REALLY confused! Re: Lightroom, full hard drive, external drive

[Pugrpooh]

The hard drive on my big laptop is completely full! I have a 500 gb external hd and I'm trying to figure out the best way to move all my photos over to it.

I use Lightroom and I have Scott Kelby's book. He writes about syncing the catalog to another computer, for example a laptop and a desktop. I saw a tutorial online where this guy recommends having LR and all the photos on an external hd. Then you can just hook up the hd to a different computer and you're ready to go. But then, what if you lose the hd? Or it crashes?

Right now I have my photos and LR on my big laptop. I also have LR on my netbook, but there aren't many photos there. I'm torn between moving everything, including LR, to the external hd so I could work on my photos on my netbook too, or leaving LR on my laptop and just moving my photos to the external hd. If I do this option, what is the best way to move just my photos?

How does everyone here do it? Do you keep your photos and LR on the same drive or have your photos separate?

Which is the better option if I also want to edit my photos on my netbook?

I've been struggling with this question for quite a while, but now I have to do something. We were at Disneyland and San Diego last week, but I can't do anything with the pictures until I figure this out! I also have been taking a lot of pictures for the scavenger hunt which are still on my camera!

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!!

 

[Gianna'sPapa]

If I'm reading your post correctly, it looks like you are keeping only one electronic copy of your photos. If this is true, I would recommend you create a second storage area for you images. I use PSE 8, which comes with two licenses. I have one on my desktop and the other on a laptop. The desktop is where I do most of my work. I have all my images on two external hard drives that are duplicates of each other. This way if I lose a hard drive, I don't lose all my images. I also keep many images on my Flickr Pro account. I try to keep my computer hard drive as clean as possible and do not use it for image storage.

 

[Pugrpooh]

If I'm reading your post correctly, it looks like you are keeping only one electronic copy of your photos. If this is true, I would recommend you create a second storage area for you images. I use PSE 8, which comes with two licenses. I have one on my desktop and the other on a laptop. The desktop is where I do most of my work. I have all my images on two external hard drives that are duplicates of each other. This way if I lose a hard drive, I don't lose all my images. I also keep many images on my Flickr Pro account. I try to keep my computer hard drive as clean as possible and do not use it for image storage.

I was actually thinking of getting a second external hd. A lot of my photos are on Smugmug and I have more on CD's and DVD's, but not the more recent ones. I try to delete and edit before uploading them to smugmug, but I'm not always the quickest about getting this done, so I'm a couple of months behind in this.

I thought I'd quickly clear some space up by taking all of my Alaska photos off of my laptop (about 2500, a lot of them RAW) since they're all on smugmug. First I wanted to copy them to DVD's and was doing that through LR and burned 3 of the 5 required. When I try to burn the 4th, I get an error message that it can't be verified that the DVD burned, do I want to cancel or try again? I've tried several times, restarting LR and my computer, changing DVD's but still get the same error message.

Then a friend of mine told me last night not to copy to CD's or DVD's because eventually the technology will be obsolete and we won't be able to read them anymore. She said to use a USB connected storage.

I also downloaded a second copy of LR onto my netbook, but it was just to see if I could in fact have a second copy of it. I will probably uninstall that one because I want to have the same LR on both.

Maybe getting another external hd and having both LR and my photos on both of them?

 

[YesDear]

You can move all of your photos to the second hard drive for storage and import them to your laptop for use. It will create a link to the second hard drive but not the size of the full image. As long as you have contact with that hard drive you can do what you want to the image. With out the hard drive attached you would be able to see that image existed without being able to adjust that image.

You do not have to have lightroom on both computers.

I have 52,000 images stored on a NAS (network attached storage) and have them all imported to lightroom on my laptop.

I hope this helps.

 

[Pugrpooh]

You can move all of your photos to the second hard drive for storage and import them to your laptop for use. It will create a link to the second hard drive but not the size of the full image. As long as you have contact with that hard drive you can do what you want to the image. With out the hard drive attached you would be able to see that image existed without being able to adjust that image.

You do not have to have lightroom on both computers.

I have 52,000 images stored on a NAS (network attached storage) and have them all imported to lightroom on my laptop.

I hope this helps.

If I move all of my photos off my laptop, I'm assuming I have to do it through LR? If I export them using LR, it will take a long time, won't it? Or can I drag and drop to an external and relink them to LR?

 

[ssanders79]

Your HDD may not be full of just your photos. If you allow LR to back up the catalog once a week when prompted then it stores the backup in the default location C:\Users\USERNAME\Pictures\Lightroom\Backups LR create a new folder (2011-06-30 0839) for each backup.

I could not figure out why my HDD space was gone then come to find out I had 2+ years of LR backups saved on my drive. Now once a week when LR backups I go in a remove all but the latest backup. You can make your won decision on how many backups you would like to keep.

This is not a backup of your photos, but a backup of the LR catalog, Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat. Mine average around 450 MB.

My photo backup plan is to keep recent files on my laptop. Every 2 months I backup the photos from my laptop to a dvdr and move them to the external drive thus freeing up space on the laptop. The photos are still managed via LR. In fact I do the moving of folders from the laptop the the external HDD in LR allowing LR to update the catalog with the new folder location automatically.

 

[Pugrpooh]

Your HDD may not be full of just your photos. If you allow LR to back up the catalog once a week when prompted then it stores the backup in the default location C:\Users\USERNAME\Pictures\Lightroom\Backups LR create a new folder (2011-06-30 0839) for each backup.

I could not figure out why my HDD space was gone then come to find out I had 2+ years of LR backups saved on my drive. Now once a week when LR backups I go in a remove all but the latest backup. You can make your won decision on how many backups you would like to keep.

This is not a backup of your photos, but a backup of the LR catalog, Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat. Mine average around 450 MB.

My photo backup plan is to keep recent files on my laptop. Every 2 months I backup the photos from my laptop to a dvdr and move them to the external drive thus freeing up space on the laptop. The photos are still managed via LR. In fact I do the moving of folders from the laptop the the external HDD in LR allowing LR to update the catalog with the new folder location automatically.

Thanks for the tip Scott! I looked at this and did delete the backups and it gave me a little bit more space, but most of my space is taken up with photos. I deleted a bunch of downloads and uninstalled programs I don't use a couple of days ago. Now I have 9gb free of 287 gb.

When I get home, I'll try and move my photos.

 

[ssanders79]

Thanks for the tip Scott! I looked at this and did delete the backups and it gave me a little bit more space, but most of my space is taken up with photos. I deleted a bunch of downloads and uninstalled programs I don't use a couple of days ago. Now I have 9gb free of 287 gb.

When I get home, I'll try and move my photos.

In my case the LR backups were close to 20GB. The other option if you are using windows is to do a hard drive clean up and choose the option to remove all but the last restore point. I recovered a few gigs the first time I did this too.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Delete-files-using-Disk-Cleanup

 

[Pugrpooh]

In my case the LR backups were close to 20GB. The other option if you are using windows is to do a hard drive clean up and choose the option to remove all but the last restore point. I recovered a few gigs the first time I did this too.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Delete-files-using-Disk-Cleanup

Thanks! I just did this and I'm now at 37.8gb free!

 

[ssanders79]

Thanks! I just did this and I'm now at 37.8gb free!

Awesome!!

 

[YesDear]

My suggestion is to drop and drag all your photos to your external drive. Then re import them to lightroom. Then you can delete them from your laptop. I also have my backups done to the external as well.

On another issue from your post, I had always been told that you probably wanted to leave about 10-20 percent of a hard drive empty for it to maintain good health. If you have a 250 gb hard drive you would want to have about 50 gb free. 37 is cutting if close. You can find tb external drives for really cheap these days. I got some for my office recently for $75.