Lightroom catalogue - untangling the cats cradle
Discussion
I've been putting this job off for far too long as I find LR eminently sensible in the way it works for processing photo's, but utterly unfathomable for cataloging.
I've got photo's saved on three different HDD's, on two PC's (on the same network) and I've just bought a 6TB drive to store them all. So I want to get all the files in the same place, and for LR to then recognise everything. The catalogue files are dotted around and opening LR I'd say roughly half of my photo's are shown as missing. The RAW files are all physically saved somewhere mind.
Ideally I'd like to retain the processing and collection information. Is that possible, and if so how do I approach it whilst centralising all the files on the new HDD?
I've got photo's saved on three different HDD's, on two PC's (on the same network) and I've just bought a 6TB drive to store them all. So I want to get all the files in the same place, and for LR to then recognise everything. The catalogue files are dotted around and opening LR I'd say roughly half of my photo's are shown as missing. The RAW files are all physically saved somewhere mind.
Ideally I'd like to retain the processing and collection information. Is that possible, and if so how do I approach it whilst centralising all the files on the new HDD?
singlecoil said:
Well he's a very watchable chap.It did help, but only to the extent that it made me realise my catalogue is beyond repair. 15,000 missing photo's. I'm going to backup everything to a separate drive, cull out a tonne of stuff I should have done years ago in Windows from the backup, backup my (current, albeit incomplete) catalogue then start from scratch based on the spring-cleaned backup files.
I'm hoping to be done some time in early 2019...
I feel your pain! I spent six months undertaking a ground-up rebuild of my catalogues and was well worth the effort.
Something that bugs me about LR is that as clever and brilliant as it is, it's also dumb. It will say that it cannot find a particular image yet when you ask it to locate it...it finds it! Why can't it just find it in the first place?
In the Library mode, choose Library from the pull down menus and select 'Find All Missing Photos to display missing files in the Grid view'. That should recover your lost files and you can drag and drop as you wish. But 15,000 is a lot of files so unless you have any particular shots you want to get hold off, a start-again approach may be better.
Something that bugs me about LR is that as clever and brilliant as it is, it's also dumb. It will say that it cannot find a particular image yet when you ask it to locate it...it finds it! Why can't it just find it in the first place?
In the Library mode, choose Library from the pull down menus and select 'Find All Missing Photos to display missing files in the Grid view'. That should recover your lost files and you can drag and drop as you wish. But 15,000 is a lot of files so unless you have any particular shots you want to get hold off, a start-again approach may be better.
Are your photos raw, DNG or jpeg? If they are raw the metadata/processing information should be stored in an .xmp file in the same folder as the image. If they are DNG, the metadata/processing information will be embedded in the file. Lightroom will recognise this data if the file is imported into a new catalogue.
I have been going through this process with my Dad recently, as his Lightroom catalog is also a mess. I had him create a new folder on his harddrive, for "Lightroom photos", with subfolders for each year. Then from within Lightroom sort out the photos, folder by folder and as each folder is sorted drag them into the "Lightroom photos"/Year folder. This is an ongoing process, but it is worth the pain, as once you have your catalog sorted it is really easy to drill down and find anything.
To help keep my catalog tidy I use the colour and star tags to identify any photos that have been shared/printed/generally that I want to keep. Then with a smart collection identify any images without a star/colour that are older than 1 year and review them with a view to deleting them. If I haven't done anything with them in a year, I'm not going to do anything with them, so there is no need to have them clogging up my harddrive/catalog.
I have been going through this process with my Dad recently, as his Lightroom catalog is also a mess. I had him create a new folder on his harddrive, for "Lightroom photos", with subfolders for each year. Then from within Lightroom sort out the photos, folder by folder and as each folder is sorted drag them into the "Lightroom photos"/Year folder. This is an ongoing process, but it is worth the pain, as once you have your catalog sorted it is really easy to drill down and find anything.
To help keep my catalog tidy I use the colour and star tags to identify any photos that have been shared/printed/generally that I want to keep. Then with a smart collection identify any images without a star/colour that are older than 1 year and review them with a view to deleting them. If I haven't done anything with them in a year, I'm not going to do anything with them, so there is no need to have them clogging up my harddrive/catalog.
I don't think the .xmp files automatically get created - it's an option you have to tick (I only know as I did it this morning, having watched the video linked above.)
Sounds like a sensible cataloguing system. That's loosely my plan - 5 star the keepers that I export, 3 star stuff which I might look at down the line and delete the majority of the rest.
Sounds like a sensible cataloguing system. That's loosely my plan - 5 star the keepers that I export, 3 star stuff which I might look at down the line and delete the majority of the rest.
Craikeybaby said:
You’ll have to check if the .xmp is moved when you move images in Lightroom, I convert my files to DNG on import, so can’t test.
I just didn't have the option ticked for most of the time. I've got some .xmp files saved - possibly from when I was using Elements - but for 90% of my photo's I haven't got the files (I've been trawling through folders so I'd know by now if I did.) But I can live without it.tenohfive said:
Is there a way on LR that I can filter the view to only show those photo's I've made an adjustment in Develop to?
1. Create a new "Smart" Collection ("Library --> New Smart Collection" on the Mac)2. Change the rule to match on "Develop" and then "Has Adjustments" to be "is false"
3. Give the collection a name and click on "Create"
This is proving to be something of a headache, in part because of file naming standards (I'm pretty sure my old camera went around the block, and the newer camera is also Canon and in the mix.)
I've created two centralised folders - one for all RAW files, one for JPEG's. I'm less concerned about the latter. I've then copied in every photo (pre-2017) into the relevant folder. Ball ache itself due to duplicate copies from various backups everywhere, part of my paranoia of losing any photo's - exacerbated by the same CR2 file name actually being two different photo's. But it's centralised - however, there are a number of copies of the same file still (where IMG_0101 and IMG_101(2) are exactly the same photo, same date, size etc.) Firstly, I'd like to clear those duplicates without manually going through nearly 20,000 photo's. Is there a clever way to do this, looking at the attributes (size/date taken etc)? Windows does it to some degree when copying, but I've still ended up with a tonne of duplicates.
As an aside, going through missing photo's I did direct LR towards the new master RAW folder and disconcertingly there were quite a few it couldn't find. Worried I've not backed them up properly.
I've created a smart collection with all of my processed photo's - which is probably a safe bet to record my keepers (about 6,000 of them.) I've backed that up to a separate catalogue and I'm going to export them all; paranoia still kicking in, but it seems sensible to have them squirrelled away separately.
The next step is starting again, new catalogue, then importing 19,000 RAW photo's (less the duplicates.)
Does that sound like a sensible route now?
I've created two centralised folders - one for all RAW files, one for JPEG's. I'm less concerned about the latter. I've then copied in every photo (pre-2017) into the relevant folder. Ball ache itself due to duplicate copies from various backups everywhere, part of my paranoia of losing any photo's - exacerbated by the same CR2 file name actually being two different photo's. But it's centralised - however, there are a number of copies of the same file still (where IMG_0101 and IMG_101(2) are exactly the same photo, same date, size etc.) Firstly, I'd like to clear those duplicates without manually going through nearly 20,000 photo's. Is there a clever way to do this, looking at the attributes (size/date taken etc)? Windows does it to some degree when copying, but I've still ended up with a tonne of duplicates.
As an aside, going through missing photo's I did direct LR towards the new master RAW folder and disconcertingly there were quite a few it couldn't find. Worried I've not backed them up properly.
I've created a smart collection with all of my processed photo's - which is probably a safe bet to record my keepers (about 6,000 of them.) I've backed that up to a separate catalogue and I'm going to export them all; paranoia still kicking in, but it seems sensible to have them squirrelled away separately.
The next step is starting again, new catalogue, then importing 19,000 RAW photo's (less the duplicates.)
Does that sound like a sensible route now?
I guess you've already Googled but would something like this help?
https://improvephotography.com/29018/finding-dupli...
The problem with doing it automatically is that you have to trust the software to detect a duplicate with 100% accuracy & it's difficult to do that. If you just pull everything into LR & use the tools within LR to manage the issues you might have more chance of sucess.
https://improvephotography.com/29018/finding-dupli...
The problem with doing it automatically is that you have to trust the software to detect a duplicate with 100% accuracy & it's difficult to do that. If you just pull everything into LR & use the tools within LR to manage the issues you might have more chance of sucess.
Mr Pointy said:
I guess you've already Googled but would something like this help?
https://improvephotography.com/29018/finding-dupli...
The problem with doing it automatically is that you have to trust the software to detect a duplicate with 100% accuracy & it's difficult to do that. If you just pull everything into LR & use the tools within LR to manage the issues you might have more chance of sucess.
I'll have a look. It turns out that because I started moving files before I'd exported my keepers my job has just become a lot harder, so I'm fighting through to avoid having to re-process all my best photo's.https://improvephotography.com/29018/finding-dupli...
The problem with doing it automatically is that you have to trust the software to detect a duplicate with 100% accuracy & it's difficult to do that. If you just pull everything into LR & use the tools within LR to manage the issues you might have more chance of sucess.
Technically speaking, it should be fairly simple to sort duplicates in software - if the attributes all match (date/time taken, file size, or even more detailed metadata) and Windows can manage it - if you copy a load of files into a folder that already contains them, it'll a) warn you and give you the option to create new files or overwrite, and b) skip the ones with the same date/file size. So it shouldn't (in theory) be that complicated.
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