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Hello, Everyone! After spending a delightful weekend with the Neelys, a couple of Staddons, and a few Wilkeses, we got to have a personal tutoring session on the drive home by none other than James! As I drove, I heard bits and pieces from the seating area about Lightroom and how great it is for organizing photos. Since my digital photos go back to 2004, when my husband’s work camera downloaded them by date as part of the name, I have always named them by date and then by event/topic. I switched to a Mac after my husband died, but I wanted to keep the photo-naming process the same so that ALL my photos begin by date. That helps me make graduation slide shows and other groups of photos that are chronological when sorting by name. I really love this method and was stumped as to how to do it on a Mac. iPhoto had me really puzzled and I didn’t know how I could download my pics and name them as I had always done. Well, a young missionary wife, married to the young man who sold me on the Mac, told me she uses Bridge. Ah! Now I could go back to my process/method. Then Bridge went through an update and would not recognize my Sony video camera. Sadness. I switched to PMB (Picture Motion Browser) and just let it download by date, but not event name. One day I saw that Bridge was again recognizing my Sony. I literally pay the monthly subscription so that I can download with Bridge! I have begun doing a few things with Photoshop, and am amazed at what can be done with it. I thought it was just for changing the color of a picture! So now I am champing at the bit to use Lightroom. Naomi (my middle daughter, who takes more pictures than ME, if that can be believed) and I have begun the photography course. We decided to jump to Lightroom lessons because we want to download those eclipse pictures! But Lightroom is giving me a strange message when I open it. I am attaching a screenshot of it, hoping someone knows what to do next.
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@momparfitt, have you ever used Lightroom before, or is this your first time to open it? If it is the first time, then don’t worry, just click on
Create Default, and Lightroom will take care of everything for you. Lightroom requires a catalog to operate, so when it can’t find one, it gets worried. 🙂I see. I don’t know if I opened it before or not. I must have, since it was in my desktop tray. Anyway, we have started the lessons and are watching several tutorials, and so far we have made a catalog for Naomi. I am about to complicate James’s uncomplication by making a second catalog for myself. Then Naomi can just open her folders and change pictures all she wants to. The big thing for us right now is deciding whether to take all our photos off the laptop and put them on a dedicated photo hard drive. I just happened to buy a pair of 8 TB drives recently, that are still unused. I think I will make them be my storage for identical copies of photos and put only photos and videos on them (I mean backup my backup). Then I can restrict my Time Machine drives to just backing up everything else: spreadsheets, documents, etc. I sure appreciate that you took the time to post an answer! By the way, does anyone have any idea why we can’t get the quiz for lesson 5.4 to load? Every time we click the quiz link, it tells us to buy the course! But we went on and read 5.5 and took the quiz. Strange!
Aha! We went back to 5.4 after 5.5 and 5.6, and it worked. It no longer said “log in” on that page. Praise the Lord. 🙂
One thing to keep in mind when considering whether to move all your photos to an external HDD…
External HDDs tend to be slower than your laptop drive, especially if your laptop has an SSD. That may be one thing to consider, Lightroom needs every speed optimization you can give it, and moving all your photos to a slow platter drive may wear out your patience with Lightroom when it takes even more time per photo! 🙂
Keep in mind that external hard drives are considered a long-term risk. All hard drives deteriorate over time. More importantly, having all you pictures in one location (laptop and external hard drive both in your home) adds to the risk. Today’s smart storage is on the cloud. For a few bucks a month, you can purchase gigabytes of storage through companies like Carbonite. Also, Apple, HP and Samsung, just to name a few, offer direct cloud storage without third party involvement. I’m not certain, but I think Lightroom CC includes cloud storage, which can be increased for an added cost to the monthly subscription.
Regardless of the above, our photos are irreplaceable treasures. Perhaps this subject could be addressed on one of the Q&A sessions to hear what the experienced photographers do.
I’ve been out of the loop over the summer! Fun catching up here…
I’m really fascinated with Affinity Photo, @vince, and may buy it one of these days just to do comparisons with Photoshop! I personally don’t use PS now as much as I used to when I did graphic design full time. I’d really like to see the differences and look forward to studying the comparison article you linked to earlier.
@momparfitt, I have begun working with multiple catalogs here recently and find it less confusing than I thought it would be. I import to the wrong catalog every once in a while, but for the most part there’s no problem switching between catalogs if there is a distinct reason to do so (like storing a completely different person’s photos, like as is your case). Where it becomes a problem is if there’s not a distinct reason to have two catalogs.So, what tutorials are you watching on using Lightroom, @momparfitt?
Oh, and by the way, you guys might be interested in this video I put together a little while back….
https://www.lenspiration.com/video/qaphotobackups/I’m an Apple user. Here is their really simple solution. When you buy a MacBook, you automatically get 50G of free storage on the Cloud. I purchased 200G for a mere $2.99 per month. MacBooks come with a built in app called Time Machine that automatically backs up all your files every 24 hours. I have 24,000 photos on the Cloud and haven’t even used half of the 200G. The beautiful thing is that all these photos are easily accessible from my MacBook, iPad and iPhone through Apple’s built in synchronization software.
@vince, that’s neat that Mac makes backing up your computer so easy. What will you do when your computer hard drive fills up?
I also use a 4T backup hard drive and manually back up everything about once a month. That drive I keep in a safe. Call me a fanatic, but I have a Carbonite backup plan that backs up the entire computer once a day. My entire life is recorded on this computer, legal documents, taxes, my life’s collections of photos, etc. I just can’t afford to lose it.
(I’m cross posting this on a couple of threads where Affinity was mentioned.)
For anyone on the fence about buying Affinity Photo (or Designer or Publisher) now is a good time to buy! They’re having a 30% off sale on all their products to celebrate the launch of Affinity Publisher for iPad! That means only $35 instead of the regular $50.
Unfortunately, as with most “design” companies, their sample illustrations are a little garish and sensual, so I won’t post a link to the sale page. You can go here to the store and just click on the one you want, the discount is automatically applied!
I use Affinity, and find that it is extremely capable. As pointed out before, it was Apple’s app of the year in 2015. It’s fully compatible with Apple and Windows. I agree that the pictures on some of their sample illustrations are a little “garish” as you stated. The price is a one-time fee and includes updates. That means no monthly charges to get a capability that some say exceeds PS. But, check the demos and judge for yourself.
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