Thoughts on Managing your photo library with Lightroom
I have been taking photos for about 8 years and have amassed a fairly large library of photos and (like lots of photographers) struggled with storage and managing libraries. It's compounded because I work off a MacBook Pro so storage is a premium, and I often don't carry around extra hard drives.
So here is what I have learned so far and wanted to offer it up as a solution to others.
Terry White put together this hugely helpful tutorial where I got some of the tips from.
Use Lightroom - Using Bridge and Photoshop is fine but it doesn't give you a great way to tag, do global adjustments, do more sophisticated contact sheets / web exports, etc.
Use one catalog. I thought it would be a good a good idea to have multiple catalogs and therefore I could archive each catalog to a hard drive and copy over the 5-star photos to a "best of" catalog. That's not the best way to do it -- that method is tedious, creates double images, and is hard to maintain. A better solution is to keep the photos integrated into one library rather than split them up and manage the photos you want off your local storage (more on this in a second.)
Update "Catalog Settings" / Metadata to "Automatically Write Changes into XMP" -- this makes it available to other apps that can use the XMP.
Import by Shoot / Vacation / Project NOT by date. Date structures are adequate for those who work in a file based structure (see above Bridge folk) but 5 years from now, date is one of the less interesting facts about your images. Organize by project is more conceptually interesting. I rename files by the type of shoot (this helps on export)
Tag your photos. It's really handy to do that so that when you want do searches later on themes, vacations, etc. it's easy to track those photos down.
Use Smart Previews. This allows you to have access to great quality of your images when the camera raw image (you are shooting camera raw, right?) is not available (e.g. on another hard drive.)
Use Lightroom's migrate function to move files to a non-local storage. I have a network attached RAID (I love my Synology!) and archive things there. It's shockingly easy to move images to that raid -- literally just drag and drop. Step 1: create a new folder on the RAID (or external hard drive) in Lightroom and then just drag the folder of images from the local service to the new one. Lightroom will copy and move the files over. Best part? If you have the SmartPreviews, most likely you won't miss not having them local when you are not attached to your server.
Backup your computer. I use both an Apple Time Machine AND a network system (CrashPlan) for extra redundancy. This helps ensure that my laptop is protected against catastrophic failure and theft.
Backup your archive. You knew this already but duplicate your archive and have a backup. I haven't taken advantage of Synology's Amazon Glacier backup service (pennies for GB) but plan on getting into that next to have remote backups of my files.
Smugmug has a great Lightroom plugin that allows you to do much of the same backups remotely AND you can use that to share pictures with folks.
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