Lightroom when traveling

[maralee808]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic most recent

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

I will be traveling with my laptop in a couple of weeks and want to be able to process photos in Lightroom. All of my photos are held on an external drive. I don't want to bring the external drive with all of my photos on it (I don't want to risk losing any of them). Do I create a new catalog and use a new external drive or do I use the catalog I am using - it will show photos missing. How do I transfer them to the main external hard drive when I return. Thanks.

 

[Paul McFarlane]

Hi and welcome to the Forum!

The Blog below is an extract from instructions in Victoria's Classic book, some very helpful ideas on hw to do this there:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-to-lightroom-catalog-multiple-computers/

 

[Zenon]

Just get another portable drive for travel. They are inexpensive. I have an iMac and a Macbook Air. On the laptop I create a new catalogue naming it based on the trip were are going on. I keep all my files on a portable drive and the catalogue on the laptop.

When I get home I copy the catalogue to the portable drive, plug it into the iMac and use the "Import from another catalogue" command. It merges that catalogue into the master catalogue and moves the files off the portable drive. All edits are retained.

 

[Califdan]

Make a copy of the full contents of your external drive onto another external drive or some other disk. Leave this copy home and take the real external drive with you. I do this all the time using two Western Digital 4tb MyPassport portable drives. One (WDP) is my real "Western Digital Photos" drive the other (WBU) is the backup of it. I also have my LR Classic Catalog on the WDP drive (which also gets copied to the WBU just before I leave.

Make sure you're running the same version (i.e. LR8 or LR6) on both computers (dot releases don't matter that much)

 

[BobMc]

I will be traveling with my laptop in a couple of weeks and want to be able to process photos in Lightroom. All of my photos are held on an external drive. I don't want to bring the external drive with all of my photos on it (I don't want to risk losing any of them). Do I create a new catalog and use a new external drive or do I use the catalog I am using - it will show photos missing. How do I transfer them to the main external hard drive when I return. Thanks.

FIRST!! Your opening two sentences imply that there are no backups of the external drive containing ALL OF YOUR PHOTOS.
At one time I only had three. I lost two in ten minutes and was down to one. I now have seven, including one off site. Would you buy a new car expecting to last for the rest of your life? All hard drives WILL fail, the only question is when.

FURTHER THOUGHT: What about backups of your catalog? LR's default is a folder on the same drive as the catalog. This serves fine for catalog integrity, but not for hard drive integrity. You need backups of the catalog, presets and your original images on multiple hard drives!!

 

[Umberto Cocca]

At one time I only had three. I lost two in ten minutes and was down to one. I now have seven, including one off site.

Just.curious here :
1. How did you manage to loose 2 in 10 minutes?
2. How is 7 better than 3? Why 7 and not 4 or 9?

Sent using Tapatalk

 

[BobMc]

Just.curious here :
1. How did you manage to loose 2 in 10 minutes?
2. How is 7 better than 3? Why 7 and not 4 or 9?

Sent using Tapatalk

1) The three were a) internal on desktop, b) external in a box on a shelf at home, c) external stored at my wifes office. First a) failed, then getting b) out of box I dropped it.
After getting c) home and verifying it was good, I attached it to the desktop along with a new unused external and used SyncBack Pro to do a copy and verify to the new drive. Once that copy was started, I walked away from the desktop and did not touch it until the copy and verify were complete.
2) After this experience 3 did not seem like enough, 7 was arbitrary. It included two drobo units set to Dual Disk Redundancy.

All backups include images and full catalog folder including LRcat, Cat backups, Presets, Previews and Lightroom Settings folder.

 

[PhilBurton]

1) The three were a) internal on desktop, b) external in a box on a shelf at home, c) external stored at my wifes office. First a) failed, then getting b) out of box I dropped it.
After getting c) home and verifying it was good, I attached it to the desktop along with a new unused external and used SyncBack Pro to do a copy and verify to the new drive. Once that copy was started, I walked away from the desktop and did not touch it until the copy and verify were complete.
2) After this experience 3 did not seem like enough, 7 was arbitrary. It included two drobo units set to Dual Disk Redundancy.

All backups include images and full catalog folder including LRcat, Cat backups, Presets, Previews and Lightroom Settings folder.

Just the other day, I thought that three external hard drives failed. It turns out that the drive cases all failed. When I put the raw drives into a "drive dock," and tested for bad sectors with Windows chkdsk, they were all 100% error-free.

Name and shame time: That vendor is Orico. All four of their toolless 2.5" USB drive cases have now failed on me.

 

[Califdan]

Always good to have a Cloud Based back up as well as however many local backups you also have. Cloud based backups many times will take several days to upload RAW images from a 2 or 3 week photo trip so such services don't negate the need for a local backup, but they sure are a great safety net of last resort and many offer protection from Ransomware by allowing you to recover back to a specified day and time.