Hi Guys,
About a month into my project I've got myself a LR3 and started shooting RAW.
That brings out the question for those of you who work with LR3...
I'd like to know, what do you do with your shots after you download them to your PC ?
Do you keep them in RAW in PC, or export them as JEPG's and get rid of huge RAW files ?
Do you save your RAW files on an external storage or something like that ?
I'm afraid I'll get too far behind and fill up my laptop with all those huge images.
Any advise is greatly appreciated.
buy an external drive. the 1TB size are pretty cheap and a lot of memory. Keep the RAW files for the images you think you may do something with or really like. Don't keep every shot you take.
If I shot a wedding / model / special occasion I'll keep raw. If not scrap edits after exporting to jpg even, the likelihood of you ever getting back to them is prob quite rare if you're constantly out increasing your collection
I keep everything on two separate external drives. One serves as a backup to the other. External drives have a very high failure rate, so you definitely need a backup. In addition to that, I use Livedrive to backup everything online. This protects from loss of physical data locally. As a systems programmer, I'll state from experience that you always want to have both an onsite and an offsite backup of anything important. Livedrive is very inexperience and has unlimited storage, and it backs up external drives.
I always keep the original raw files. I'm no pro, just an amateur. But you never know when you might be asked for some of your older shots and need to reprocess them because the person asking for them needs them in a different size, resolution or just because you think that it would be a good idea to re-process the picture in a different way. It's always easier to do that from the raw file - in some cases, it's impossible to do from the jpg, especially if you've downsized it for monitor viewing/posting to the internet somewhere. I actually had that happen to me, where someone writing a book wanted to use some of my pictures after they saw the low resolution versions I have on my computer. Those were not going to be appropriate for that person's application, they needed a much higher resolution version.
I do cull out ones that are obvious failures or that I really don't like and then keep everything on a couple of external hard drives. I now have an eSATA docking station and a couple of bare hard drives to hold my photos. I use another portable exernal hard drive as my current, working drive, it goes on trips with me and will hold things until I can copy them to the bare drives. I have separate Lightroom catalogs for each of the bare drives, with all the photos keyworded to make it easier to find specific files (my files are left with the camera's original file name/number and kept chronologically. When I process and resize for computer viewing I add a word to identify what the subject is in the middle of the original file name, so that it can easily lead me back to the original file).
@mtngal OK, so if understand it right, when you import photos from your memory card, it goes straight to one of the external drives that's also your working drive ? And when you edit photos in LR or Photoshop , your PC is accesing them at that external drive ?
@bardejov Yes, I keep my pictures on external drives (use LR import and copy feature). At the moment I'm using a USB portable drive for my primary drive, because I had it before I got the eSATA card and the docking station. At the moment I use the bare drives as backup, but the dock is so much faster that I'm planning on getting another bare drive for primary use and use the portable only for traveling. I have several USB external drives, one for backup, the portable one and a third drive that I keep the files I export from LR. I have LR set to export tiff files, which really are intermediate files since they have the LR adjustments, but not anything from photoshop. I'm not very concerned about keeping these files, but I do hang onto them and occasionally back them up to DVD. Every once in a while they come in handy. I only save as jpg when I'm completely finished with the file. This works for me, but I think that some would consider it too fussy. I do keep a certain number of the completed jogs on the hard drive, but not many.
My machine has two 1tb drives. All images go to the D drive via Lr3. The whole thing is backed up to a 3tb external. I am now only shooting raw using Lr3 to organize. I have plenty of room, but with over 20+k of images I still go back and cull out oldies that will never make it!!! I never turn the machine off except to clean the filters and fans! Can't say enough about Lr3 and the difference it has made. Lr4 is coming!
@hown Thanks a lot for your reply. I'm going to get myself some external drive a start using LR features to the fullest. Or at least as fast as I can learn on a daily bases.
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With storage so cheap nowadays it's much more convenient for me to not have 234987 copys of the same file.
I do cull out ones that are obvious failures or that I really don't like and then keep everything on a couple of external hard drives. I now have an eSATA docking station and a couple of bare hard drives to hold my photos. I use another portable exernal hard drive as my current, working drive, it goes on trips with me and will hold things until I can copy them to the bare drives. I have separate Lightroom catalogs for each of the bare drives, with all the photos keyworded to make it easier to find specific files (my files are left with the camera's original file name/number and kept chronologically. When I process and resize for computer viewing I add a word to identify what the subject is in the middle of the original file name, so that it can easily lead me back to the original file).