Lightroom workflow and organisation examples?

[gnirtS]

Im still trying to "learn to love" lightroom on the trial thing and just wondering how people generally use it.

Might help if i briefly describe my current setup...

New photos are imported via Bridge into a "Photo Temp" directory with subfolders containing the shoot date (so Photo Temp/20111129/ etc etc). When processed the finished JPGs are exported to "My Pictures" in an appropriate folder. The finished JPGs along with original RAWs are removed from Photo Temp and backed up to an external drive to free up space on the computer.
Editing is done with Bridge for keywording and ACR/Photoshop for actual processing.
This way i have finalised JPGs on my PC to view/show without leaving the drive cluttered up with 100s of large RAW files.

Is this a sane approach with lightroom or is it even possible? Im playing with catalogs etc and although i like the non-destructive editing approach i cant see how i can preserve my changes if i move the RAWs to an external drive once im done with them. I tried a brief test and just got a "missing photo" error.
Is there a way of keeping a master catalog on the PC and simply updating the links to whatever external HDD they now live on so i can find a preview on the PC then know which drive to plug in to edit/get at the original image?

On the subject of catalogs, are people using 1 computer wide "master" with lightroom or lots of sub-ones. Currently im creating a new one in each of the days photos directories in photo temp but suspect this isn't what you're supposed to do and things like keyword lists, collections etc dont seem to be global and are limited in scope to the catalog they're created in.

I can see the benefit in LR for batch processing (even if im finding the interface clunky and have to go into PS to run noiseware, content aware fill and other stuff a lot anyway) along with publishing, watermarking etc but no real idea how to organise properly.

Sorry for all the questions - im after ideas of how other people actually use LR to organise and process their photos and how they back up/keep them afterwards.

 

[arad85]

You have to change your workflow with LR. You have to stop thinking of it as an editing program that you open and edit in and do everything from within it. I now only save my raws as JPEG if I want to get them onto the TV, mail them or send them for printing. Otherwise, I view and manage my photos exclusively in LR. Most are only held as raws.

To move the files to an external drive, do it within LR not from the OS. If you do it within LR, it will detect the images as missing or offline and when you reconnect the disk, it will find them again. It will allso store a thumbnail so you can see which images are where.

I use a master catalog, but then I only have a few thousand images. You're right, a lot of things are stored in the catalog.

 

[mattyh]

Seems mad to use Bridge and Lightroom, considering they use a lot of the same type of tool to do the same job.

My workflow is simple;

1. Import photos onto HDD (I have a specific drive), sorted into year, month and shoot.

2. Import to Lightroom. I have one catalog for everything, up to 17k images and no slow down at all.

3. Sort into collection - I have a collection for types of photos. Weddings have their own set, so I have a "Wedding" set and then each collection is per client. Everything else has it's own tpye, such as landscapes, portraits and the like.

4. Keyword if required - I should do more keywording and don't, to be honest.

5. Edit as appropriate and generate JPG's from the finished files as and when required. I have a backup of all my edited JPGs kept off site, so this is a vital step in my process, but if I didn't, I wouldn't produce JPG's until I actually needed them for any purpose.

That's it. My whole workflow in five easy steps

To answer your questions;

Is there a way of keeping a master catalog on the PC and simply updating the links to whatever external HDD they now live on so i can find a preview on the PC then know which drive to plug in to edit/get at the original image?

Yes, all you would do is move the files from within Lightroom, so it knows where the files are going - It can't possibly work out where you've moved them to if you don't tell it. The problem you'll have is speed - Accessing via USB to an external drive won't be as quick as an internal hard drive.


On the subject of catalogs, are people using 1 computer wide "master" with lightroom or lots of sub-ones. Currently im creating a new one in each of the days photos directories in photo temp but suspect this isn't what you're supposed to do and things like keyword lists, collections etc dont seem to be global and are limited in scope to the catalog they're created in.

This seems like a crazy way of working - Let Lightroom do the work instead of creating new catalogs for each day. I've got four years of photos in my current catalog (the catalog is also backed up, just in case!)

I don't import from my memory cards via Lightroom because I found it a lot slower to run like that than it did to copy manually first to the hard drive, then import to LR from there.

Hope this helps a bit