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Moved to MacBook Pro; Lightroom Classic Setup Tips Needed

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OzzieMike

New Member
Joined
Aug 23, 2018
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1
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic 9.2.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
OK...so it's not me who has moved to a Mac....it's my brother, who I told I'd see what the folks here have to say....

He's using Lightroom Classic and has about 1.5 TB in his Lightroom library on his PC, and has purchased a (used) 13" MacBook Pro (early 2016) with a 1TB internal hard drive. He's asking me some questions I don't have answers to, as my library is much smaller than his, and everything fits fine on the internal drive on my MacBook Pro.

In his situation, though, he has some questions:

  1. Should he try to keep all his photos together on an external hard drive?
  2. Should he cull his photos and archive those he no longer accesses to an external drive, and keep the balance on his MacBook Pro's internal drive?
  3. If he puts all his photos onto an external drive, will he have to deal with a lot of spinning beachballs waiting for photos to load?
  4. If option (2) above is the best way to go, how would he configure Lightroom to deal with it?
Any assistance from experienced users here would be greatly appreciated.
 
My main computer is also a laptop, though it is hooked up to a monitor. I keep all my images on an external hard drive. My workflow is this: when I import off a card, one copy goes to the hard drive, linked to my catalog. The other copy is on my computer's hard drive. It is critical to always have at least two copies of each image. I back up everything, including the image hard drive, so once I've backed that one up, I then delete the images on my computer (which have served as a backup). So I have then preserved having (at least) two copies of each image.

He should have no problems with the spinning beachball if he uses a good external hard drive hooked up to the computer on its fastest connection, which should be at least USB C or Thunderbolt (can't remember which that laptop has). Important to use a high-quality cable for the connection, since that will make a difference in speed and reliability.

My main catalog is on my computer's hard dive, and the backup catalog is on the same external hard drive where my images live. This way, when I back up that hard drive, not only are my images backed up, so is my backup catalog. In my case, I actually have two backups of my images. Hard drives are cheap! A person smarter than me once wrote that "Hard drives are cheap, regret is expensive."

The backup software I use for my computer is SuperDuper, which makes a bootable backup. The software I use to backup my data is ChronoSync, both for Mac.
 
He might also be interesting to keep the most recent (last year, last 2 years, it depends of him) internally and have all the other photos on the external drive. That way, if he doesn't need to modify or print older photos, he doesn't need to have the EHD conected. These older photos will however always be visible and searcheable.
 
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