Long time, first time!

[coyimages]

Hello all!
I'm extremely happy to see that this forum is actually active, and used. The site was recommended by a fellow user on FredMiranda.

I've been using LR since about 2010, however after an 8 year hiatus from major shooting, I'm getting back into the swing of things. Although I've been using LR for a number of years, I was completely blind to the amount of power and tools that it contains, and only used a fraction of whats available. I've been watching a number of youtube videos and creating my own workflow outline notes, while using the techniques I take note of to commit them to memory.

Although I'm familiar with LR, I've just downloaded the e-book, so I'm off to read it and see how much I don't know!

Thanks
Chris

 

[Paul McFarlane]

Welcome to the Forums, Chris, and to your voyage of discovery in Lightroom!!!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Welcome to the forum coyimages! You'll learn plenty here, so make yourself at home.

 

[BobMc]

In your reading of Victoria’s Quick Start eBook, pay attention to the chapter on Backup. Most people want to jump to the develop module and there are lots of resources on that, but knowing the relationship between your images and the catalog and having multiple copies on external drives and even having a copy off site is essential.

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. All hard drive WILL fail, the question is when.

 

[Paul_DS256]

pay attention to the chapter on Backup.

Yes, very important. I just had to restore after a crash.

Keep in mind that LR Backup only backs up your catalog and not your pictures. If you keep LR and LR Backups in the same directory structure as your pictures, then your backup of pictures will also backup LR and LR Backup.

Personally, I have a nightly backup to an external drive that I swap occasionally with an off-site drive.

 

[Paul_DS256]

The good thing about LR is that it is feature rich. The challenging thing about LR is that it's feature rich. In other words, don't feel you need to use everything either in Library or Develop. Start slow and build. Especially with Develop determine what you want the photo to look like then work the controls to find it. I find 'Auto' a good starting point.

My one piece of advice is to develop a discipline of assigning some sort of minimal metadata and keywording when importing your pictures. This will allow you to use the power of LR to find pictures in the future.

Have fun.