I thought that Lightroom would be a safe way to manage almost 20,000 photos with big increases in the numbers as I scan old analog slides. Now, I have suddenly been obstructed by a near catastrophic problem with my photo library that has kept me from posting for over a week.
The advertised "non-destructive editing" of Adobe Photoshop LIghtroom 3 became like a Balrog was to Gandolf in the Ring Trilogy, when I found that although it cannot cause irreversible destruction of an original photo, it CAN alter your file structure of your library in a DESTRUCTIVE and extremely bad way.
I have just spent over a week trying to recover my library of photos because of something I did when importing photos directly into Lightroom.
When I systematically went through my collection of photos and scanned slides, filed chronologically, I found that Lightroom had been renaming photos, refiled them into different folders, and creating duplicates of many photos in an apparently random fashion. My workflow had involved directly importing into LIghtroom from my Canon 5D M2.
After spending over a week reconstructing my library from multiple copies on multiple computer hard drives, I am almost afraid to begin using Lightroom again. It is a seamless connection with Photomatix Pro and Photoshop, but after this disaster, I can only be thankful that I had multiple backup copies of my photos. The "not destructive" Lightroom had become a BAD DOG of the worst proportions and I am still unsure how I caused this to happen.
Being still reticent to restart Lightroom, but have developed a plan for a new workflow. I am now downloading from my camera directly to my laptop with its 1 TB of "solid state" memory using the Windows 7 hierarchy to click and drag the photos from the camera to a new folder on the Dell Alienware m17x laptop. I then immediately copy the photos to two external hard drives for a triple redundancy.
My next step will be to import into Lightroom only the copies of the photos on one of the external hard drives, a Seagate FreeAgent Ultra, 1.5 TB hard drive [ http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/external-hard-drive/portable-hard-drive ]. That will be the only drive photos which will be imported to Lightroom, and will be my working copies of the photos on the external HD.
Any suggestions as to workflow and any experience with this type of problem are welcome.
Sounds sensible. If your photos are critically important, it makes sense to be backing them up before doing anything else, and having redundant copies of the images that don't go anywhere near any post processing tools.
Yeah, Lightroom has never failed me, and has always served me really well, that being said I always backup not only lightroom but I back up all my photos on a external hard drive just to be safe haha
You just need to check all the right boxes (dropdowns) when you import. It's easy, when you're used to it.
With existing images (on your HDD) - simply choose to import them without moving/renaming.
With files on your camera card - work out a system, and stick to it. Use dates if you must, but better to use keywords. You can sort by date regardless of how you create your folders, so you really can just import everything into one folder. Once you get the hang of using filters, you'll feel safer about dropping the "old school" habit of creating folders by date for everything.
Also, apply keywords on import. So, if you've shot a wedding (for example), use keywords "wedding" and the bride's and groom's names so you can find them later without having to remember the date (knowing, of course, that you can filter by date anyway if that's how you happen to remember it). When you have over 300000 images in your lightroom library, and you want to find "that one image I took that day last year" it pays to have keywords. You can also sort by camera (serial number), lens used, and any other metadata, which is also great. And you can add photo-specific keywords later, so when you want to find that photo of "Amy" the "bride", with her really amazing "eyes" that you shot with your "EF 85mm f/1.2 L II USM" lens, it's really easy to sort it out.
As my main upside-down man @jinximages says, the error here lies in the chair-keyboard interface, not Lightroom. It's perfectly safe and will only rename/move things if you tell it to.
Always pay attention to all the options in any dialog box in any software, never just click Next-Next-Next-OK blindly!
@jinximages I appreciate your taking the time to comment. Your reply to an amatuer, from a pro taking 100k pictures a year is commendable. Thank you very much and I wll check out your tutorials on Photoshop listed in your profile. I will try to remember whodat, Dr. whatdat said about the chair-keyboard interface.
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With existing images (on your HDD) - simply choose to import them without moving/renaming.
With files on your camera card - work out a system, and stick to it. Use dates if you must, but better to use keywords. You can sort by date regardless of how you create your folders, so you really can just import everything into one folder. Once you get the hang of using filters, you'll feel safer about dropping the "old school" habit of creating folders by date for everything.
Also, apply keywords on import. So, if you've shot a wedding (for example), use keywords "wedding" and the bride's and groom's names so you can find them later without having to remember the date (knowing, of course, that you can filter by date anyway if that's how you happen to remember it). When you have over 300000 images in your lightroom library, and you want to find "that one image I took that day last year" it pays to have keywords. You can also sort by camera (serial number), lens used, and any other metadata, which is also great. And you can add photo-specific keywords later, so when you want to find that photo of "Amy" the "bride", with her really amazing "eyes" that you shot with your "EF 85mm f/1.2 L II USM" lens, it's really easy to sort it out.
Always pay attention to all the options in any dialog box in any software, never just click Next-Next-Next-OK blindly!