Switching from Windows to Mac - Questions

[Unbroken Chain]

Hi Folks,

I haven't posted to this forum in a while because I have been happy with LR 4 and have had few questions. It meets all my needs as a serious photography hobbyist.

My Windows machine just crashed and I am seriously considering switching to an Apple iMac, maybe the 27" version. I also think I should take the opportunity to upgrade to LR 5. So, here are my questions and I appreciate any/all input.

1. Is the switch from Windows to Mac really worth the extra $1,000 I will have to spend? I know there is no right answer but I just want your thoughts. The main use of my computer is photo editing and organization, with some light office work and internet usage. Some say Apple is the gold standard for photo and video editing, but I don't understand why. Is it safe to say my 5-year-old Canon slide scanner will work with an iMac?
2. I assume I would be buying a Yosemite OS machine. I have read a number of complaints on this forum about LR 5 and its compatibility with Yosemite. Are these problems pervasive or limited to just a few people? Have some of you used the LR 5 / Yosemite combo without difficulty?
3. As I mentioned above, I also want to upgrade to LR 5. If I buy an iMac, will I be able to purchase the $79 upgrade or will I have to start over and purchase a brand-new LR 5? I guess I am not clear if the version of LR 4 I own is specific to Windows or can it be loaded onto an iMac and then I upgrade?
4. My photos are backed up on an external hard drive, so I did not lose them when the computer crashed. I have also been backing up the LR catalog on the same external. Whew. However, I just read Victoria Bampton's page on the many files you have to back up -- http://www.lightroomqueen.com/backup-lightroom-files/ -- and I am kind of freaked out. Nowhere have I ever read previously that any files other than the photos and the catalog have to be backed up. I am particularly concerned about my presets...are they gone forever? I am also concerend about the LR serial number. Why do I need this and how do I get it given my computer has crashed?
5. Most of my photos were imported to LR from the aforementioned external drive. Some of my photos, however, were imported directly from the crashed computer's hard drive and these same photos were backed up on another external. WillI be able to point a future version of LR at these backed up photos or will I have to import them all over again?
6. Victoria's page on moving Lightroom to a new computer looks helpful, but I don't understand it all. Am I stupid to think I can move my LR catalog from Windows to Mac? Have any of you done this successfully and are you satisfied with the result?

Kind Regards,
UC
www.chrisstubbsphoto.com

 

[clee01l]

I made the switch about 2 years ago.

1. It was worth the extra cost. No virus scanner necessary. That alone speeds up the computer. I no longer needed to run Windows only Apps. i no longer need you own an office license. All of the office equivalent apps are included free in OS X and are the same as those found in iOS. So, having an OS that needs careful attention was no longer important. I had an iPhone & and iPad. while these integrate with Windows it is not seamless. There is a good chance that you can attach your Canon Slide Scanner and the Preview app will scan natively using that device. It would not hurt to check Canon for drivers for OS X that will work with OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) There may even be special OS X canon Scanning software available for download. I have an ancient Lexmark AIO. It might be 10 years old and Lexmark does not support this printer any more. The Preview App sees is and I scan from it just fine.
2. New Machines will come with Yosemite (OS X 10.10) I've been running it since the day it was released. LR works just fine with it. I see no difference in LR performance after upgrading to Yosemite for Mavericks. I think people who are having problems are few and lets face it some people will find a problem because that is their nature. Version 10.10.0 is a little rougher around the edges but this I expect will clear up with 10.10.1.
3. You can upgrade any license for $79. You can run that license on any two machines one can be Windows and one can be a Mac.
4. The biggest issue with moving LR from a Windows machine to a Mac is that Windows uses drive letters in the Absolute Path stored in the catalog and there is no such thing as a drive letter in OS X . You will need to correct this after you move or create a package that contains in one folder, your catalog, your previews, folders for your master images and a Lightroom settings folder. If you create the package, the transfer from Windows to OS X is painless. OS X uses a different filesystem (HFS+) from Windows. If your External Drives are formatted NTFS, then OS X will be able to read them but not write to them with out third party software running interference. Both OS X and Windows can read and write to volumes formatted as exFAT.
5. Your LR catalog should not be point to any image file backups If it is, then the image files are no longer backups. LR catalogs master originals. they can be on a local drive or that can be on an external drive or that can be on a network drive. They are still the master image files and these master image file should be being backed up using your system backup software. If you create the package that I described in Step 4, then all of you master image files will be inside one folder structure located under the folder that contains the master LR catalog. This package is what gets created when you use the Export as Catalog function and also export the negative files. You need enough disk space to hold all of your images in one place along with the previews and catalog file. If you plan to use a portable drive to get data between Windows and OS X that drive needs to be formatted as exFAT.
6. OS X comes with a tool called Migration Assistant. It will transfer one user settings and all from one Mac to another, There is also a Windows component of Migration Assistant that you can download that will help you migrate all of your critical user files (including LR and image files) You can use that and the process is transparent. OS X was designed for simple people with a minimal knowledge of how computers work.

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Okay. One problem is I never backed up the previews or presets. Had no idea this was necessary. Is this a disaster?

 

[tspear]

I am planning to go the other direction. From Mac to Windows on my next machine, but the issues I have with Yosemite likely would not apply to the kind of use you describe. (I run many applications on multiple monitors, many applications with multiple tabs/panels components as part of my day job; with Yosemite I can no longer out of the corner of my eye determine the active window, tab or screen. Instead you are forced to look closely for some very subtle changes in the color grey on some small dots or tab lines).

So with that stated, I have switched most of my family (including brother's families) to Mac over the past ten years. Now a good portion of us are switching back. The biggest difference was with Mac, stuff just worked where with Windows you needed to make it work. With Windows 7 and 8.1 Microsoft finally seems to be getting close to where stuff just works, and the annoying things I dislike with the Windows interface, I can buy $5 apps to solve/change.

Last point, with Apple, you have to work the way Apple wants you to work, if not you have lots of issues/problems headaches. Apple does not like you to go outside their playground. The flip side, if you buy into the Apple fanboy world you will be very happy; and the premium you pay comes with incredible customer service.

Tim

 

[chris02]

I use a windows machine and I always back up my presets on a regular basis, just in case disaster strikes, realise this does not help you now.

Best of luck with the move to apple.

 

[clee01l]

Okay. One problem is I never backed up the previews or presets. Had no idea this was necessary. Is this a disaster?

No this is not a disaster. LR will always build new previews from the original image file if the image that it needs in not in the Preview Cache. Presets on the other hand are more problematical All of the adjustments that these develop presets have made are still stored in the catalog. A Develop Preset is a set of develop adjustment that have been assigned a name. If you had third party Develop adjustments, then you just need to download and install these from the source again. User defined presets you will need to reconstruct. In addition to Develop presets, there are (to name a few) export presets, import presets, file naming templates, Smart collection templates etc. that were maintained in the Lightroom Settings folder. If these were not being backed up, then you will need to re acquire or recreate them. Additionally Publish Service plugins will need to be reinstalled from the source where they were obtained.

More importantly perhaps, if you are recovering from backups. Not only to you need the backup catalog, you also need the original image file in the same folders that they were in when LR recorded the path to them in the LR catalog.

You did not answer the earlier question about file system used to format the surviving external HDDs. OS X will be able to read the NTFS disk format, but you will not be able to use this filesystem in LR unless you use a third party app to do the read and write for you.

When you open your Windows generated LR catalog in OS X, the location to the image files will not be defined, You will need to "re-educate" LR to the new OS X location of each top level folder.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

User defined presets you will need to reconstruct.

One tip if you do have to recreate your own user presets - look through your catalog and find photos that you remember applying them to - that'll help you recreate them without having to remember everything.

 

[Unbroken Chain]

"More importantly perhaps, if you are recovering from backups. Not only to you need the backup catalog, you also need the original image file in the same folders that they were in when LR recorded the path to them in the LR catalog."

I definitely have all the original image files -- the masters as you call them -- in the same folders. Most of these -- I'm not even sure how to articulate this -- are the masters that were imported to lightroom from the external hard drive. A smaller subset of photos, however, were imported to LR from the now defunct computer. I no longer have these masters as the computer is dead, but I do have mirror-version folders and image files backed up on the external. Will I be able to point my new version of LR at these?

"You did not answer the earlier question about file system used to format the surviving external HDDs. OS X will be able to read the NTFS disk format, but you will not be able to use this filesystem in LR unless you use a third party app to do the read and write for you."

I didn't answer the earlier question because I have no idea the answer. My external hard drive is a Seagate 1 TB "Backup Plus." I bought it at Best Buy about a year ago. I don't know how this is formatted and there doesn't seem to be a ready answer when I do a Google search. If I plug it into an alternative computer, how do I find out how it is formatted?

"When you open your Windows generated LR catalog in OS X, the location to the image files will not be defined, You will need to "re-educate" LR to the new OS X location of each top level folder."

Understood...mostly. Back to my first answer in this post, I think the question is will I be able to "educate" LR to the top level folder of image files that were never actually imported to LR (but the file names and directory structure mimics those that were imported)?

Some of this is beginning to sound complicated. I enjoy post camera processing and working with photos, but I don't frankly enjoy higher-level computer problems. Is any of this an argument for just sticking with the Windows OS?

UC

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Okay so I just plugged my external into my work computer and I see it is an NTFS file system. So what does this mean in terms of compatibility with Mac OS or lack thereof? Cletus says above that "OS X will be able to read the NTFS disk format, but you will not be able to use this filesystem in LR unless you use a third party app to do the read and write for you", but I don't really know what are the ramifications of this? Is this as simple as just buying a new external that is formatted for Mac OS and transferring the data? Or is this a bigger issue and I should just stick with Windows?

UC

 

[clee01l]

Your old catalog pointed to locations for each image file. Consider the following file paths on your old computer: (your folder names and drive letters will probably be different)

Primary HD (C:\)
\Pictures
.....\Lightroom Images
..........2014

Photo EHD (P:\)
\Photos
.....\Lightroom Photos
..........2012
..........2013

Backup EHD (G:\)
\Pictures
.....\Lightroom Images
..........2014

The LR catalog recorded paths that included the drive letters C:\ and P:\.
Drive G:\ was not in the catalog but mirrored C:\.
C:\ is corrupt and not available - gone forever.

Now you have OS X and LR installed. You copy this catalog to the Primary drive and into this folder:
Macintosh HD /Users/[YourUserName]/Pictures/Lightroom

Now you need to copy the image files. OS X can read the EHDs but does not have the ability to write to them. From the Backup drive, copy the folder labeled "Lightroom Photos" and all of its subfolders and images to /Users/[YourUserName]/Pictures/ On OS X that path will look like this:

/Users
...../[YourUserName]
........../Pictures
.............../Lightroom Images
..................../2014

From the Photo EHD drive, copy the folder labeled "Lightroom Images" and all of its subfolders and images to /Users/[YourUserName]/Pictures/ On OS X that path will look like this:

/Users
...../[YourUserName]
........../Pictures
.............../Lightroom Images
..................../2014
.............../Lightroom Photos
..................../2012
..................../2013

Once you have removed any other critical files off of those two EHDs they are free to be reformatted so that OS X can read and write to them. If large enough you can use one of them for your OS X TimeMachine backups. If you bought a smallish MBP with a small capacity SSD, you might not have enough room for all of your image folders. If that should be the case, you will need to free up one of the EHDs so that it can be formatted as HFS+

When you open your copy of the LR catalog on OS X, it won't be able to find your top-level folders because the path in the catalog still has drive letters. In the Folder panel just right click on the top-level folder (which has (?)s) and choose {Find Missing Folder...} from the context menu. Repeat until all of your missing folders have been reconnected on OS X LR.

 

[clee01l]

You won't need to buy new HDDs you just need to park the data that is on them on another drive and reformat using the DiskUtility app.

but I don't frankly enjoy higher-level computer problems. Is any of this an argument for just sticking with the Windows OS?

Actually, this is the best argument for leaving the Windows OS. Windows is the only OS that uses Drive Letters. OS X does not and neither do any of the flavors of UNIX. Once you transition your data to a Mac environment you won't need to dive this deep into filesystem stuff again. Your LR catalog has to accommodate the OS with respect to file path. It is the Windows idiosyncrasies that we are having to deal with at this point.

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Cletus et al.,

I really appreciate the help and advice. I am pretty sure I am going to purchase an iMac (but haven't made the final decision yet). When I do, I am sure I will be back here with more questions. Quick question: is 8gb RAM sufficient?

In other news, I am attempting to retrieve the preset and preview files from the crashed computer. Since the motherboard died -- and not the hard drive -- I am told by a friend that file retrieval should not be difficult.

UC

 

[Victoria Bampton]

It depends how many programs you like to have open at one time. If you like to have music playing, email open, multiple browser windows, plus ram hungry stuff like LR and PS all running at the same time, you might be happier with 16. 8's certainly usable - one of my machines has 8 - but since it's not user upgradable, I'd check the prices for 16.

And that's great news about your missing files!

 

[clee01l]

My iMac is quad core and 16 GB My rMBP is only 8GGB. and dual core. (It was the max that Apple would put in them at the time). 16 will be fine, 32GB would be better. But 8 is OK.

When you get your new machine, Come on back here and we'll walk you through getting LR up and running. Especially the part about helping LR catalog know where you master images are on the new OS.

If you have a good C: drive, this is great news! Just pick up a USB Drive enclosure (~$30USD) and put that drive in the enclosure. You will be able to read the contents just like you do with your other EHDs. You' will be able to get all of your presets and plugins and should not lose anything.

With three EHDs, you should be in good shape for making up your Primary HDD and all of your critical user data.

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Cletus et al.,

I have decided on the iMac 27" and am picking up my new computer tomorrow. I will likely be setting it up this weekend or early next. My first question: should I install Lightroom first or transfer my photos, catalog files etc. first, or does it not matter? Second question: you may recall from another post that I am also upgrading from LR 4 to 5. Should I go ahead and install LR 5 before I do anything else, or is there a reason to first open my catalog in LR 4 and then upgrade?

UC

 

[clee01l]

LR5 will read and convert the LR4 catalog. I would get the iMac, purchase and install the LR5.7 upgrade. Since your have not had LR4 on the new iMac, LR will want you to supply your qualifying LR4 license S/N as well as the LR5 upgrade license S/N. Installing will offer to create an empty new catalog. You can ignore this catalog. Open the LR4 catalog and let LR convert it to the LR5 structure. Once that is done you will nee to tell LR where the top level folders are that show up as 'missing' in the folder panel. These folders and the complete image folder structure will need to be copied to a location where LR has both read and write access. (i.e. your primary HDD until you can free up one of the NTFS drives for reformatting.)

 

[Unbroken Chain]

OK I just set up the new iMac. Here are a few questions:
1. Where should I purchase LR 5? I was thinking of B&H photo...does it matter? I assume I download it rather than purchase a disc, correct?
2. I have four external hard drives that have to be reformatted. Based on the previous conversation, I understand that I have to dump the data to the new computer's hard drive, then reformat the externals, then dump the data back, then remove from the computer's hard drive. That's a lot of data to dump back and forth...will it cause some kind of disc fragmentation on my iMac hard drive? Will I need to run a defrag routine?
3. How do I reformat the external hard drives? There must be some kind of command in the Mac OS, correct? Will it automatically format properly or do I need to choose a particular type of format?

UC

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Yeah, B&H, Amazon, direct from Adobe. If you're not in a mad rush, it might be worth waiting for Black Friday this week, just in case it's discounted somewhere.

I'll leave Clee with your other questions, as you've been chatting.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Well, I'm going to chip in on the other questions and suggest having a look at the apps that allow NTFS file-formats to be read and written on a Mac. That's what I did, I installed Tuxera NTFS and it works fine. All my old PC portable backup drives are now able to be used on both platforms, with no messing about.

 

[clee01l]

I like Victoria's idea of waiting for some "Black Friday" discounts. While Jim's solution is OK if you will be sharing these EHDs with a Windows device. If I understand correctly this is not an option for you any more. The software is not necessary and introduces a middle layer of processing between the OS and the filesystem. For this reason, I recommend clearing the EHD and reformatting.

Disk fragmentation is not the problem that it once was. Windows since Vista have been doing this automatically in the background and OS X has this feature to although I'm not sure in which version it was introduced. So, don't worry about fragmentation. Also you may consider whether you need to store data on EHDs at all If you have enough rome on the primary HDD and enough free space left over too, you could just leave it on the Primary HDD only moving it once.

In your Applications Utility folder there is an all called "Disk Utility" Select the disk partition and choose "Erase" from the tabbed sections. There you can choose a Filesystem Format - HFS+ (Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled)) and a new volume name. The Volume name is of some importance as the volumes are mounter using the volume name since there are no drive letters in the OS. It is also possible to create a RAID set out od several volumes if you desire that kine of redundancy. You can also choose to format the volume as exFAT instead of HFS+. Drive using the exFAT filesystem can be used OS X, Windows and LINUX OSes without the need for any intermediate software

One of the newly free EHDs could dedicated for your TimeMachine backup disk, This of course will need to be formatted HFS+.

I'll also refer you back to the previous reply: #10 for some suggestions on how to move data to your primary HDD.

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Progress! I've set up the new iMac and successfully downloaded LR 5.7. All well so far. I note that Adobe seems to point people at the creative cloud and they make it somewhat difficult to find the regular, non-cloud download.

Tomorrow I migrate the photo files and the old LR 4 catalog. One question: I don't have access yet to the preview files or the file that contains my presets (I don't have the housing for the old hard drive yet). Can I go ahead and open the old catalog in LR 5.7 and begin working with my photos again, or do I need to wait until I migrate over the presets and the previews and do it all at the same time?

UC

 

[clee01l]

The previews files will regenerate as needed as long as LR has access to the original. The presets folders not present in the install will be missing. This is not a big deal. the presets can be copied over into the appropriate folders at any time. They will appear the next time LR is started.

Sounds like you are doing fine.

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Sounds like you are doing fine.

I am doing fine, Cletus, because you and others on this forum have been so forthcoming with helpful information. Thank you.

UC

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Well things are going along swimmingly. I have transferred the files to my new computer, opened my new version of LR (5.7), and reconnected to the old catalog. It automatically created an LR 5 catalog from the old LR 4 catalog, so no problems there. I was also able to point the catalog to my old files, so everything seems to be working...yay! The only thing I haven't done yet is install the old hard drive into the housing I purchased, so I still don't have my presets. When I get to that point, I may have some questions about where to find the old preset files and where to put them on the new computer.

A couple random questions:
1. My new computer's hard drive is 1 TB. Right now I have all my RAW files and my LR catalog on this hard drive. It's a total of about 250 GB or about 25% of the available space on the new computer. Do you recommend that I continue to work off the hard drive, or should I migrate these files back to the external drive once I reformat?
2. I notice some of my settings/preferences didn't come over with my catalog. Specifically, what information is shown about each photo (file name and size etc.) and my custom watermarks. Where do I find these files and how do I point my new Lightroom at them?

UC

 

[Unbroken Chain]

Guys, I can't find my presets on my old hard drive. Can anyone help? I tried searching where it says on Victoria's blog but no luck...that path isn't there. Perhaps if you tell me the actual file name I can just search for it....

UC