Lightroom alternative? ie Network friendly

[Wildwood]

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

Posted on the computer and stuff forum, thought it might be worth trying here to

[cs174]

Hi Woody,

Is it not worth getting an external hard drive and sticking with Lightroom?

You can get external hard drives quite cheap. I bought a 1TB drive for less than £100.

Colin

[miniman]

Posted this on the other thread.

miniman said:

It takes a bit of head scratching to work out what it is doing. When you "import from disk" you are not actually moving / copying physical files anywhere. So they can be on any drive you wish, and they stay exactly where they always were. The "catalog" is a database of actions that you have carried out on each image. So when you view a previously processed image in the "Develop" screen, all it does is loads up the original image and then applies the various transformations that you carried out on it (i.e. it never actually changes the original image). The only time that an actual JPG containing the processed image is created is when you export one.

So in your case, the catalog should stay on the laptop and the images can go anywhere, e.g. on a NAS or whatever.

I use SyncToy to back up my photos and the lightroom catalog file to my NAS every week or so.

[Wildwood]

cs174 said:

Hi Woody,

Is it not worth getting an external hard drive and sticking with Lightroom?

You can get external hard drives quite cheap. I bought a 1TB drive for less than £100.

Colin

HIya Colin
I'm considering that, would a wired hard drive work from some type of 3 way USB connection in conjunction with my NAS?

I'm also considering using Adobe Bridge instead, are the plusses that much using Lightroom instead?

miniman said:

Posted this on the other thread.

miniman said:

It takes a bit of head scratching to work out what it is doing. When you "import from disk" you are not actually moving / copying physical files anywhere. So they can be on any drive you wish, and they stay exactly where they always were. The "catalog" is a database of actions that you have carried out on each image. So when you view a previously processed image in the "Develop" screen, all it does is loads up the original image and then applies the various transformations that you carried out on it (i.e. it never actually changes the original image). The only time that an actual JPG containing the processed image is created is when you export one.

So in your case, the catalog should stay on the laptop and the images can go anywhere, e.g. on a NAS or whatever.

I use SyncToy to back up my photos and the lightroom catalog file to my NAS every week or so.

I'm still trying to get my head round that one!!

Edited by Wildwood on Thursday 5th March 16:53

[andy-xr]

The way I thought Lightroom worked was that it indexed everything and if you ran an operation against it, it altered the index rather than the image itself. So you could run an operation but if you went back to the image in it's stored location you'd still see the original file

[Simpo Two]

Well it's all gibberish to me. I like my RAWs in a folder called 'RAW' and the resulting JPGs in another folder called 'Processed'. Two folders for each job, done.

It's so simple I scare myself

[Bee_Jay]

Simpo Two said:

Well it's all gibberish to me. I like my RAWs in a folder called 'RAW' and the resulting JPGs in another folder called 'Processed'. Two folders for each job, done.

It's so simple I scare myself

Indeed. I have a folder of RAW and out of camera large JPEG files for each job, then a Subfolder called 'Converted' with the one's I have converted from RAW to JPEG and done work on sitting in it.

I picked this workflow up from using Rawshooter in the early days. Then hated Lightroom because you had to import the complete images into their database (like in Aperture). In Rawshooter you could just navigate the folder structure and work on them straight away where they were - fabulous. However because they stopped developing the software (bought by Adobe and incorporated in Lightroom) I had to stop using it, especially once I had the 5D2 as the RAW format was not supported.

In a recent version of Lightroom they changed it's operation, where you now point it at the RAW files, and can have it default to output them to a subfolder called 'Converted' so my workflow is back again, very similar to Rawshooter used to be - happy once again.

I have all my images on a NAS drive and connect to them from both PCs and Macs running Lightroom to work on them.

The only thing is before you work on a folder of RAW files, you have to 'import' them to that machine so that it has them in it's 'catalog'. A minor hassle, but not a big problem.

Lightroom is way too good to turn away from...

[Major Bloodnok]

I wanted to hate Lightroom after they killed off RSP (which I loved), and, at first, I found it hard to get on with. Now I can't live without it - especially after reading Martin Evening's book and discovering all the really amazing things you can do that I had no idea about...

Incidentally, for those who use Google Reader, there's a package available on there of Lightroom RSS feeds that you can subscribe to. Well worth it - lots of extra info, tips, tricks, presets and more.