Fredrik - I wrote the post while very frustrated not being able to put together a submission. 

I guess I was not thinking about eSATA for the lab top in that I have not seen a card that will allow me to connect 4 eSATA cables to my laptop.  It is a great idea and I think I will work with it. 

Scott

I use Nikon and I just randomly checked and the lens information does make it into the dngs that I have created.  I no longer use EM2, but the lens information was in the file using Bridge.  I do not normally save the autofocus points so I can not address that aspect of the conversion.

Scott

Roger - I have been away from the forum for a while - yes it is the yahoo group.

Scott

I have a desktop computer that I use for essentially all of my archive, processing and is the central part of my entire workflow.  It is a Windows 7 machine (quad core with 6 gb of RAM).  It is attached via esata to a Granite digital JBOD that has four drive bays.  I have a Windows 7 laptop, that I many use for travel and I use it to archive images while traveling and a little light editing.  This has worked well for me for the past several years.  i currently have about 90,000 image archive which has started to grow very fast as I have started doing a large number of time lapses and currently the Granite Digital enclosure has 3 1tb drives and 1 2 tb drive.

This weekend my desktop failed to boot and I have taken the computer to the local computer guy for repair.  My problem is that I need to get to my images and I can not do it as the images are located on the Granite Digital JBOD that I can not access with my laptop.  Hopefully, my desktop will be back soon, but this situation has made me realize the hole in my system.  I was wondering if it would be a good idea to add a NAS to my network such that I can access the files.  Back in my lab days we used a NAS to backup data, and I remember it being rather slow.

I am thinking it would be nice to have a duplicate of the files from my laptop that could be accessed by my laptop whenever the desktop has problems.  I would not plan on using the NAS as my main workflow, but as a backup.  Does this seem to be a good approach?  Is there a better approach? 

Thanks,

Scott

I use it and like it. 

They have a list serve that is fairly active so I would think it has not died. 

Scott

Joe - there are many different eco friendly recycling programs around.  That's how I have been doing it.

Scott

Mattia - I do the same as John.  So my workflow with multisource file techniques is to import with Image Ingester and bulk keywords are added.  Then I import into Lightroom add keywords for the images, Panos get a blue label while HDRs get a green label.  I stack them.  Then the derivative produced and stored in the derivative folder with the same keywords and labels.

I hope this helps,

Scott

Mattia -

I'm not sure what Peter does in these cases.  I use color labels to tell then from single images so that I will not toss the odd looking images.

HTH,

Scott

Nevermind - I think I found out how to do it.  I had forgotten about the Keywords and Containing Keywords tab of the Keyword Tag.  Now I just need to convert my previous keyword lists over for use in Lightroom.  Fortunately I have the original files and the intermediate steps I sent through to generate them.

I remember in previous versions of Lightroom if you used long keywords lists, like David Reicks' Controlled Vocabulary, the catalog would slow down.  I currently using it for keywording and the catalog seems find, is there a point at which the program slows down now?

Scott

I just moved to Lightroom for my sole cataloging application recently and like it better than Expression Media in most areas other than keywording.  There are a couple of threads from the past wher we discussed making a keyword list to use in EM such that I was able to insert very quickly and efficiently taxonomic information very quickly. 

I created a series of lists for EM that had scientific data from many groups of plants and animals (I had many special vocabularies I used depending on the types of keywords I was adding).  This worked well for me in that I would start typing Mallard for example and an entire list with the following info would pop up Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos, ANSERIFORMES, ANATIDAE, Anatinae, Anas I would hit enter and the keywords would be in place.

I have just started keywording once again and I was using lightroom and checking off the keywords in the list is just annoying and slow.  Is there a way to add keywords in a manner as easy as I did in EM?  I also submit to a stock agency and the keywords need to go into the keyword field which by my reading may preclude the use of hierarchical keywords, but I am not sure.

Last night I used EM to keyword and then sync the files and then I exported from Lightroom for a small submission.  Seems rather inefficient to have to import the same images into different catalogs.. 

Also I found on the web lists of this information but it only had the scientific name the common name and the common version of the family name and I want to add more info than that as I just sold a couple of images that the buyer had searched for a subfamily name that I had added to keywords.

Thanks,

Scott

John -

Yes that sounds much better, maybe I should not answer forum questions while listening to a teleconference!

Scott

At this time I would not convert the jpegs to DNG as it just creates a much larger file to store.  My catalog in Ligthroom catalog has DNG, jpeg, tiff, and psd files in it.  With tools like John Beardsworth I can now keep all of the meta data constant and the same (if needed) between all of the related files.

Scott

Mattia -

I ingest by date and create a folder with that date name like yesterday with the new waterfall photos they were in folder 2010-07-15 this folder will once my basic work is done I will convert to DNG and place in a DVD bucket and these files will be in a subfolder 2010-07-15 (DVD430-->2010-07-15). 

All of the derivatives will in a large folder and that structure looks something like  Derivatives-->2010.  For client work they will be archived to a derivatives DVD that will be on a shelf and a second copy will be sent off site.

HTH,

Scott

As long as you sync the metadata from the catalogs to the files you should be fine. 

Scott

I just converted over to Lightroom for most of my cataloging needs and I have jpegs, dng's an derivatives all in my catalog.   

If you add metadata to the raw file, it should carry over.  But if you keyword the raw file, make a derivative, then add keywords to the raw file the two files will not have the same metadata.  If you need to fix this John Beardsworth has a great little plugin for Lightroom (and I think it was a script for iView and Expression media).

Scott