Alan321 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
+1 to import without moving.
Treat Lr as the master image file manager and all will be well. Treat it as just another of several editors and Lr will soon lose the plot.
Once the files are "in" Lr (more correctly, perhaps, is that Lr knows where they are and knows stuff about them but they are actually exactly where they were before you imported them) be sure that you only ever rename them or shift them with Lr. Otherwise Lr will lose track of them. Do not use the operating system or any other program.
If your images don't already have a common parent folder then make that happen once you get them into Lr (Lr can create folders or you can create a new one outside Lr and then tell Lr to use it). This common-parent approach makes life much easier for backing up and restoring your images and telling Lr where to find them on a different drive. Much easier.
A single Lr catalog lives in one place but can include images from multiple folders and multiple drives.
Lr will initially show you every folder that you imported that has image files in it but they may seem to be in the wrong order. To fix this you probably just need to tell Lr to show the appropriate parent folders - at least enough to establish the appearance of the original folder structure. Right click on any folder and select show parent folder.
Be aware that there is a lot of info inside most image files and Lr lets you access most of it, so you can easily find or sort or select by that data (exposure data, date, camera, lens, etc.).
You can apply keywords but a little forethought goes a long way. Keep it simple - you can easily expand or change keywords later but don't add new ones until there is a need to do so (e.g. there are far too many images to browse through without a more specific keyword).
Ratings and labels are potentially useful but try to imagine what they will represent and write that down somewhere so that you will use them consistently. I actually wrote them as folder names which I included in the catalog so they are always handy. I use ratings for "initial impact" (quick to assess, perhaps after some very basic initial editing, but can change after more serious editing. Plus there can be different ratings for different versions created from the same master file) and labels for "technical quality" (which takes longer to assess) and combine them later with smart collections to determine which images are my best, and so on. This also helps me prioritise which images to spend the most work on (e.g. it won't be the crappy images that don't matter, nor those that are already very good).
Collections are useful too. You can put images into collections (none or more) but that does not move the image files. When you delete images from a collection the images are still on your drive and still in the Lr catalog - just not in the collection. Smart collections are automatically populated collections that can be based on collections and other rules but not on other smart collections (an oversight that I hope Adobe will fix).
The more images you have in Lr the more useful Lr will be. Lr is useless at searching across multiple catalogs at once, or for showing you images that it doesn't know about, so put everything in one catalog and use all that metadata to find what you want when you want it.
The main downside of Lr is that it is built on a database and like all good databases it can never be better than the data within it. If you put no effort into organising data you will still get to use the automatic exif data from each image but you'll get nothing from ratings, labels, keywords or collections unless you add some of your own input.
I don't let Lr create .xmp files because they clutter things up and take time to manage. Instead I rely on the Lr catalog to hold that data. This works because I don't do anything to the image files with other programs and so the .xmp files are not needed to transfer metadata between programs (I can still edit in Ps by calling it from within Lr, but I don't do heavy duty editing). Also, and this very very important, I make lots of backups of the Lr catalog - every time Lr closes it does a backup. I copy the catalog to other drives too. Often. I've had too many drive failures and other failures to risk losing all of my image editing efforts in one go.
As much as I like Lr I still use other software to show me additional exif data and which focus points were active, etc. That includes Nikon View NX2, Canon DPP, and BreezeBrowser Pro (only for Windows OS).
Before I trash an image I like to learn from it. If it is out of focus but I don't know that the camera thought it had attained focus or not then I would not know that the camera or lens may have developed a fault. On the other hand, if Lr tells me that the shutter speed was pretty slow then I can assume user error was to blame.
If you get stuck then ask for help before abandoning Lr. The learning effort is well worthwhile. You can download the Lr help guide as a pdf file - well worth doing. Play with some raw images safe in knowledge that you are not damaging the raw files.
By the way - I do not use DNG files except for the Lr Smart Previews. DNG files get updated with all of the edit instructions. Changing (adding) just a few bytes of data makes the file different which means it gets backed up by my system after every edit and that gobbles up too much drive space. I'd rather just back up the catalog (which you should do even if you use DNG files) and not have to change the raw files.
- Alan
|