minutes to scan thru old threads; we've had a lot of discussion on similar topics. Our search feature here is fairly literal-minded, and not very flexible, so that may not help too much.


Edit: See what I mean? Thanx Braders ....

 

[wolfpackmars2]

Hey, thanks for the warm welcome!

I did read a post by someone who advised to resist the temptation to create multiple catalogs. I would like to dive deeper into this discussion, and know the pros and cons of creating multiple catalogs.

Basically, here is my situation. I have been trying for the better part of a year now to get my photos organized and find a way to share them. With the birth of my first baby girl just less than a year ago, I purchased my first dSLR, the K1'D. I found that I was hooked on taking pictures! I have had it now for less than 1' months and have taken over 26'' photos with it, though I'm sure that's not much by some standards. Realize I was in school and changing jobs for most of the time. Now I have a new job where I travel all over the country doing field service work, and I have caught up enough to get back into taking pictures. I have a lot of old pictures from my point and shoot and DVR cams, pluse I have a lot of pictures from my new camera... overall probably 4 or 5,''' photos to sort through and find the good ones.

Additionally, I my family lives in California while I am in Missouri, and they all want pictures of my daughter. I need an easy way to post family pictures online and offer an easy way for my family to select and print photos from my online catalog. I have my own website, hosted by Bluehost, which gives me my own domain and virtually unlimited disk space. I am also signed up for DigiBug for my prints, though this is not a requirement.

I am also trying to take some pro (ie not family) pictures, and offer those on a separate website for people to view and hopefully purchase. I have no fantasies of getting rich selling photos online... I have a career already that I like, this is just my hobby and I want to have fun at it.

Which brings me back to LR... I want to be able to enjoy taking photos and stay out from behind the computer. I want to share my photos, those which are for my family on one website and those for everyone else on another... separate groups of photos.

What is the easiest way to manage these different groups of photos with different purposes? I want to be able to select and review photos for family without having to go through all of my other photos, and vice versa. How can I categorize them easily? What is the best way to categorize them in such a way that I can readily select a group of photos for publishing to the web?

Don't mind the other subjects I referenced above... I am laying out my goals and expectations for Lightroom (and this thread is called Lightroom Test, after all) I will address those other subjects in an appropriate thread/forum.

 

[wolfpackmars2]

Could an XMP file help in this situation?

 

[Brad Snyder]

Here's a thread that just about exhausts the topic. I expect if you read back through past threads we've had the same discussion at least half a dozen times.

Multiple Catalogs?

Feel free to post followup questions after that reading assignment.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

This is my first post, so be gentle.

Hi Steven, welcome to the forum! Don't worry, we're always gentle!

Looks like you've got some great info there already, but don't hesitate to shout if it creates more questions.