Moving Defined Publish Services

[SteveFuller]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic 9.1

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

I had such good luck last week, I'm going to ask another couple of questions.

I shoot a lot of athletic events/race. I'll work off my laptop and an external drive and -- eventually -- move those images onto my "master system" at home. In order to get all the teams their images, I create publishing services that use keywords to put photos into smart folders where they get pushed up to dropbox for retrieval by the teams/schools.

Q1 - Once I get home, I "import from catalog" to get the images moved over to my master system. Is there any way to move/export the publishing services? In this case, I've got an EISA 2020 Alpine and EISA 2020 Nordic. I've typically recreated them on the master system, but there's got to be a better way.

Q2 - Is there a way to nest sub-folders based on keyword logic? In the example below, all of Bates Alpine shots go into one folder. I'd love to be able to nest specific races (e.g. UVM Carnival, UNH Carnival, etc.) underneath and have the photos from those events go into their appropriate folders. I use Photo Mechanic extensively, so the event information is definitely in the EXIF.

Thanks again.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

Q2: How about create a group folder "Bates Alpine" and create inside this group smart folders based on the event keyword ?

 

[johnrellis]

"I'll work off my laptop and an external drive and -- eventually -- move those images onto my "master system" at home."

You might consider putting your main catalog folder on the external drive, taking it with your laptop and then plugging it into your "master system" at home. That way, you have one catalog you use everywhere. (And of course, make sure you have tested backups at home.)

 

[SteveFuller]

Philippe - Thanks for the suggestion. I think that implies creating group folders for all the teams, right?

And John -- I've considered this approach. My biggest hesitation is that I've got 125k(ish) of images in my LR catalog. It definitely slows things down a bit. But this still might be the way forward.

 

[johnrellis]

"My biggest hesitation is that I've got 125k(ish) of images in my LR catalog. It definitely slows things down a bit. But this still might be the way forward."

You can leave the 125K images on the master system and just put the catalog folder proper on the external drive. When you get home, within LR, drag the newly imported photos to the proper folder on the master system.

As long as the portable external drive is newer and can read and write at least, say, 80 MB/sec, you shouldn't notice any significant performance degradation for interactive use. LR ends up caching the entire catalog database file in memory, so catalog reads are very fast. And such a drive is more than fast enough for the small number of catalog writes and photo preview updates that occur during interactive use. Only during a batch import (which generates a large number of previews all at once) or a batch export to the external drive might you notice a speed difference.

 

[SteveFuller]

"My biggest hesitation is that I've got 125k(ish) of images in my LR catalog. It definitely slows things down a bit. But this still might be the way forward."

You can leave the 125K images on the master system and just put the catalog folder proper on the external drive. When you get home, within LR, drag the newly imported photos to the proper folder on the master system.

As long as the portable external drive is newer and can read and write at least, say, 80 MB/sec, you shouldn't notice any significant performance degradation for interactive use. LR ends up caching the entire catalog database file in memory, so catalog reads are very fast. And such a drive is more than fast enough for the small number of catalog writes and photo preview updates that occur during interactive use. Only during a batch import (which generates a large number of previews all at once) or a batch export to the external drive might you notice a speed difference.

This is very helpful -- thank you.

 

[clee01l]

The only way to copy publish services from one catalog to another is to Simple make a copy of the master catalog. If the master catalog when copied refers to images that are not present, then remove these from that catalog. Later when you have new images in the copied catalog and have them in the desired Publish Services, you can merge the copies catalog back into the master catalog and the Publish Services in the master will be populated with the image that were in the identical Publish Service on the copied catalog.

You also might want to investigate Smart Collections and Smart Publish Collections. Using keywords and smart Collections/Publish Collections the Collections will automatically populate when the right keyword is assigned to the image.

 

[SteveFuller]

The only way to copy publish services from one catalog to another is to Simple make a copy of the master catalog. If the master catalog when copied refers to images that are not present, then remove these from that catalog. Later when you have new images in the copied catalog and have them in the desired Publish Services, you can merge the copies catalog back into the master catalog and the Publish Services in the master will be populated with the image that were in the identical Publish Service on the copied catalog.

You also might want to investigate Smart Collections and Smart Publish Collections. Using keywords and smart Collections/Publish Collections the Collections will automatically populate when the right keyword is assigned to the image.

Thanks Cletus. These are all smart publish collections.

 

[LouieSherwin]

There is a plugin Lightroom Voyager that does move Publish Services between catalogs.

-louie

 

[SteveFuller]

WHOA! Hadn't seen that one. Thank you Louie. Truly appreciated.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

Philippe - Thanks for the suggestion. I think that implies creating group folders for all the teams, right?

Yes, that's what I mean.