I’m getting ready to move my Aperture photos to LR and am trying to get everything ready. I plan to store the “Photos” on an external HD just like I have been with my Aperture Library. It appears that the LR Catalogue is something different and has to be stored in a different place. Can I store this on my internal hard drive? I am using a Mac Book Pro and do not want to have 2 external hard drives connected.
Katie
I believe the catalogue is somewhat small so storing it on your laptop is fine. Some even claim they keep the catalogue in Dropbox? I use MacBook Pro and 21” iMac with Lightroom CC and Apple Photos.
Milo
www.milosmetal.com
Your LR library is actually Apple Photos? So your photos are also available via the Apple Photo App? If so that is a great idea for if Apple Photos improves as a DAM it will not be difficult to move on from LR (although I see that as a desirable but unlikely scenario)
No, the two aren’t compatible to share the same. Apple creates its own catalogue. I meant that my main software are apple photos and lightroom. I’m not using apple photos at all anymore.
Milo
www.milosmetal.com
By default it is stored in your Pictures folder. I think this is fine
Alan
I agree with Milo and Alan. I keep mine in the Pictures folder which is the default. When I exit Lr I set up through Preferences (Edit in PCs) to be reminded to back up my catalogue when closing Lr and do so in a folder set up on my externalHD where all of my photos are kept in a separate folder.
Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com
Florian, Looks like I may have found the right place to discuss this subject. Do I understand correctly that your LR catalog is in Pictures on your computer? And that you back it up to a Folder on an external HD when you exit LR? Is this the same HD where your actual images are stored? Is this external HD a RAID HD? Then do you also have a portable HD that you back up both your images and LR Catalogue and take offsite?
Susan
Susan, Yes My Lr Catalog is on my Macbook Pro’s HD in Pictures>Lightroom>Lightroom Catalog.lrcat. In the Lightroom folder are several other older catalog’s as well. Also in the Pictures Folder is my Aperture Library. When you open Lr and click on Lightroom on the top bar you will see Catalog Settings. Click on it and you will get a window and under the General tab you can see where your Lightroom catalog is located. In my case it is /Users/florian/Pictures/Lightroom. Next to it is a button “Show” which will bring you into Finder and give you the location. When I exit Lr and have it set up to optimize my catalog and to save a backup copy (a zip file) to the same external HD that houses all of my pictures. On my LaCie 2Big external HD I have folders for a copy of my Aperture Library, my Photos, and my Lightroom Backups which houses the zip file by date of backup of my Lr catalog.Hope this answers your questions and helps.
Florian
Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com
Florian, thank you so much. The possible set-ups are becoming much clearer. Now to the decision time!
Susan
Ah, decision time. Both scary & exciting at the same time!!
Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com
Do you have Thunderbolt? Not sure if I can with my computer. Do I need to worry about speed?
I’ve been watching Tim Grey and he just uses 2 external HD and software that copies for his backup from one to the other.
Speed, $$, portability
i just want to take photos! Apple grrrrrrr!
Susan
I have a thunderbolt hookup. Unless you are shooting thousands of photos at a single photo shoot (weddings and sports come to mind), I don’t think speed is as critical, that’s why I choose RAID 1. My LaCie set up has the software built in, so Tim Grey’s set up, if it’s economical for your needs, coupled with the lower price of WD’s RAID system should suffice.
Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com
I do have Thunderbolt.
Susan
Our studio has 3 workstations and we’ve had a great Aperture workflow by creating managed Aperture libraries for each client in a “Client Sessions” folder on our studio server. We can navigate to the folder from any workstation and launch the job remotely. This makes things very flexible and we can assign edits to whoever is open.
Now, with Lightroom, it seems that you can’t work from a central server across multiple workstations. The catalog for each client has to live somewhere on the system drive (Pictures by default) and it maintains hard paths to the media so you can’t access jobs easily on multiple machines. It seems absurd that a professional grade application won’t play well on a network.
Am I reading this right?
Does anyone have a successful studio Lightroom workflow?
Thanks, Paul