My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives
As a professional digital photographer, I work with Adobe Photoshop and with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom every day. After eight years in the business of digital photography, I have shot about 30,000 images. I need a cost-effective, and scalable way, to store all of these images, but I also need a way to access any of these files from either my laptop or from my desktop.
Now there are many different ways to put together your image storage system. After years of experimentation, I have finally found a hardware / software setup that works really well for my needs.
Before we go any further, please let me define a couple of words here. When I use the term “cost-effective” I mean a storage media that is within my budget. External hard drives have got to be one of the world’s greatest bargains. With today’s prices, you can store huge amounts of data on an external disk for pennies per megabyte!
“Scalable” here means that my system can grow over time as I shoot more images without having to open up my computer and fiddle around with any of its internal hardware. My image library currently takes up about 300GB of disk space which fits beautifully on a LaCie d2 Quadra external hard disk.
When I get close to maxing out the free space on my 500GB disk, I will replace it with a 750GB or 1TB disk. Sure, I will have to buy another disk, or as you will see disks plural, but it is an easy process to copy all of my files from the almost full external hard drive over to its replacement. No tools required and minimal downtime for my business.
Last, I had better carefully define the phrase “access all of these images from either my laptop or my desktop.” I need to make it clear here that I can only work on these files using one computer at a time. I don’t mean to imply here that I am working with my images through some sort of network in my office. If I want to use Lightroom or Photoshop on the laptop then I need to physically connect my photo storage external hard drive to the laptop. If, on the other hand, I want to work with my images on the desktop then I must physically connect the external drive to the desktop. The drive can only be connected to one computer at a time.
This is not a “shared or network enabled” disk for two simple reasons. First, Lightroom doesn’t like network disks. It has major issues with network connections and shared files. Second, I only have two hands so I can only work on one computer at a time! Working alone here in my office, there is simply no need for two computers to be reading and writing to the same files simultaneously.
Now that we have cleared these issues up, let me explain that my computer’s internal hard drive holds all of my programs. I am talking here about the boot disk, the main Macintosh hard drive, or the “C:” drive for Windows folks. Program’s like Adobe Photoshop, and Lightroom, run off my main internal hard drive. The boot drive holds my programs, but it does not hold any of my images or my Lightroom Catalog files.
In my system everything photographic, regardless of file format, is stored on my “Photo Library” external disk. As you can see in this screen shot, this disk has just two top-level folders. One folder holds my Lightroom Catalog components, and the other is the parent level folder for all the sub-folders which contain my digital images.
Top Level Folders on My Photo Library External Disk
Again let me point out here that I can easily work with any computer since this one hard drive contains everything photographic. If I need to work on images on the desktop, I just plug this drive into the desktop and away I go. If I need to go out on the road, I grab my laptop and this external drive, and now I have access to any image plus my entire Lightroom Catalog while I am traveling. Since everything photographic is saved to this external disk, nothing ever needs to be “updated” or “synchronized” when I get home.
Hopefully, I have convinced you at this point of the elegance and simplicity of using a single external hard drive for your photo storage. Please don’t stop reading here though, because there is great danger in this setup. When my Photo Library disk breaks, I could lose everything. If you put all of your eggs in one basket and then drop the basket what’s left? See the danger of storing everything on a single external disk is that eventually it will fail!
Thus, part two then of my system is to plan for total disk failure. Sitting right beside my Photo Library disk is a second external hard drive. The second disk can be a different brand and a different size. Identical brands or models is not the important part. What’s essential here is that the second disk is regularly updated so it contains a perfect copy of every file that is on the Photo Library disk.
I use very simple backup software to keep these two disk identical. I make my backups daily, but the schedule is far less important then the results. What matters is that if my Photo Library disk dies right now that I will lose nothing! The demise of one external hard drive is not going to wipe out my entire business or destroy all of my precious images.
To keep my backup disk up-to-date, I am fond of Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac and Acronis True Image Home for the PC. It doesn’t matter what program you use as long as your software makes it easy to create a perfect mirror, a complete clone, an exact copy. What matters most is that the backup disk perfectly matches the Photo Library disk. If the two are identical and one dies then you haven’t lost anything!
Here is a tutorial that I created on backing up my Photo Library disk using Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac.
Backing up an External Hard Drive with Carbon Copy Cloner from David Marx on Vimeo.
PC users might want to watch these tutorial videos on backing up with Acronis True Image Home.
I don’t care what program you use but please don’t expect any one hard drive, of any brand, to last forever. Plan and prepare daily for disk failure!
Please click here for my recommendations on brands and models of external hard drive. You might also want to read this article that I wrote on the difference between a backup and an archive. I’ll be releasing another article soon on an online backup system that I am using as yet another way of protecting myself from total disaster. Stay tuned…
Filed Under: Featured • Getting Started • Hardware • Tutorials • Workflow
About the Author: David’s sports and landscape images are often used on the web and in outdoor sports publications. He has an extensive knowledge of digital photography and is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David is a talented instructor and his entertaining teaching style works for students of all skill levels.
In 2009, David Marx led digital photography programs for the 
[...] laptop without the laptop being plugged in to the power supply Free Laptop and Notebook InformationMy Photo Storage System Two External Hard Drives TheLightroomLabcom Written by David Marx I found some cool stuff here: My Photo Storage System Two External Hard Drives [...]
Hey Dave,
Just wondering… Do you have only one LR Catalog?
I split up my catalog in multiples, because I found it became very slow and bulky, even after 15,000 images already.
hello my friend! i am finally shooting and so so happy. i want to know how to remove dust spots in lightroom. when does rmsp start?
cheers
kreis
i figured the spot remover out!
Please follow this link if you need advice on how to properly format an external hard drive.
http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/01/formatting-an-external-hard-drive/
Arno,
I’m sure Dave will chime in shortly, but I do have more than one catalog in a few, specific instances. Typically, I don’t recommend multiple catalogs for beginning Lightroom users because of the high risk of confusion, duplication, and misplaced files/edits. I have no doubt that you can handle it, though, Arno.
Here are some tips that I give for having multiple catalogs:
-Make sure each original file (negative file) only exists in one catalog at a time. (Don’t have more than one catalog pointing to the same exact photo.)
-It’s much easier, organizationally, if your separate catalogs contain photos which you would never need to work with or see together. In other words, it doesn’t make sense, for me, to put all my wildlife photos in one catalog and all my landscape photos in another because I may want to see those categories together at some time. If you think about wedding photographers, on the other hand, it would be unusual that they would need to see photos from more than one wedding together. It makes sense to have each individual wedding stored as one catalog.
-Make sure that you are completely comfortable with the way catalogs, backups, sidecar files, and original files are moved, referenced, and stored before trying to tackle multiple catalogs.
Scott
Arno,
I am a big fan of the one, and only one catalog, model. It’s what I truly do and its part of what I love about Lightroom as the “google index” of my digital images. I feel like the use of multiple catalogs for your own image storage weakens Lightroom.
Here’s my logic. Let’s say that you have images in one catalog, say weddings, and then an entirely separate catalog of landscape images. All seems good up until the day when decide to put together a portfolio, or build a web page, that includes both your best wedding and your best landscape images.
See, if you make multiple Lightroom Catalog how can you put together a single collection that includes all of your best work regardless of image type without lots of extra effort?
Likewise, I use a lot of Lightroom Export Plugins, like the plugin that takes my photos directly from Lightroom to Flickr, and I have built important presets for things like my copyright and contact info. If you have configured Lightroom the way that I suggest then all of these settings are Catalog specific. If you start making multiple catalogs then you have to remember to copy all of your settings from one catalog over to the others. If you don’t copy these settings then your metadata preset, for example, will be missing.
Is copying the settings folder from catalog to catalog hard? No, but I would call it a totally unnecessary complication. One catalog keeps it simple.
Now not everyone agrees with me, and I will admit that I too make separate tiny catalogs for projects like my class examples and my lectures. The ability to have multiple catalogs is a nice feature if you know what you are doing, but I would urge you to stick to maintaining just one big, all-inclusive, 100% of your digital photographs catalog.
You say that you split up your catalog because it was getting slow and bulky. First, I would ask when is the last time that you ran the optimize catalog feature? Then, I would suggest that its your hardware that needs upgrading– more ram, faster rotational hard drives, a stronger processor. I would rather install more RAM than make my life more complicated, and my workflow less efficent, by building multiple catalogs.
David
Scott, Dave,
Thanks for the replies.
Dave,
).
I might’ve misformulated that I split up my catalog *because* it’s getting slow and bulky. That wasn’t the only reason, obviously.
I have so many different things going on, and I’m a perfectionistic control freak, that I get annoyed if things get messed up.
I have a separate catalog for all my trips to different countries, just because I don’t want to mess up my information. I know I can make separate collections within one catalog, but that still itches (I know, I know…!
As for the hardware… aside that one issue that I’m running Windooms, there’s little I can do about the rest, except for buying a whole new system, which I’m not ready to do (yet). Dual single Xeon 1.8Ghz, I have a bunch of hard drives hooked up, all 7200rpm, 4Gig RAM (of which XP only reads 3 anyway).
Optimizing catalog once per week.
Not much else left to do, or is there?
Dave, does Lightroom have a vault function for backing up an entire photo library to an external drive? Apple’s Aperture has this feature, so you need not create a mirror image of the library with a separate program. Second, with all the biking around town we are supposed to do during SI, would two portable external drives work better?
Lightroom lacks a “vault” function. It does have an automatic backup option, but sadly this feature only backs up your catalog and not your actual photographs. Still, programs like Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac) or Acronis True Image Home (PC) make it so easy to backup an entire drive that I can easily get around Lightroom’s limitations with minimal extra expense or difficulty.
Now, as far as what to bring to school each day during the Rocky Mountain School of Photography’s Summer Intensive Program I would bring only my working photo storage drive and I would leave my backup disk at home. This is what I do whenever I am traveling.
In my world, my backup disk always stays on my desk at home so that the working disk, the active photo storage disk, can travel with me. This way if disaster strikes; bike accident, rain storm, TSA / luggage monkey abuse in an airport, etc., my backup disk is still safe and sound. That said, please bring both disks to our first class together so that we can help you get everything setup. See you in a few weeks!
[...] My photo storage system – 2 external hard drives [...]
I’ve been worried about a theft or power surge destroying the computer and two external drives. I just picked up a third drive so I can rotate one offsite.
I think this will also make me more comfortable when taking a drive (or two) on a field trip.
The more backups the better! A backup does not guarantee that your data will survive a massive disaster. But no backup is a guarantee that nothing will survive. Having an offsite backup as well as onsite greatly increases your odds of success!
Hey Dave,
I just want to emphasis with your keeping dual hard drives. I am up to two hands need to count the number of hard drives that have crashed in the last three years. Keep DOUBLES everyone! It’s extremely important!
I love you stuff Dave!
Kat
Thanks Kat for the kind words and the support! Backups, backups, backups. You can never have too many. Drives are cheap. Replacing lost images expensive or impossible.
Hi Dave,
Do you know of any way to keep one catalog for just browsing and thumbnails, but that refers to images stored on multiple hard drives? That would really be idea for our studio since we have way more than a TB of photos to store and sort.
Thanks,
Meg
Meg,
I’ll answer for Dave quickly. You can most definitely do that. That’s what Lightroom was designed for!
When importing images, you specify where those images are to be stored; be it the same drive that holds the Lightroom Catalog or a separate internal, external, or networked drive. See this post on Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to Copy New Images in from a Memory Card.
If you have a catalog or images you’d like to move, this post on How to get your Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive might be helpful.
Let us know if you have more questions about this.
-Scott
Thanks for all the info, I’m new to mac and building up my knowledge of Lightroom so nothing is too obvious. My question is, how does storing all images on an external drive affect the edit in photoshop function? Can you run CS4 on the internal drive and store all your images externally and still work fast? I assume you use the internal disk as your scratch disk?
Thank you
Colin,
The Edit in Photoshop function will just fine. To get the best performance, make sure you’re using a fast external hard drive (I try to use 7200 RPM drives whenever possible) and a fast connection (Firewire 800 is a great choice).
-Scott
I like the idea of having one catalog. I really don’t like separating my files, but I’ve read that Lightroom can get grumpy if it gets too big or has too many keywords. Have you read Eric Scouten’s blog post?
http://blog.ericscouten.com/2009/09/lightroom-2-technique-how-i-organize-my-catalog-and-why-2009-edition/comment-page-1/#comment-5461
I’m about to catalog and keyword 8 years of digital images, so trying to get my game plan.
btw, think of adding the plug-in “Subscribe to Comments”
Great site!
Dear Leslie,
I have read Eric Scouten’s post and I respectfully disagree with his advice. I find his four separate catalogs idea complicated and cumbersome. Not to pick on him (because this is a place where there is no one right answer) but what is the point to his “family selects catalog?” Couldn’t he accomplish the same goal– the best photos of his friends and family– using a single keyword and a single colored label or star rating?
I just can’t see the logic to creating an entirely separate catalog for this purpose when a smart collection that looks for say images with the keyword “family” plus say “the five star rating” would accomplish the same goal. Why make life more complicated?
As far as the warnings about large catalogs upsetting Lightroom, I believe that you have nothing to worry about. I have never heard of Lightroom having problems that were caused by lots of keywords.
Now it is true that Lightroom v.2 has an 100,000 image limit, but how many of us have shot 100,000 photos total much less 100,000 that are actually worth keeping? My advice is put everything into one catalog but be sure to make regular backups of both your catalog and your images. Backups, backups, backups! That’s the key to success and a good nights sleep in the digital world.
best of luck,
David
PS. Thanks for the kind words and the subscribe to comments suggestion.
Thanks for the response, David. I’m trying to wade through the different ideas for using Lightroom. There are some really complicated systems out there and from my own experience using databases, I’ve found that you should keep it simple and don’t start dividing up your photos. I have to agree that I really don’t like the idea of having separate, duplicate images for different catalogs.
I wish that Lightroom could behave more like Cumulus where you can have different catalogs open at once and drag an image reference to a different catalog while maintaining the location of the file.
I’ve been working all day editing a 5 day personal shoot I did last week on a trip with friends and dogs and it has me thinking about your comments on the site about only keeping your best work. I keep a lot of my work because I photograph for a lot of different reasons, not only artistic / technical merit. Some of my favorite shots for memories aren’t all that great technically. I’ll give a DVD to my friends of nearly all the photo’s for a memory of the week. Only around 5% at most are photographs I think I could use artistically, but I do want to keep all the photo’s for memories for the future. I wonder if I should burn a DVD of those events, so I have the “memories” shots saved but then edit down to only keeping the best in Lightroom.
Granted, one reason I have this cross-over problem is that I’m not just using lightroom for professional shots, but also my snapshots. I wonder if I should separate those out or will it start breaking down in the future?
Once again I come back to how I wish I could use Lightroom like Cumulus! I could easily have more than one catalog without separating out the photos. Wonder if there’s anyway to convince Adobe of the benefit of that?
Leslie,
I wanted to chime in on your discussion about which photos to keep. I’ve struggled with the same issue. For now, my solution has been to keep my “point and shoot” images in iPhoto and my professional work in Lightroom.
This has its limitations, obviously, as sometimes photos I take “for fun” end up being “keepers.”
I’ve certainly not found a perfect solution yet…
-Scott
I happened across this link from the adobe forums (I am new to Lightroom).
What I use to backup my images (Windows Vista) is SyncToy from Microsoft. It is a free download and does much of what the carbon copy does for mac. It has a few extra features that I like.
It can allow you to mirror changes across network shares. In the windows world, this is \\remotemachine\share . So for my laptop, I set up the master to be \\desktop\photos and the mirror to be c:\photos. This lets me copy everything to my laptop, including the latest changes, before I go. But I set them to the “Synchronize” option, so if I do any work on the laptop, when I get home, I run SyncToy and it copies everything back to the desktop. For my backup drive, I use the ‘echo’ setting to just copy everything to the drive like shown in your video. SyncToy has a 32-bit and a 64-bit version for the various flavors of Windows.
But I also have 2 backup drives, one of which lives at my brother’s house and gets updated about once a month.
Hi Dave,
Like your comments and the way you teach. My question for you is how to send photo’s from LR2 by email. I think I have set it up correctly but when I go to send them the email page is not up.
Also how do I get to see all of your movies?
Thanks
Your setup is so simple, thanks for taking the time to share this. Today I ordered a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II WDH2Q20000. It has two 1TB hard drives and can be setup as a RAID 1 drive, automatically and continually making two identical copies of your information. The interface choices are Hi-Speed USB, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 or Serial ATA-300. Hopefully this will be a good setup for me to implement your system. (The Wikipedia article on SATA indicates a max 3 meter cable length for ATA-300.)
I made a mistake in my previous post, the My Book Studio II 2TB is WDH2Q20000N.
David,
Strongly considering your 2 drive system. Was thinking ahead and a question popped up. Background…I just switched over from PC to Mac Bought a MBP and LR2 which I have not yet installed. Bought a LaCie 250 G Rugged to use as a back up. Was planning on using the LR “backup on import” function with this drive. Here is the question. If I use your set up and use the LaCie 250 for my “photo library” disk and another say..500 GB drive for the “photo backup” drive. When the 250 library drive gets full and I begin using a new drive while still using the original 500gig back up drive..Will the clone program wipe out the info on the back up drive if I am mirroring the data? I am thinking it will think hmmm….I’ve got all these photos and this new drive has none, I’m mirroring it so I’ll delete all this data to match the new one. Sorry for the long drawn out question.
Scott
P.S. Graduated from Southeastern Center for the Arts in ATL which Neil and Jeanne owned before founding RMSP and moving west. They are a couple of great folks! Miss them.
Dear Scott,
Apologies. I just noticed that your question is still unanswered. Let’s see if I can help. To start with we have two drives: A = LaCie 250 and B = Some other 500GB.
If you start out using A (the 250) as your primary storage and you use an automated backup system like Carbon Copy Cloner then there is absolutely NO reason to turn on the “backup on import” option in Lightroom.
(I am not a fan of this button at all. Yes, this button makes a second copy of your files but it does not update their metadata nor will it ever update them after the import operation is over. This means that if you ever need to use these files, say after your main drive fails, that they lack your copyright, keywords, etc. and they are still full of the problems that you had already fixed.)
But again if you use Carbon Copy the way I do then you have nothing to fear. Carbon Copy will put your files onto the second drive and it will keep them up to date too.
So when the first drive gets full, I would promote the B drive (the 500GB.) Drive B becomes the new primary storage and then we go out and get an even bigger one to use as our new backup drive. We teach Lightroom the name of the B drive and we setup Carbon Copy Cloner again. In ten minutes you are all set to go and the old little LaCie can be used for any other purpose.
Does this help?
–David
David, Thank you for such a clear description. I have one question, as I am ready to make the plunge for the two drive storage/backup.
Do you hook both drives up to the computer using the 800 and a usb port? or do you daisy chain the two drives together. a very basic question, I know, but I’ve never used a back up drive in all these years. Feeling like my luck wont last forever…
Thank you!
Jacki
Dear Jacki,
If both drives have Firewire ports I would definitely daisy chain. Daisy chaining is one of the best things about Firewire since it means that you don’t need to buy a hub or install a whole mess of ports on your computer. Plus, daisy chained devices still run at Firewire speeds which will make your drives perform faster than they would if connected via USB.
best wishes,
David
David,
Thanks, I get it now regarding the question above. Thanks. Although I just created a new problem that I have sort of fixed. Was watching your tutorial on moving your LR Cat to an external. I bought this Mac and LR at the same time and started from scratch using your 2 drive system but somehow screwed up and had my catalog on what appeared to be my internal hard drive and external library. Watched you video on moving cat to external library drive and did what was instructed. Then moved the LRcat file from internal to the trash. Reopened LR and none of my folders containing pics were there!!! CRAP! almost died. Ended up importing entire catalog from Photo Library drive using the import button on left side panel in Library module. Only 550 pictures so not too big a deal. Then had rename folders. Now have duplicates of all folders on Library drive. Not sure why LR can’t see the original folders??
Great and helpful information. I am using a two drive system at the moment but I am thinking of adding a server for older images any thoughts on this?
I’m using a set up similar to what you’ve described, with one difference being that I have my catalog on the internal hd of my desktop. I’m considering moving it to the external drive where the bulk of my images are sitting. This would certainly make working with 2 different Macs a lot smoother,however,i have a couple questions/concerns about doing so:
A) Does performance suffer by having the catalog on an external (FW800) drive rather than the internal sata bus?
B) What’s the Best Practice for relocating an exiting catalog? If files from multiple volumes on included in the catalog are there any concerns about moving catalog or are the references to volumes absolute? (I suspect they are.)
C) At times I’ve enjoyed being able to work “offline” on my laptop (i.e. not connected to the disk with the RAW files). Of course, this limits me to Library functions, and it can be tricky to apply any changes made on the laptop back into the “Hero” catalog back on the main, desktop Mac. What downsides have YOU found to always having to have your external drive with you?
I’d love to here peoples thoughts on dealing with multi-user, multi-platform situations!
Thanks – great discussion
Mike-
Sorry about the delay. Your question slipped through the cracks. Apologies.
I don’t think that you will like the Lightroom + a server combo. Truth is that Lightroom is not a network ready program. Using a server as a backup is no problem but I think that you will have problems if you choose to keep your working files on a server or network disk.
There is a network version of Extensis Portfolio 5.0 but I have not tried it.
best wishes,
David Marx
Dear Mark,
These are good questions. First, I don’t think that you will notice a significant performance difference if you move your catalog from an internal disk over to an external Firewire 800 disk. There maybe a slightly longer pause when the program launches but after that there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference.
Moving your catalog to an external is easy and as you say the file path’s are absolute. Nothing to worry about here but an article that I wrote a few months ago might help.
How to Get Your Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive
You last question is the toughest. Like you, I tried keeping my catalog on my laptop’s internal drive so that I could “work” on my files even when they were offline. What I soon learned though was that I couldn’t actually do much. I could add metadata– keywords, labels, rating stars, etc.–but I couldn’t do much else especially in the develop module since the actual files are not available.
If you are adding metadata, and if your files are offline, you need to be really careful about backing up your catalog. Since the files are not available, the metadata that you add is stored only at the catalog level. Until the hard drive is reconnected this information cannot be passed down to the file level.
So what I learned the hard way is that if you do a lot of work while your images are offline, and if your catalog gets lost or corrupted, then you haven’t accomplished anything. :< Yes, its nice to travel without the external hard drive, and yes it is nice to have your thumbnails even when the files are offline, but its risky and it makes life far more complicated.
My post on the Write to XMP Switch might add some relevant info on this topic.
Hope this helps.
David Marx
Interest post. If I may, I’d like to add a couple of suggestions:
- About your suggestion that “The second disk can be a different brand and a different size. Identical brands or models is not the important part.”, I would say that you should make sure that the second disk IS a different brand. Different HD’s of the same batch are much more likely to fail at the same time. If you buy different brands, you are safer from this point of view.
- I keep an additional external HD backup in a safety deposit box in the bank. That prevents you from losing everything in case of fire in your house or office (even fire-proof safes are usually not safe for hard drives).
Giordy
Excellent points Giordy! You are definitely taking the right steps to prevent disaster.
Thanks for this long thread – very helpful.
One thing I haven’t noticed on this is how Time Machine fits (or doesn’t fit) into all of this.
My thought was to include a partition for Time machine in the main external drive that then gets copied to the other external HDs via carbon copy.
Make sense? Are there better options?
Thanks,
Joey
Dear Joey,
In my system, Time Machine has been disabled. I think that Apple deserves lots of praise for including Time Machine into the core operating system.
I love Time Machine for its ability to protect everything on my Mac’s internal drive but I don’t like Time Machines default scheduling. I think that running the backup every hour is overkill though you can change this with the free Time Machine Scheduler.
I also find that using Time Machine to backup an internal drive + an external hard drive onto a second external disk can get complicated. Again, in my system Carbon Copy Cloner does everything that Time Machine would do but I find it much easier to set the schedule and designate what gets backed up where with Carbon Copy.
I am not trying to convince you that my system is right and that your idea is wrong. There are no rights and wrongs here. What’s important here is that you find a backup system that works for you and that use it regularly!
Happy Holidays,
David
Hi Dave,
I travel a lot and take my computer with me when I travel. I will often edit shots and print them on the road. I also only use my laptop – no desktop. Do you have any suggestions as to how best set up my system for that? I don’t believe it will work to have a LR catalog on my laptop and my external HD; or is there a way to merge them when I return home? I do plan on storing my photos on an external HD, quite convinced of that, so I will download the photos off my laptop to the HD when I return home. But what about the LR edits and such?
Thanks,
Richard
Dear Richard,
Apologies for the delay. I wrote a response a week ago but digital gremlins ate it. This is a great question and its exactly why Lightroom has both an “Import Catalog” and “Export as Catalog” feature. Let’s assume here that you set yourself up my way with both your photos and your catalog on an external hard drive. Now when you need to travel you have two choices. One is to disconnect the external hard drive and then launch Lightroom. Since your main catalog is unavailable Lightroom will create a new one. Unless you tell it otherwise the new catalog will live inside a “Lightroom” folder inside of your Pictures folder. So far so good. You go out on the road and use this catalog to empty your memory cards and do your work.
The tricky part though is merging this work in with your main catalog when you get back home. To do this you need to restart Lightroom and force it to load your main catalog. There are many ways to do this but I think the easiest is just to browse over to your external hard drive, find your Lightroom Catalog file– its the one that ends with “.lrcat”–and double click. Be sure you launch the right file though because we are going to merge everything that you did on the road into this catalog using the “File > Import from Catalog” command.
Once you hit “Import from catalog” you will need to guide Lightroom over to the road catalog– the one that lives inside your internal Pictures folder–and select the “.lrcat” file. When the Import Dialog box pops up be sure to tell Lightroom that you want to copy all of the new files over to your external hard drive and that you want it to take everything including the “negative files.” Negative files, in this case, means the actual images regardless of file format and not just their Lightroom thumbnails.
Once the import is successful backup your external hard drive so that all of your new work is safely stored on more than one external hard drive. When you are sure that everything worked and that everything is safe I suggest deleting the travel catalog and all of the road images from your laptop’s hard drive.
For an excellent article on this process please read this excerpt from Martin Evening’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers.
–
David
P.S. Before you do any of this you need to really understand whats going on inside the Lightroom Catalog itself. This video from Adobe Evangelist George Jardine might help.
I have recently set up lightroom on my laptops (3) I have just taken a 9 hour course on lightroom and have purchased Scott Kelby’s book, “lightroom 2 a book for digital photographers” There Scott recommends using a 2 hard drive system, one for the edited photos, one for originals. This requires one usb 2cable and one firewire ieee 1394 cable. The problem is none of my laptops support firewire and I have been told that this method is obsolete in all new laptops. Is there anyway to get lightroom to differentiate between edited and non edited files, and still have backup copies of each on seperate harddrives?
Dear Marg Wood,
I must admit that I do not have a copy of Scott Kelby’s book on hand so I can’t check his exact advice but I have a few thoughts. First, I wonder if your new laptops do have built in Firewire ports but I would not be surprised at all if these are the Firewire 4-pin (mini) variety? For more on Firewire and its profusion of plug shapes and sizes please click here.
Even if you don’t have Firewire ports there is no reason why you couldn’t follow Scott Kelby’s system using only USB external hard drives. The type of connection–USB vs. Firewire– has no effect on what a drive can or cannot do. The drive connector only changes its data transfer speed.
Second and more universally useful, I don’t like Mr. Kelby’s advice that you should use “one drive for edited photos and one for originals.” With all due respect, I think this is a very inefficient way to manage your digital images and it makes protecting yourself with a mirrored backup system much more difficult. Before I go bashing Scott Kelby’s plan though let me point out that we are in complete agreement about the need to have multiple copies of your files stored on multiple hard drives.
As you can see from this tutorial, I believe in keeping all of my files–whether I have edited them or not–on a single hard drive. This drive is my working drive and it is regularly backed up (mirrored) to another external using quality backup software. Whenever you “edit”–edit here meaning to enhance or change the look of a digital photo–Lightroom marks the file’s thumbnail with a series of badges. The “Plus / minus” badge indicates that this file has been adjusted in the Develop Module. The “Cropping Badge” indicates that the thumbnail that you are seeing in Lightroom is a cropped version of the original file. If you are not seeing any of the badges in the lower right-hand corner of your Grid Thumbnails then you need to enable this feature.
Not only does Lightroom mark which files have or have not been developed or cropped but these labels are also searchable. You can easily tell Lightroom to find all of your files that have never been “edited” or to find only the ones that have been cropped using the power of Smart Collections For more on Smart Collections please check out this excellent article from lightroomsecrets.com.
Hope this helps,
David
I have just moved from a pc to a macbook pro and am delighted to find your site. Your articles have answered many of the issues I am having. I have always stored my images on external drives (multiple) and have just purchased the LaCie little big disk 1TB drive to use as my working drive with the LaCie Starck 2TB drive for the desktop backup drive. I use my macbook pro for travel and when in the office I dock it with an external LaCie monitor, keyboard, etc.
My question is….what is the advantage to having your Lightroom Catalog on the external drive if you only have one computer? The catalog doesn’t take up much space so my plan was to leave it on the laptop.
I am not looking forward to moving my folders within lightroom. I have close to 1TB of images to move and I am thinking it will take forever. I know you said be patient but I’m wondering if moving individual folders over is the only way.
Thanks again for providing such great information,
Carol
I just saw the comment from Mark back on Nov 30, 2009 and your answer. This answers my previous question concerning keeping the catalog on my laptop.
Thanks again for all of this very helpful information
I have an iMac, MacBook and two 500GB portable external drives. This is exactly what I want to do – thanks for the explanation. However, one further question: Since I want to go light in the field and carry only one external drive (as primary) is it practical to reverse the role of the laptop and external drive for backup purposes. In other words set up as you describe with the external drive as primary, but in LightRoom choose to backup to MacBook folder. That avoids using another program for the backup and maintains two copies of the photos. I’d do a third copy to the other external drive once I returned home.
Does that make sense?
Glenn
Dear Glenn,
I like your thinking! The only trouble that I see with your plan is the disk size. This should work fine as long as there is plenty of free space on your laptop’s internal drive. In my case your plan isn’t going to work because I have about 500GB of images but only a 320GB internal hard drive. Remember too that you need to leave about 20% of your computer’s internal drive free for the operating system to use as a “scratch disk.” But if you have the free space to spare go for it when you are traveling!
–
David
P.S. I should add here Glenn that I always travel with a second external hard drive that is a backup of my laptop. There is nothing worse then getting ready to teach a class and discovering that your laptop is dead and that now all your presentations are gone.