On Apr 2, 2009, at 2:49 PM, Larry Colen wrote:
Perhaps you can tell me how to handle an issue. My iMac doesn't have
huge amounts of disk space, and it's not trivial to add a bigger
drive.
- The solution is to buy an external hard drive with lots of space,
Larry, if you don't want to install a larger hard drive. You can get a
1T standalone drive and plug it into the iMac for about $100 or so
these days. Put the LR catalog and your image files onto it. If your
iMac supports a FW800 interface, be sure to buy one with a FW800
interface as that will net the fastest disk transfer rate.
I don't know which iMac you have, but while I wouldn't recommend
changing drives in an iMac to a computer novice it should be a piece
of cake for anyone who knows about hardware. I have opened and swapped
drives on all of the iMacs prior to the very latest ones, just put a
1T into an iMac G5 for a friend the other day. It took me 10 minutes:
a standard SATA 3.5 inch drive.
I have several external drives with a repository of the image files I
don't access so frequently on them. Saves space on the startup drive,
keeps lots of disk space free for best performance.
- When you import into LR and want to reorganize files into
subdirectories and such, you can either just move them around from
within LR in the Folder panel or you can move them around using the
Finder. When you re-start LR after doing the latter, files it can't
find will be highlighted with a question mark. Pick one, click on the
question mark, and locate the new them for LR. It will reset the file
paths for all files in that folder.
I import into a folder hierarchy that is named as follows
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/YYYYMMDD[-tag] where -tag is an optional
mnemonic naming the group of files.
If there are several sessions in a day, I can do one of two things:
- import each session into its own YYYYMMDD-tag directory under
in_progress
- import the whole batch into a single YYYYMMDD-tag directory under
in_progress and then sort them in LR. In the Grid mode, select each
session's images then use the "Library->New Folder..." command to
create a new subdirectory containing those files under YYYYMMDD-tag
with a descriptive name. The end result of doing this is that clicking
on the YYYYMMDD-tag directory will show all the files in all the
sessions, but opening the disclosure triangle and clicking on each one
of the subdirectories shows the files that are in each individually. EG:
imported into '20090401-mixed' ... 20 files
selected seven and created subdir 'morning_walk'
selected three and created subdir 'jeannine_portrait'
selected ten and created subdir 'sunset_walk'
You could also create the subdirs with the same naming pattern
(YYYYMMDD-tag1, ..tag2, ..tag3) and afterwards move them to be peers
of the original YYYYMMDD-tag parent directory, and delete the parent
when it no longer contains anything.
I also rename all files on import using the naming pattern YYMMDD-tag-
fnum where
YYMMDD -- capture date
tag -- mnemonic custom text I assign at import time
fnum -- is the numeric portion of the original, camera generated
filename.
This means that if I import several days' worth of shooting at once,
they'll all sort easily in the Finder by name in date order. EG:
Importing four days shooting at one time today, I get
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090330-
mixed-1010223.dng
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090331-
mixed-1010224.dng
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090401-
mixed-1010225.dng
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090402-mixed-2458.dng
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090402-mixed-2459.dng
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090402-mixed-2460.dng
~photo-files/YYYY/in_progress/20090402-mixed_work/090402-
mixed-1010226.dng
etc
which shows I used two different cameras/cards (different fnum
numbering schemas) when I look at the contents of the folder after
import.
Basically, I find LR does the job very efficiently and with very few
issues. It keeps me working on the photos, not the file system.
Godfrey
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