Storage question for the brain trust

[TonyDownunder]

Thank you all for sharing your strategies. It seems like the way to go is to have a travel drive for that trip's photos and then import into the main LR catalogue when I get home. On trips, I do culling, but not much editing, since my laptop screen even though 16", is too small for details for these old eyes. I've been avoiding the importing step and possibly screwing up my main catalogue by carrying my primary storage drive, and on longer months-long trips a backup drive with me, but that risks too much. I've been lucky so far. I think I'll get a 10tb desktop drive for home and repurpose my 5tb WD or an older and smaller LaCie for travel. If you see any holes in this thinking please let me know. Again thank you. It's much appreciated.

My worry with using an “older” hard drive when travelling is you may be setting yourself up for trouble. A more robust SSD for travel seems a safer bet IMO.

 

[Roy]

I am running out of room on my 5tb WD Passport portable drive that I use only for photos. I use a 2021 Mac Powerbook. My wife and I spend a fair amount of time camping and birding each year, and during the evening I cull the days catch, while everything gets stored on the WD drive. When I get home, sometimes weeks later, I back up to the cloud using BackBlaze and also to a desktop Toshiba hard drive, currently also 5tb. I use Lightroom and currently everything is under one catalogue. It's time to do a hard drive size upgrade or come up with a new strategy for storage in the field and transferring to a larger hard drive at home. There aren't too many portable drives with more than 5tb of storage. Desktop drives are 3 1/2" and so have more memory, but require a separate power supply and are bigger and heavier. I'm wondering what others do in the field and at home considering the use of Lightroom and frequent travel. Thanks for your help.

First of all - One backup doesn't cut it.
I use multiple cards and dont erase them until i'm back in the studio and they are safe.
My SSD drives are only for insurance. SD cards can fail.
Deleting images from the camera is usually safe but can corrupt it on rare occasions.
SSD drives are much more reliable than Mechanical ones and they are getting cheaper...

 

[mrt]

Ok. I thought I had it figured out. Not so much. I bought a 2 tb ssd travel drive and have it on my current trip. I took today’s pictures and imported them into LR which put them into my regular catalog that is stored on my computer’s hard drive and stored the pictures on the new hard drive. I also brought my current 5 tb drive so I could experiment with moving the pictures from one drive to the other. The problem is I haven’t been able to. So the question is, how do I move the pictures from the new drive to the old? They’re already in the catalog so I only have to move the picture files from one drive to the other and have the catalog keep track of their location. All the files are on my memory card and on my 2 tb drive so they’re safe. I hope this question makes sense. Thanks for your continued help.

 

[Patrick M]

Ok. I thought I had it figured out. Not so much. I bought a 2 tb ssd travel drive and have it on my current trip. I took today’s pictures and imported them into LR which put them into my regular catalog that is stored on my /Copying computer’s hard drive and stored the pictures on the new hard drive. I also brought my current 5 tb drive so I could experiment with moving the pictures from one drive to the other. The problem is I haven’t been able to. So the question is, how do I move the pictures from the new drive to the old? They’re already in the catalog so I only have to move the picture files from one drive to the other and have the catalog keep track of their location. All the files are on my memory card and on my 2 tb drive so they’re safe. I hope this question makes sense. Thanks for your continued help.

can you see both SSD drives in Finder? Can you see the folder with the images? It should be as simple as opening a 2nd Finder then dragging/Copying the folder with images to the target drive

 

[Patrick M]

I never use the mac's Photo app because it stores the images using some kind of compression algorithm and its a ***** to have to then export the images to post processing ... I wonder if LR does something similar? I always copy my raw images , from the camera to my Mac to a folder in Finder - and I have my Synology DS set to automatically copy this folder to the NAS Disc Station on every change to the folder. Its fully automatic that way.

 

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Ok. I thought I had it figured out. Not so much. I bought a 2 tb ssd travel drive and have it on my current trip. I took today’s pictures and imported them into LR which put them into my regular catalog that is stored on my computer’s hard drive and stored the pictures on the new hard drive. I also brought my current 5 tb drive so I could experiment with moving the pictures from one drive to the other. The problem is I haven’t been able to. So the question is, how do I move the pictures from the new drive to the old? They’re already in the catalog so I only have to move the picture files from one drive to the other and have the catalog keep track of their location. All the files are on my memory card and on my 2 tb drive so they’re safe. I hope this question makes sense. Thanks for your continued help.

To move images that are in LR from one drive to another, there are two methods:

• BEST BET --> Do it within LR using the Folder of the Navigation pane (left side by default). It's slower than moving files at the operating system level, but it's simple. I moves the files and changes the LR Catalog entries to point to the new location.
• If you move it at the OS level (which sometimes you do without thinking about it), LR will be pointing to the old location and you will get an error in LR. But you can still tell LR where the new location of the files is. This works best when you move folders of images. LR will say it can't find then and will ask you to LOCATE the new location. Simply press the LOCATE button and navigate to the new location. (You really don't want to do this on a image by image basis as it would take a very long time and is error prone, but folders and simple enough.)

Chris

 

[mrt]

Not a Speck. Thanks for your suggestions. I’ve tried pointing to the file after the fact in the past and it does work and does take time. Better than nothing. I will try the navigation pane suggestion when I charge up my computer. Last night was one of those where I blew a fuse in my inverter power supply as well as ran into storage issues. Working within LR is definitely the way to go.

 

[Replytoken]

Not a Speck. Thanks for your suggestions. I’ve tried pointing to the file after the fact in the past and it does work and does take time. Better than nothing. I will try the navigation pane suggestion when I charge up my computer. Last night was one of those where I blew a fuse in my inverter power supply as well as ran into storage issues. Working within LR is definitely the way to go.

My workflow is to generally move the files where I want them permanently located either before I import them or during the import process. Moving them afterwards and helping LR find them is fine, but it is generally easier to take care of this step on the front end.

--Ken

 

[mrt]

Hi Ken. My work flow has been the same as yours, but since I travel a fair amount I want to decrease the risk of losing my main storage drive while camping and driving.

 

[Replytoken]

Hi Ken. My work flow has been the same as yours, but since I travel a fair amount I want to decrease the risk of losing my main storage drive while camping and driving.

Understood. I guess the question I would first ask is do you want/need to import into a LR Classic catalog while in the field? If you are primarily culling, then there are a number of options to cull your images before you import. The most popular paid option is Photo Mechanic. Free or low-cost options include FastStone Image Viewer, BreezeBrowser, FastRawViewer to name just a few. if this works for you, then leave your main drive and main catalog at home and do the importing there when you can transfer the images to your primary storage drive.

If you want/need to use LR Classic in the field, then you have a couple of commonly recommended options - bring your primary catalog and Smart Previews with you on a portable drive (but leave your image files at home on your large primary storage drive) or create a travel catalog that you can then export to your main catalog which remains back at home. Each workflow has advantages and disadvantages and only you can decide if either, or a modified version of either, will make sense for you.

The issue with either approach is moving your new files form your travel drive to your primary drive and letting LR Classic know about the move. You can move them in the program, which is pretty straight forward, but possibly slower, or move them outside of LR Classic and then point the program to them after they have been moved. The key to keeping the latter approach simple to to try and keep a similar folder structure so all you are doing is moving a limited number of folders from one drive to another. Files scattered all over the map (for example) that are copied to a new drive all over the place will make this process challenging. I am not saying you are doing the latter, but am using it as an example of when things get difficult.

I have been using LR since it was released in 2007 or 2008, but I tend to do a lot of file management (culling, renaming, backing up files) outside of LR before I import. It jsut works better for me. Others like to do it all inside of LR. It is all a matter of preference and desired workflow.

Hope this helps,

--Ken

 

[jadewolf]

I moved to a NAS. My Synology is now 8 x 8TB drives in Raid 6. The ~35TB capacity (1 drive is a hot spare for those doing the math) is currently about ~20TB full.

This is the way.

Currently I'm using a large HDD for home storage and several portable Samsung SSDs for travel, along with Amazon Drive for cloud backup. This solution works, but isn't ideal. And with Amazon Drive going away at the end of the year, I've been prodded into moving forward with what I've been wanting to do for years.

So next year, I've budgeted for a full storage revamp. I'm going NAS, plus going to write up my own sync scripts to send long-term backups to a Glacier-tier AWS S3 bucket (and retaining the portable SSDs still for travel). Using S3 buckets is a very roll-your-own solution and not for everybody, but the cost savings over using an out-of-the-box cloud storage solution (BackBlaze, SugarSync, Google Drive, etc) is worth it for me.

NAS is more expensive up front than regular external drives, and more complicated to set up, but the scalability and redundancy makes it the best option for home storage.

 

[mrt]

Speck and others who are interested: using the navigator panel to move yesterday’s photos worked. It was simple. Dropping yesterday’s folder on my 2022 folder in my main drive moved the files and fixed the catalogue pointer. Thanks to you all for helping me arrive at the solution. Score one for the brain trust. I chickened out today and went directly to my main drive, but tomorrow I’m going to be brave. I’m on the Olympic peninsula and still have several days to screw up.

Heres an American Golden Plover from yesterday, an unusual sighting here. It was among a hundred or more black turnstones.

You can only see EXIF info for this image if you are logged in.

 

[Replytoken]

Speck and others who are interested: using the navigator panel to move yesterday’s photos worked. It was simple. Dropping yesterday’s folder on my 2022 folder in my main drive moved the files and fixed the catalogue pointer. Thanks to you all for helping me arrive at the solution. Score one for the brain trust. I chickened out today and went directly to my main drive, but tomorrow I’m going to be brave. I’m on the Olympic peninsula and still have several days to screw up.

Heres an American Golden Plover from yesterday, an unusual sighting here. It was among a hundred or more black turnstones.

View attachment 46678

Hope you have had as good (i.e. warm and sunny) weather as we have had this past week in the Sound, excepting the smoke from the forest fires.

--Ken

 

[mrt]

Hope you have had as good (i.e. warm and sunny) weather as we have had this past week in the Sound, excepting the smoke from the forest fires.

--Ken

Hi Ken. A little rainy today. The past few days around 75 and beautiful. No smoke. Headed to Aberdeen today.