jarhtmd
Member
I'm an amateur & shoot for fun, but I have about 100K image files. I just got LR & want to think thru my plan, before rushing into something only to discover after a lot of work that my approach won't work. Currently, my images are stored by year. Years 2013 thru 2010 are on internal drive. Years 2009 thru 2003 are on external drives. I don't really have a filing system now, but they are stored by year. Finding images is largely by memory. I've always assigned my own unique #/names, altho' there are many duplicate copies scatter around my computer. I'm working my way back thru the years to clean up those duplicates. That's quite a task (that must be done outside of LR), but an absolutely necessary 1st step. Even w/o LR it would free up disk space. My plan is to do that year by year (working backward from 2013) before importing into LR a year at a time. My plan is to store/catalog each year as a subfolder in my main catalog.
Roughly, my plan is to import by year (not necessarily a whole year at once), assign keywords, stars, etc. I really don't yet know what I can/should do when importing & adding to the catalog.
Roughly, my plan is to import by year (not necessarily a whole year at once), assign keywords, stars, etc. I really don't yet know what I can/should do when importing & adding to the catalog.
- My LightRoom Catalog (folder)
- 2012 Photos (subfolder)
- Keepers (subfolder) 0 stars
- Good (subfolder) 1 star
- Better (subfolder) 2 stars
- Best (subfolder) 3 stars
- 2013 Photos (subfolder)
- etc
- 2012 Photos (subfolder)
- 99% of my images are JPGs. Are sidecar files written for JPGs?
- When is metadata actually written to the files?
- When Exported from LR?
- Is metadata from LR appended or does it overwrite? Some (small %) of my files already have some added metadata . . . keywords, geotags, copywrite, description. I don't want to lose that.
- I read references to hierarchical keywords, which seem like a logical approach, but haven't found examples &/or how to use.
- When is metadata actually written to the files?
- Many of my files have info within their filenames ("HDR" for instance) that I would like to extract & use a keyword instead. ("2012-1234-NY-0 Statue of Liberty HDR")
- Can LR search by literals within filenames? If not, any suggestions?
- I know (at least, think) LR can rename files during Import. How about during Export? Or w/o Exporting?
- Can LR data be moved/copied between catalogs?
- Say file1, file2, . . . , thru file1000 are in C:\Folder1 & in catalog1. If I copy them (outside of LR) to D:\Folder2, which I also want to put into catalog2 in LR. Can I copy that part of catalog1 data (whatever, keywords, flags, . . . ) into catalog2?
- As a kind of side/parallel project, I want all bring all of my catalogs "online" for searching, collections, etc. For various reasons the externally stored images are rarely referenced. I'm thinking about making small JPG copies of all images (via Photoshop File/Script/Image Processor) after removing duplicates. They will be tiny files (<100KB each, but will display big enough to make keep/toss decisions) & can all be stored on my c-drive, allowing me to search all my images during my initial LR builds. Does that make sense? Hopefully, I will also be able copy these tiny files & their LR catalog to my laptop for spare time reviewing when I'm traveling. It will be a long time before I have all my back images cataloged.