A quick post today.
Adobe Lightroom has taken over most photographers’ post-production work. Myself included. Although Lightroom, an application for managing and editing and post-producing your images, takes a few days to learn, this is time well spent. Your post-production time (the time spent on your pictures after you get home) will be cut in half – or better. I recommend it.
When I teach Lightroom, people often ask me “how do you set it up?” – especially with regard to backups. Safety is everything.
So I thought that I might share my suggested file locations and backup methods with you here. Here’s how I do it.
- Catalog: The main Lightroom Catalog (which I renamed to something including my name, i.e. MVWPhoto.lrcat) lives on my main computer (in my case, a Mac). That’s standard.
- Photos: The actual images (raw) live on an external USB drive, in a folder called “PHOTOGRAPHY” (and within that, per year and then per date). New images go there too. That’s better than on my Mac.
- Catalog backups: I make a copy of the catalog every day (you can set up Lightroom that way, in Preferences). That copy also goes to the external drive (in a folder called “LR backups”).
- Photo backup: The external drive gets backed up to another external drive.I do this manually every day, or after every import.
To back up the first external disk (Iomega-1TB-1) to the second (Iomega-1TB-2), I run the following little script:
#Photo disk sync
rsync -a –verbose –progress –stats –delete /Volumes/Iomega-1TB-1/PHOTOGRAPHY/ /Volumes/Iomega-1TB-2/PHOTOGRAPHY/
If you don’t know how to create or run a command line script, just get a computer person to help you with it. It’s that simple!