Storage of Photographs

Penny

Veteran
Having had an error note when I tried to export developed photos from LR to My Pictures:eek: (which has never happened to me before )
I deleted some of the many pics in My pictures and all was well.
However from my point of view I didn't think I had that many photos anyway, this got me thinking about external storage hard drive.

Then I thought just how many places were all these pictures..

1 My Pictures
2 Picasa
3 Light Room
Which is crazy ok I need them on My Pictures but do I really need to save them on the other two?
I assume I can move them back and forth if needs be anyway.

What do other members do?
 
Penny, keep the faith. I know that you're going to get some helpful responses as the day/evening/afternoon wears on! I've moved your thread in here because at present we don't have a hardware/software forum and, in the greater scheme, digital file storage is related to Image Processing.;)

When you say My Pictures - are you referring to a a place on your computer? Are you using a PC or a Mac?
 
Not sure about Picasa but Lightroom doesn't save additional copies of your images. It creates a series of thumbnail previews and it saves the changes you apply to images as a separate (small) file. This is what is backed up when you run LR backup. If you go to the Lightroom folder in Pictures, you'll see a Lightroom Catalogue Preview folder and a Backup folder. If you were to delete an image from your My Pictures folder that you had previously imported into Lightroom you would still see the preview images when you opened LR but with a little question mark to indicate that the actual file was no longer where it was.

What you can do to save space is delete some of the old backup files. LR stores all of these going way back and if you have LR set to back up every week these soon add up. You can delete all but the most recent of these if you wish or save the last 3-4 if you are more cautious.

I don't think Picasa creates extra copies of files either but I'm not entirely sure how it actually works.

So what you have in both cases (LR for sure; Picasa I think) is a series of additional files created for the programmes to work, but you don't have multiple copies of the actual RAW or JPEG files. So any file you delete from My Pictures is gone for good even if previews still show up in LR or Picasa.

I hope this is reasonably clear. If not feel free to PM me with any other questions or post them in this thread.
 
Thanks Olli; Every photo I had since using LR is still there as you say in thumb nail and even when I try to delete them they bounce back, to be honest it drives me mad! I don't back up deliberately because of having pics in the other places; whenever I open Picasa the pictures are there as how I left them; altered or not as case maybe.

It was so much easier when I didn't have LR trouble is I actually like using it and all my photo's go into it automatically.
cheers penny
 
Penny, you should be able to remove them.

If it is an image that you have deleted from your hard disc you go to the Library window in LR, right click on the relevant folder and select Synchronise Folder. This will give you the option of removing images from the LR catalogue that are no longer present on your hard disc.

You can also remove folders from LR without deleting them. Again in the Library window right click on the relevant folder and select Remove. This will remove the selected folder and all images from the LR catalogue but they remain on your hard disc.

You can remove individual images from LR without deleting them from the hard disk. In the Library window right click on the relevant image and select Delete Photo. This will give you the option of either deleting the image (which will remove it from your hard disc) or removing it from the LR catalogue only.

Regarding backup, the LR backup does not back up your pictures, it backs up the record of changes you have made to those images while processing them. If for any reason your LR catalogue gets corrupted or deleted you will be starting again from scratch with your RAW files.
 
Thanks Olli
I think I follow you; when I have deelted a pic I general click on remove from disk but think I understand what I should be doing now.
Still thinking about an external HD anyway after speaking to a friend this afternoon. cheers penny.
 
I'm a fan of external hard drives. I have two at the moment and when my hard drive gets too overloaded with files I'll add a third. They are very cheap - relatively speaking - these days so it's good to think big. Even if you think you'll never need a 500GB drive it's worth setting that as your minimum.

I also have full size unedited jpeg's of everything on Flickr and full size edited jpeg's of my better shots on smugmug. Just as soon as I'm back somewhere with a decent upload speed I'll be uploading all my RAW (probably as DNG's) to Amazon via Smugmug.

Two dead discs in the space of 18 months taught me a lesson I've never forgotten. Fortunately I didn't lose to much but it's not a risk I'm ever taking again.
 
I have ordered a 1TB western digital external HD the main thing was to make sure it is compatible with Wins 7 64bit which I understand it is.
Re Smugmug I don't know anything about this site but as you know I use Flickr but don't want to load all my pics off computer hence buying a external storage unite.
Thanks penny
 
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