adopting lightroom for workflow thought please

[brummie]

Hi all,

currently I am testing lightroom and reading martin evenings book and thinking about adapting lightroom for raw files. At the moment I do everything in bridge and expression media.

My thoughts so far are as follows to start with.

two internal 1tb drives on my main pc. one as user catalogue one as light rooms mirror. Then one external 1tb drive to back up weekly and take off site.

The problem with it all is how then to split the lightroom folders into dvd packets.

how do people get around this problem please and back up to dvd.

many thanks

brummie

[peterkrogh]

Brummie,
This is a real problem. Lightroom does not give you an indication of data size, which makes dividing the media in the application really haphazard.  And the program can get hopelessly confused if you move images around in subfolders outside the application.

(Not just an issue for buckets, BTW. The download backup it makes is in a different folder structure than the primary.  And the way the interface is designed guides the user into organization with folders.  If you need to roll back to a backup catalog after moving images around, you can be in for a real pain.)

For Lightroom 2, you may want to consider using Lightroom to prepare working files, and continue to manage the archive with EM2.  There are a number of other issues with collection management in LR2 that may feel like roadblocks (catalog size, only one open at once, limited metadata display, etc).

I know a number of the people on the Lightroom team simply don't believe that you need Optical disk, but the more I research hard drive issues, the more I'm convinced it's an essential part of a safe storage system.

If you want to use Lightroom only, you will probably need to make rougher bucket sizes, less efficient. You might also consider Blu-ray disk, depending on the size of your shoots.

Peter

[brummie]

thanks peter, um it would seem to me that lightroom would not be good for me, will stick to bridge then, it would be simple I would have thought to code for bucket sizes in bridge of say specific sizes, with room for a em catalogue, they should code for it, then it would work, a little like iphoto does but with more control.

cheers

brummie

[Dorin Nicolaescu]

Lightroom does not give you an indication of data size, which makes dividing the media in the application really haphazard.

In Lightroom, you can right-click on a folder and choose Properties to learn the folder size. Of course, it's not as fast as EM (I assume you learn the size of the folder by the number in the status bar, right?), but in my opinion fast enough for buckets management.