Lightroom - need help with catalogies and collections etc

Zascar

I've started using Lightroom recently and I love it but I've made a total mess of it lately. So I have a few questions I'm hoping you can help me with:

I had to reinstall windows on my computer and I have ended up with 3 different catalogs, in different places. At first I had them all on my D drive - my second hard drive - but after I reinstalled I was unable to open that catalog so I created a new one, but this was created on the C drive. I'd rather keep everything on the D drive - so I need to rename them, move them and combine them. How do I do this?

I want to import a lot of old directories, but they contain both jpg and cr2 files. Can I get lightroom to ignore the jpg's - or do I put them in a different directory or something?

What about the Output - say I've imported a large shoot, deleted most and brought it down to the final e.g 25 I'm happy with. Whats best practice about where to store these on export?

Can anyone tell me the best practice for working with collections or how you guys do it?

Thanks

flyingsnail

Zascar wrote: »

I've started using Lightroom recently and I love it but I've made a total mess of it lately. So I have a few questions I'm hoping you can help me with:

I had to reinstall windows on my computer and I have ended up with 3 different catalogs, in different places. At first I had them all on my D drive - my second hard drive - but after I reinstalled I was unable to open that catalog so I created a new one, but this was created on the C drive. I'd rather keep everything on the D drive - so I need to rename them, move them and combine them. How do I do this?

If you want to move just the files (eg Raw jpg ect) then move them in Lightroom to the D drive. If you want to move the actual "catalogue file" this should just be a case of copy an pasting the file from the C drive to the D drive and opening it from there. As long as you don't move any actual photo files while doing this it should be fine.

Zascar wrote: »

I want to import a lot of old directories, but they contain both jpg and cr2 files. Can I get lightroom to ignore the jpg's - or do I put them in a different directory or something?

This only works in grid view, click "G" for grid view
When in lightroom go File > Import and select the source directory in the left hand navigation bar, then click "uncheck All" on the bottom left, further along the bottom bar you will see the word sort, click on this and select "Media type" , you can now click on the first Raw file and then navigate to the last raw file and "shift + Click" on that. All the Raw files from start to finish should now be selected. Click on the small grey box on the top left of one of the selected thumbnails and this should select them all. If you click import now you will only import the selected Raw files and not other files in the folder

Personally I would import the whole lot and use the filers in the library module to swap between RAW and jpeg depending on which I was looking for.

Zascar wrote: »

What about the Output - say I've imported a large shoot, deleted most and brought it down to the final e.g 25 I'm happy with. Whats best practice about where to store these on export?

Can anyone tell me the best practice for working with collections or how you guys do it?

I just store them in the same folder as the Raw files, you can easily use the filters in the library module to show only Jpeg or Raw. Personally I tag my photos blue (shortcut = 9) for the finished files.

Kenny Logins

You can open the existing catalogue and direct it to the new file location. There is a checkbox on import that allows you to treat jpeg and RAW as one file (ignoring the jpeg).

BTW, I always import as DNG as it store the metadata and jpeg preview withing one file.

pullandbang

Zascar wrote: »

What about the Output - say I've imported a large shoot, deleted most and brought it down to the final e.g 25 I'm happy with. Whats best practice about where to store these on export?

When the missus and I shoot a wedding we'll have maybe 800 - 1000 images from the day between us and they'll all end up imported into the one file. They'll be whittled down to around 300 edited images for the couple and for the album, they'll be whittled down further to around 100 - 120.

So the first export would be all the edited images which go up on our website into a private gallery for the couple to view. In order to choose which shots make the grade, we flag the ones we want, then filter that lot. Once they're all processed it's a simple matter to select all (flagged) shots and export all - usually to a subfolder within the original folder and usually named "Website". Of course these would be exported at 72dpi and maybe 800px on the longest side.

For album printing though we usually go back through the flagged shots and then star any shot we think we may use. You can use any of the rating systems in LR but starring them is handy. For convenience sake we break our wedding day into periods, for example, Preps - Church - Hotel. So then we process all the Morning Prep shots that we've starred and export them at 300dpi and full size, again into a subfolder inside the original folder, this time labelled "Preps". We repeat the process for the Church and Hotel etc.

At the end of it we have our original folder with all the DNG files, both processed and unprocessed and the relevant ones are still flagged. We also have a number of subfolders as outlined above and all the shots are handy to find - once you've tagged them properly in the first place.

Hope this helps....