Lightroom confusion...help!

[TenaciousTins]

So I really love Lightroom and have had it (version 3) for several months now. The problem that I'm running into is that I'm quite confused by the file handling and all of that. I hate the whole catalog concept and don't understand it at all. Tonight I decided to see how many pictures I had and the folder I keep all my pictures in said something like 57 thousand pictures. Which is very unreal since not so long ago I went through and did a mighty sweep and got the numbers down to 16 thousand from 30 thousand. I took about 8 thousand "keeper" pictures last year so there is no way it could add up to 57 thousand. So I have decided this is a Lightroom thing. I have several catalogs and the first couple were just a few that I had made during the 30 day trial as I was working with it. I decided to combine all my catalogs into a "master catalog" of sorts but in the process, I ended up finding a few folders under "My Pictures" that have all my pictures...so I thought well I don't need them, might as well delete them. Wrong idea...all my pictures in Lightroom were gone. Oops. So I'm recovering them, not a big deal really. EXCEPT that they're practically doubles...some are RAW so I can't use them as my main pictures that I put up on Facebook and such. So I want to organize this properly. Normally what I do in Lightroom is import the pictures into a catalog, edit them, and Export them into a date-specific folder in my desktop folder "pics" so that I have the JPEG final product that isn't way too huge to load into Facebook or the likes. Most of what I do is *not* anything special and is just snapshots around the home of my family and friends and such.

But now I am really confused...I have looked up videos, read the manual, and I somewhat get the concept, but I need this in freakin layman's terms. If my hard drive wasn't filled up I wouldn't even blink. But it's very close to being filled up (I have a 500 gig and will upgrade to a Terabyte as soon as prices drop again) and I need to make some room. How confusing...especially at 3am :mrgreen:

I have hated Lightroom's setup ever since I got it because I couldn't understand it well. Now I find these extra pictures, or rather, originals that were imported in, and it looks like I have to keep them IF I want to be able to open them in Lightroom and re-edit or whatever. I also keep the originals of all my important pictures on separate hard drive (although it died so now everything is on this computer for the moment) so now I'm thinking maybe it would be better to save THESE originals and delete my folder of originals to be saved.

How the heck do you do this?

 

[Rephargotohp]

The cataog does a couple things, It stores links to where all your photos (that have been imported are) are and then it generates, thumbnails and previews of all those images. Lastly it stores any develop and metadata information about your images. What it doesn't do is store then actual image files in the catalog ( it only has links to waer they are)

The actual photos are stored elsewhere on your computer. They may be where you originally downloaded them from your card. BUT all of this depends HOW you import images to the Lightroom Catalog.
When you import images, at the top of the import Modules, You will see 2 choices or 4 Choices depending if it is your card reader or a hard drive. With hard drive the 4 choices are Copy, Copy as DNG, Move or Add.

If you choose:

Copy, It leaves the file in the original Location and copys a new file to LR's default Location ( probably My Pictires in your case), Add the links to the catalog. The problem with this is now those photos are duplicated and take up twice the sapce

Copy as DNG, again copies the files but Raw files are converted to DNG Raw files, Again thsi duplicates all your files takes up twice the space. it adds the links to the catalog

Move, moves the files from it original location to LR's default folder and adds the links to the catalog. There is only one copy of your images but it has been moved to a new location

Add, Add leaves the images in the original location but adds the links to the catalog

If you have more than one catalog, then not only may you have duplicated the images in the fisrt catalog, you may have made even more copies in the other catalogs unless you just did move or add.

LR has a feature to avoid duplicates but it only does it across ONE catalog


Now you have a mess.

The best thing to try to do is sort thiough in Windows and look and see where all your actual files are and don't get rid of anything until you are sure you are not getting rid of amything but a duplicate. Once you do that you may want to make a new catalog or pick one catalog and clean it up.

Be aware that catalog files themselves can get HUGE because of all the Previews that they generate. The Preveiws are 3 sizes of JPEGs that LR uses to see the RAW files onscreen. So not only do you have your original files, 3 previews are generated too and stored in the catalog.

I agree. Honestly I hate the way LR catalogs things and the whole Import/export thing is rediculous. I much prefer Bridge but I am overwhelmingly in the minority

 

[WesternGuy]

TT, one question first - how many LR catalogs do you have? I use LR and I only deal with one catalog for all my images - like you, I shoot raw. When I started, I followed Scott Kelby's advice and created a top-level folder in the PICTURES library called "My Lightroom Photos". If you don't have a copy of Kelby's book, I would encourage you to get one and work through the chapters - he has a lot of the images that he uses in his book available on the web, so you can follow along with his exercises. Anyway, enough about that...

I use LR to manage all my photos and copies, e.g., jpgs, virtual copies, etc., that I create. Under the top-level folder, I have Yearly folders and below the yearly folders I have folders that hold the actual images from the download and these are ordered sequentially, by a date within the year. I download my images from the memory card and import them into a folder which I usually name by the date that I upload the images. Once the images are downloaded, then I key word them in the Library module and then I review them for keepers, or not. Once I have done this, I then select candidates for the Develop module - not every raw image I take will be developed, but they are still there if, at some later date, I decide that I would like them for whatever reason. I also make extensive use of Collections including Smart Collections - but that is a subject for another discussion.

If, I do a jpg conversion for the web or Flickr, I have designed a preset that does that - the conversion - and then it puts the converted image back into the catalog, next to the raw image from which it was created. That way, I can keep track of any of my jpeg conversions and and virtual copies I have made, as well as any tiff or psd files that come back from CS5 or one of the plugins that I have. Anyway, enough about my approach...

I am not sure what to suggest to you to help you out of your conundrum - maybe this - start by "collecting" all the raw files into one folder within your hard drive. Then maybe collect all the jpgs into one big folder. You might then want to create a new catalog and import all of the raw and jpegs into this new catalog. You should then have two "folders" within LR that will have all your originals (the raw images) and one that will have all your jpgs in it. I would then simply use LR to manage your folders/sub-folders and all of your images from this point on. I am not sure if this approach will help, but it is the only thing I can think of at this time - probably because I am not sure I have a good understanding of what your root problem is, as I have never had a problem managing my LR Library using the approach that I have shown. My approach starts with "date specific" folders, whereas yours seems to end with them - is this right? I also make very extensive use of keywords for each of my images and I can find just about any of them in less than a minute of two. If this doesn't help, please enlarge a bit on your problem and maybe with some more exchange and input from others here, we can help you out of you situation. My 0.02¢ FWIW.

Cheers,

WesternGuy

 

[gerardo2068]

There's a lot to explain on this one, and many people have different ways to organize their libraries. I would search online video tutorials. I was so confused at the beginning too, I used to hate it too. What I do is I got a completely empty external hard drive and make it my Lightroom library. I created a new catalog in the external hard drive and name the folder "Master Lightroom Library". Then I go to Lightroom preferences, under Presets tab and I like to check "save presets with catalog". I would create a folder inside the Lightroom catalog besides (not inside)the "Lightroom settings" folder that is automatic created with a new catalog and called it "Lightroom Library". Then I would start over and import all your photos, but here's the important part. Here's where you have to think and decide how you are going to organized your photos. I organized by year>country>event. That's a personal choice, people do it in many different ways. But when importing you have to put the photos in folders inside the "Lightroom Library" folder, and from there into any subfolder according to what you have decided to do. That way all your photos would be organized inside a folder. I don't think you should export JPEGS to your computer for Facebook photos. I would recommend you make "Collections" of photos you want to put in Facebook and then from there select all the photos and right clic and hit export, in the export window I would set the options how you like, select export to the desktop and then clic "ADD" and save the export preset "Facebook Export", in the future you can select that preset every time you are going to export to Facebook. Once all the photos are exported to the desktop you can upload them to Facebook, and then delete the photos from your desktop. There no point on having the photos in your desktop, it takes too much hard drive space that way, you can make "Collections" it takes way less space. You could also set up the "publishing" feature in light room and upload to Facebook straight from lightroom. At the end the whole goal of lightroom is to organized all your photos inside lightroom. Use the "collections" like a way to organized for different purposed. There no much reason to organized on folders outside lightroom. But this is just one way, many do it their own way.

 

[TenaciousTins]

Hmm that helps me a little. I import pictures from my SD cards directly for editing. I export as JPEG so I can A. put on facebook/photobucket B. edit in other programs and C. organize them by year/month/day or event within a year. I have about 5 different catalogs but have been working off of one for the last couple of months. I originally thought I should create one for each month but that sounds kind of confusing.

I never actually view the library in Lightroom so maybe I should...it all is definitely confusing to me!

 

[TenaciousTins]

I have all my originals stored into months and years too...boo...I guess Lightroom saves the originals so...I don't need to save originals again.

 

[Rephargotohp]

That's why you use Add instead of copy

The reason it is best to only use one Catalog besides possible duplication, ids also that when you use the search function (if you use the search function) only works across one catalog at a time. So if you wanted to find all your "tree" pictures it would only look in the catalog you had open at the time

Check what your import settings are. The reason when you have a Card Reader or a camera attached you only see Copy available, is that Lightrooms assumes you will delete those images off your card so there is just one copy on your computer. But if you keep use copy with images that are already on your computers hard drives, It makes a second copy of that image

 

[TenaciousTins]

Ahhhh ok...well that's a royal mess! I will definitely change that!

What about my current pics? Just go through them? I have 100 gigs of originals...I don't think I need them LOL! Yikes!

 

[Rephargotohp]

I have 3TB of pics...so I would be a bad one to ask LOL

But yes, if you have duplicates, it's not worth taking up the real estate. Just be careful an don't loose something you need

If later you go back to Lightroom and find question marks by a pic you want, you can click it and tell LR where it is..IF you know

That the weird part about LR, it makes complicated things easy but makes easy things complicated

 

[TenaciousTins]

LOL exactly!! I used to use just Photoshop Elements and it was so easy through there. I ADORE Lightroom's capabilities...but do not like at all this confusing mess! Now I'm going through my personal folder of originals and getting rid of stuff I don't want. After that I'll go through the (hopefully fully restored) folder that Lightroom created of my originals and see what's there. Most of 2011 I had Lightroom so I won't need to go through THOSE originals. But man this is ridiculous! I lost all of my originals from early 2010 back due to an external hard drive failing and I haven't had a chance to get another hard drive because the prices went up due to some natural disaster somewhere.

 

[TenaciousTins]

Ok so I think I've got this straight. I need to have Lightroom copy the imported pictures into my "Originals" folder and I don't need to save the originals separately. So now I've got it importing into that folder instead of into the My Pictures folder. I can't choose the "Add" option because I'm importing straight from an SDHC card. Gahhhhhh! But I think I've figured it out now. I will create a master catalog and combine all my catalogs into one. Then I will go through my originals that Lightroom saved and get rid of the ones I don't want. And I will go through my Originals folder and get rid of the ones that LIghtroom has saved. GEEZE!

 

[TenaciousTins]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am SO FRUSTRATED! I don't get this at ALL! Now all my pics are showing up with question marks saying they can't be found. This is after I combine the catalogs. So I open the original catalog that the pictures were in, and they're STILL question marks even though I kept the catalog. Where did they put my originals??

 

[gerardo2068]

I would actually say Move the photos, or Add and delete from the original location, The point of Lightroom its to manage all your photos, you can save them however you want, by year or by month inside Lightroom, there's no reason to export them to save them by dates outside of Lightroom. research videos on organizing you library. You should export the photos to your desktop only when you want to upload them to Facebook, but after upload to Facebook you should immediately delete those photos from your desktop. if you need for some reason those photos again in jpegs you can always export them again. that's why you need to research about saving export presets. you can send a photo from Lightroom directly to photoshop elements and when you are done with editing in photoshop element you save it and Lightroom will automatically import the photo back and "stack" it with the original! Thats the beauty of Lightroom. You do every organization INSIDE Lightroom. There's no need to have duplicate in different formats every where taking up unnecessary space.

 

[Flyer]

I hope I'm not breaking rules doing this, but I found this tutorial about LR3 and it helped me TREMENDOUSLY. I too struggled with it some time ago, but decided to give it another try and found these tutorials.


Right here on the home page ...

Photography Tutorials, Photography Tips, Photography Lessons, Photography Equipment Reviews, Photography Wordpress Themes

Scroll down to under the main frame, it's a LOT of videos, but if you start them they all start making sense. You can do sections at a time to help out.

FWIW I import mine from the camera into LR3 making a new folder with the date I imported as the folder name. I shoot only RAW and let LR3 do it's thing. I only have one catalogue with about 16k pics.

You should really watch those tutorials.

 

[gerardo2068]

You should have only one folder that will be your MAIN LIBRARY, so when you import photos, you moved or copy them to this folder and delete the original file from their original location. Now this photos inside the MAIN LIBRARY folder its all you need, inside that folder then you can organized the photos by year or by month into many subfolders. BUT remember you have to create new subfolders and organized the photos INSIDE Lightroom, you cannot organized outside Lightroom because it will mess it up and will break the lightroom catalog. Go here: KelbyTraining.com | The Leading Provider of Education for Photography and Creative Professionals Worldwide take the free trial and go straight to watch the videos on Lightroom by a guy called Matt Kloskowski (He's like the phtoshop guy) He explain the organization really well.