Organizing Images

That’s not the point. Any system can be recovered from a backup. We’re looking for a reliable system that seldom needs a recovery. The fact that you can recover a system from a failure is a weak recommendation for using it.

After working in Silicon Valley for 40 years I don’t need a lecture on backups.

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Thank you, yes always sage advice to back up. I’m moving away from anything Adobe CC related in a couple of weeks back to a previous standalone version that does still work on Windows 10. I also now own Luminar which has a cataloging aspect to it I have to learn. In the meantime I need to move on this type of work is now part of my business and right now, scattered on portable hard drives and DVDs with contact sheets. It’s going to be a Herculean undertaking but I plan to bring relevant images to my server which has mirrored hard drives.

Oh my gosh, thank you! I will look into both. Thank you for the resource suggestions!

Thank you everyone for your responses and great suggestions! Event though I haven’t posted images yet or been as active as I would Iike to be, I really am thankful for this group of photographers - everyone is so giving and caring. Thank you.

I need to make this project a priority. I want to cry at how I thought I was organized when the images were just considered fun and personal but now I face the envelopes, boxes and file drawers of slides and negatives of all sizes, DVD’s with contact sheets in notebooks and boxes and then there are the couple portable hard drives too. I wish I could just go into a time warp and concentrate on this because it is indeed becoming a part of my business - not just the personal images that don’t have a use.

The irony is- because it’s not income-producing yet my brain has not made this a priority, yet as it becoms more and more a part of my business then it IS a priority - I have to wrap my brain around that and set aside the time…but then it’s business as usual and I take care of the clients and weekly routines and there we are, the project gets pushed off and pushed off.

I am discontinuing Adobe CC in a week or so - they have ticked me off enough and I resent being held hostage to a subscription I have no control over. CS5 still runs on Windows 10 and LR4 as well. But I have bought Luminar which has a cataloging aspect I need to learn, plus I need to map out my hierarchy. The right images will be brought onto my server which has mirrored hard drives, so the back-up aspect is fine and I have a trustworthy tech guy who watches out for me and my equipment.

In the rare case that I need to access my server remotely, I use TeamViewer and transfer A copy of the files I need to my laptop to work on and then save on the laptop plus transfer back to the server remotely.

I’m relaunching my business on Monday actually and it has consumed all my time in redefining everything and now is the time I will need to start this project because I’m running out of my own brainpower trying to remember and find particular images I want, not to mention the amount of time I spend searching, simply to illustrate emails and blog posts.

Thank you all for taking the time to respond!

FWIW, my understanding is that this LR problem affected only those using the mobile device version. My LR for my PC was unaffected.

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I have been using Photoshop CC for quite some time, and have never had any issues, including never losing any images due to PSCC. Note that I do not use Lightroom. I use a program called Photo Supreme for cataloging images.

Keep in mind that if you go back to CS 5 and LR4 you will not be able to get any security updates, or bug fixes of any kind. Also, you will not have access to the refinements present in PSCC (and other Adobe apps) if you end your subscription.

Personally, I store nothing in the cloud. All of my digital and scanned images are on on-site hard drives, and they get backed up on a regular basis.
-P

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Thank you, agreed, I know it’s going backwards. I’ll have to look into Photo Supreme. I store nothing in the cloud either. I weighed the options and never used any of the apps nor cc for storage. Adobe has become a monopoly and I’m tired of the umbilical chord and no control.

Cheryl: In terms of alternatives, many of the people in our local camera club (and they’re the better photographers and processers) have moved to ON1 for their processing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the third party plug-ins available that PS does, but apparently it works quite nicely. It doesn’t have any file management, so you have to do that independently.

Igor_Donov,

First off I wasn’t given you a lecture. I was just stating my opinion. I thought this was a discussion. No need to get defensive. So forgive me for not apologizing.

I agree, that being able to recover is not a recommendation for using a system, software, app or hard drive will fail eventually, thus the reason for backup just as the reason for any insurance. Believe me, I am not a fanboy of Lightroom especially since they moved to the subscription based platform i.e. “ecosystem”. I do not and don’t plan on ever using the Lightroom CC platform. I do however use Lightroom Classic which is basically the old Lightrooom standalone. It is basically like having Microsoft Word 365 subscription. Even Quicken has gone to a subscription based platform and I suspect so will many more software across all genres.

Anyway, back to Lightroom since the standalone version 3 and have yet to have a corrupted catalog. Perhaps I’ve been lucky. That said, I’ve had other issues with Lightroom but none severe enough to out weigh the convenience of using the platform for digital asset management. I know there are many, many softwares available for digital image asset management, I’ve tried some including, Luminare and CaptureOne, which are both good but since I’ve had Lightroom since version 3 none have offered any functionality worth my trouble of changing at this point. But if Adobe ever gets rid of the Lightroom Classic version I will probably make a change then. As I have no desire for my images to automatically cataloged, tagged and sorted for me. At my age (69) I’m not ready for that radical a change (thus why I still use Quicken on my computer not the online only version).

Thank you- I will check it out!

Hi Cheryl,
Hope you don’t mind a revisit. I felt just like you when Adobe moved to the subscription model. However, Tim Grey changed my perspective and although I’m still not a an Adobe fan of I still like using LR Classic. You can use Classic version without even touching the online version, except for paying for subscription and when needing help or tutorials. As someone as said, if you go back to standalone you’ll lose many of the advancement since Adobe made the switch. Since you were like I was too, a portrait photographer, I think you’d like CaptureOne. If you shoot with Sony, I don’t think you do, you can get the express version, aka Sony only, for free. I used it along side LR for a while but as an old dog I wasn’t willing to learn new tricks even though by all accounts (not mine) Capture1 offers superior raw capture processing and several different ways of cataloging your images.

Thank you George - I feel so understood! lol. I will definitely look into it. I’m Canon so you are correct that I’m not Sony. I do have some things to figure out and some new systems/workflows to develop as I partially move into this new world in a more serious way vs “just for fun”.

And I still have a standalone QuickBooks too! Not worth $50 a month to me. I am trying to keep my life as simple as possible and have barely used or learned LR. Though I’m getting better with it so maybe that’s why it would be so easy for me to switch. I have used PS since early 2000’s so I have grown with it but I am seeing so many other things and I know I don’t use it nearly to what it has available because I don’t need to.

With all these subscriptions, I keep thinking how people would come to the studio asking for ads and sponsorships…" it’s only $25" . But what they don’t realize is that their $25 request is the 5th one this month. Like the subscriptions…$9 for Spotify, $10 for Adobe, $12 for Canva, and so on…all ads up. What is truly important and what will make me money? Not Spotify - I’ll deal with commercials, not canva - the free version is fine. Adobe losing my entire workflow as if I had just loaded a brand new version - which in essence is what happened but without my consent or time set aside to set up - was a waste of my time and energy and caused me so much stress (needed to get a job to the lab) and lost time that it was the final straw. My standalone CS5 a tad slow now but came to the rescue while I sat waiting for someone from Adobe to chat and treat me like I was an idiot. My goal across the board this year was to simplify so I seem bent on seeing my bank account with only my car payment coming out. lol, ok. rant over. Thanks for reading and responding. Everyone in this group is great!

Hi Cheryl,
I use LR almost exclusively, and find it very easy to organize my folder hierarchies. I basically have the following:

Pictures
All New Imports
Bodies of Work

and then folders by topic or location:
Birds
Coast
Columbia River Gorge
High Desert
Mount Hood
ICM

Within the topic folders, I have either dated folders or an additional location and then dated folders. So, for Columbia River Girge, for example, I have each waterfall or view point, and then dates.

I also have the following on my desktop:
Email and Delete
Share for Feedback

These last two allow me to easily purge the hundreds of small files that I have bigger originals for but also see the versions shared for feedback at 2.9 mb, etc.

FWIW, I love “All New Imports” because I go through those, and when I’m done editing and processing, they get filed into folders by location. Any folder in All New Imports (which has subfolders by date) has things I’m still working on. Sometimes there’s not much there that’s still on my front burner because it either gets filed or gets put into a Body of Work (a series I’m working on or have completed, to the extent anything is ever complete).

Hope this helps. One crucial factor is that all folders should be created IN lightroom to show up in LR and in Windows or IOS or whatever your computer uses. If you create it in LR, it’s in Windows Explorer, etc.

ML

Thank you so much. Very helpful, I am starting to catalog by date and place for starters. I appreciate your help.

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Igor,
Lightroom corruption definitely is an issue. Although it is possible to at least partially recover the catalog file using SQLite, I have done so in dozens of cases after the same thing happened to me and I found the method on the web. If you still have the corrupted LRCAT file, let me know and I could try to rebuild it.
Holger