- Location
- Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Name
- Sue
As some of you are aware, I was intending to switch from iPhoto to Lightroom for general photo management on my mac... changed my mind, but in the process of copying out the contents of my iPhoto catalog, realised I had already done it, multiple times in the past. One of my external drives had four folders all of which were previous exports, copies, whatever. One of those had over 14,000 photos in it!!
After importing a few to Lightroom and starting to work on them, I realised that most of my editing is still going to be done in Photoshop. Additionally, Lightroom's detection of dupes was not very reliable (FYI none of the available programs *are* particularly reliable) so I gave up quickly, and decided to return to old habits: ie; iPhoto for storage and management, Photoshop and a few plugins for editing, and a separate folder for edited shots.
I am currently wading through everything I imported back to my iPhoto Library... but began with over 20,000 shots, of which approximately 1/3 are duplicates. The trick is in finding which are the "real" shots, and this is where the dupe detection thing falls over. iPhoto can be told not to import dupes, and it doesn't, but it can only not import *exact* dupes. I think this is probably what the issue was with Lightroom as well.
This has become a monumental task. Only 14,550 to trawl through now. From here on, I am going to be doing my deletes right away (to get rid of the crud) and where there are many similar shots, choosing one or two only, instead of having 9 million. And I will be keywording and rating which is something I have never bothered with, before.
Here's a question: How do people deal with their photographs on their first download to the computer? Delete some and keep only the best? Store everything but choose some for further action? Used to be I was told to keep everything, but after this exercise, I think that's just crazy.
After importing a few to Lightroom and starting to work on them, I realised that most of my editing is still going to be done in Photoshop. Additionally, Lightroom's detection of dupes was not very reliable (FYI none of the available programs *are* particularly reliable) so I gave up quickly, and decided to return to old habits: ie; iPhoto for storage and management, Photoshop and a few plugins for editing, and a separate folder for edited shots.
I am currently wading through everything I imported back to my iPhoto Library... but began with over 20,000 shots, of which approximately 1/3 are duplicates. The trick is in finding which are the "real" shots, and this is where the dupe detection thing falls over. iPhoto can be told not to import dupes, and it doesn't, but it can only not import *exact* dupes. I think this is probably what the issue was with Lightroom as well.
This has become a monumental task. Only 14,550 to trawl through now. From here on, I am going to be doing my deletes right away (to get rid of the crud) and where there are many similar shots, choosing one or two only, instead of having 9 million. And I will be keywording and rating which is something I have never bothered with, before.
Here's a question: How do people deal with their photographs on their first download to the computer? Delete some and keep only the best? Store everything but choose some for further action? Used to be I was told to keep everything, but after this exercise, I think that's just crazy.