Advise me on cleaning and organizing my LR3 catalog

Good afternoon,

My father-in-law gave us his iMac, so I'm going to move the whole LR3 library onto an external drive, so I can use it on the laptop for easy tethered shooting, and on the iMac for editing on a larger screen and more ergonomic work environment. As part of the move/transition, I'm trying to clean up my catalog and workflow, and looking for advice.

1. PSD files.
So far, I have NOT been adding all my PSD files to the LR3 catalog. My general workflow is to import the source file and convert to DNG, do basic corrections in LR3, open from LR3 into PS, then save the PS file as a flattened TIFF (readable by LR3) as well as a layered PSD file (so I can edit more in the future in PS). The TIFF file becomes part of the LR3 catalog, but the PSD file just sits there in the same folder, not part of the catalog.

Any tips here? Should I skip the TIFF file altogether, and save the PSD files with "Maximize Compatibility" turned on? Any down-sides to that? Maximize Compatibility will bloat the file size of the PSD file, but I think it may save total disk space if I don't need a separate TIFF.

Or, should I add the PSD files to the LR3 catalog, even though LR3 can't really do anything with them (no previews or anything).


2. Raw+JPEG files
For a while I was shooting Raw+JPEG files, and not realizing that Lightroom was copying and importing both. Now, I want to discard (remove from catalog and delete from disk) any JPEGs for which I also have DNG copies. Any tricks here? Some way of using a smart collection or quick collection?


3. Storing on a USB drive
Will I notice a significant performance hit by moving my catalog from the internal drive to a USB2 drive? If so, will that only be during importing, or will it impact performance of everything I do? How about an external Firewire800 drive, any better?

We have a Voyager Q drive dock, but my wife is using it most of the time; I just borrow it for running backups.


4. Backups.
So far, my method for storing offsite backups has been to just use "export as catalog" to dump everything to an external drive (SATA drive in the Voyager Q drive dock connected by Firewire), then I store that drive offsite. Any recommendations for something better? It's slow, but I just let it run overnight. I expect it'll take even longer if my main catalog is on an external USB drive and I'm exporting to a different external drive... still, if it's running while I'm sleeping, I don't care how long it takes.

"Export as Catalog" doesn't preserve the PSD files that are currently not part of the LR3 catalog.

1) Lightroom can "read" psd files, so really there is no need to have an extra tiff just for the Lightroom library. In Lightroom, go to your Edit/Preferences and to your External Editing tab, and in the Photoshop panel, select psd instead of tiff. Then, when you do an Edit in Photoshop function, LR will create a psd and add it to the library. Do an operation in Photoshop and just Save -- the changes should be visible in Lightroom. I just tested this by using a Black and White adjustment layer in PS and saved without flattening and it shows up fine in LR.

What I don't do, though, is try to use LR to adjust pics like that after Photoshop. If you want to do that, I'd say flattening would be the way to go. But for my work, I don't see the use of having a flattened tiff as well as a psd. But whatever works for you!

2) You can get rid of the jpegs in LR by getting everything in the grid/filmstrip and then changing your Sort order to "File Extension" or "File Type" -- you'd need to select all the jpegs one way or another then just delete them. Do this in LR so you don't have to do a separate operation.

3) If you have USB 3 then it should work quickly. Firewire 800 will as well. But I don't have that new "stuff" on my PC so I do all my "short term" work on my internal drive then move my stuff onto an external "library" drive.

4) Well, I don't backup that way -- I just copy my library folders/files over as needed. But again, whatever works for you. I know you can automate backups that will keep everything synchronized, you might check that out.

It's important, or at least very helpful, that you have an "intelligent" file system with "parents" for your images that are part of your Lightroom library/catalog and reflected in your backup. That way if you need to resort to your backup and Lightroom discovers that your images are "missing" then you can point it to your "parent" folder(s) and LR can pick up the missing sub-folders.

Just my random thoughts!

1) Save the tiff with layers, or a layered psd, whichever you want. I'd skip the flattened tif if you want to skip something.
2) What Tony says
3) USB2 is significantly slower. FW800 is faster, but I keep images I'm working on on my internal and move them to external after I'm done.
4) Backup the image files (CR2 and tif) separately! The exported catalog is just the settings (unless you tick "export negative files"). Set LR to backup the catalog each time you exit, and set it to back up to an external (or Time Machine-d) drive.

Thanks for the advice. My responses.

1) LR3 does not show previews for my PSD files, though I presume it's because I have Maximize Compatibility turned off. I'll go back and re-save a couple with that box checked to see if that makes a difference; I expect it will. I think I had turned it off because it gives a little warning dialog about increasing file size when it's turned on, and I'm always trying to save disk space.

2) My Lightroom library contains a lot of jpegs from my old point-n-shoot, as well as from my Canon from before I started shooting raw. So I can't just throw out ALL my JPEGs; I only want to get rid of the ones where I have both DNG and JPEG. I may just have to go folder-by-folder... shouldn't take too long, I guess.

3) I'll have to do some experimentation and see what works. I've read up a little on merging catalogs, so maybe I'll have a temporary "working" catalog on the internal disk, and medium-term storage on the external USB disk, and merge the internal files onto the external disk when I'm done with that shoot.

Or maybe the slowness of the external drive won't bother me. Guess I'll find out.

4) I do let Lightroom make its daily backup of the catalog (settings), but for my offsite storage, I've been exporting the catalog with the "export files" box checked, so I'm pretty sure it backs up everything. So I have many backups of the catalog (settings) and a couple backups of the images.

On a related note to that:
For the daily catalog/settings backup, there any way to exclude the previews? They take up more disk space than I would expect. If I have an emergency and need to roll back to a previous catalog, I won't mind waiting for it to re-render the previews that I want... I don't need gigabytes of backups of previews that can be easily re-rendered.

1) Yes. LR reads the flattened image that "Maximize Compatibility" creates. It cannot "read" the separate layers.
Related note) LR doesn't back-up the previews (Catalog Previews.lrdata), only the Catalog.lrcat file.

nathancarter wrote in post #13675443
Thanks for the advice. My responses.

1) LR3 does not show previews for my PSD files, though I presume it's because I have Maximize Compatibility turned off. I'll go back and re-save a couple with that box checked to see if that makes a difference; I expect it will. I think I had turned it off because it gives a little warning dialog about increasing file size when it's turned on, and I'm always trying to save disk space.

If you open the LR Preferences and read the "fine print" when you have chosen to use PSD when you Edit in Photoshop, it stated that if you don't use the Maximize Compatibility option, "failure to do so will result in images that cannot be read in Lightroom."

So you can save an image with layers but it has to have compatibility turned on. I haven't messed with how much "editing" you can do in LR to a psd with layers and how then it will "look" in Photoshop -- something to play with!

In the LR Library module you can select multiple folders and all the images in those folders will show in the grid/filmstrip, so then sorting by file extension/file type will only sort the images in the selected folders. So your jpegs from the earlier cameras can be "spared"!

Well, to "merge" two sets of images with the catalog data you have the choice of either Exporting as a Catalog from the one catalog then opening the other catalog and Importing from Catalog which, once you get a "feel" of things, works pretty seamlessly (and imports all metadata such as collections, flags and such) or you can select images in the first catalog and do a "Save Metadata to File" and then in the other catalog do a "Read Metadata from File" and it will get most of the metadata but not all. The Export/Import process is more "complete".

Once you're done, within Lightroom you can then just delete your exported folders if you want to get them off of your internal drive.

I believe you said you are using a Mac? Check as to whether it has USB3.0 -- if so, using either it (and a USB 3.0 drive) or Firewire 800 are both good fast options. Otherwise, like me, you may be stuck with the slower USB2 (or Firewire 400), which is why I use my internal drive for the "short term" work.

The thing is, to do a backup you really don't need to do the Export as Catalog operation unless you really want to "Export the negatives". But, to each his/her own!

You can set Lightroom to toss out previews after a period of time in the Catalog Preferences in the File Handling tab.

Also, you can delete backup catalog folders at any time. I periodically go through my backup "main folder" and delete ones that are more than say a month old. It clears out that cluttered disk space!

But as far as I know there is no option to not back up the existing previews.

So I've turned on "Maximize Compatibility" then gone through all my .PSD files (thankfully, not too many) and re-saved them. In some cases, it made almost no difference in the file size; in other cases, it made the file almost five times as large. In just about every case, it was still much less disk space after I deleted the corresponding tiff that I don't need any more.


I can't figure out how to separate the files that I've already imported as DNG+JPEG. In Preferences, there's a check box that LOOKS like it would separate them... but checking that box seems to do nothing. See, in the Grid View Extras it says "DNG+JPEG" and I can't seem to separate them. I haven't tried just deleting them from the Finder file system; I would prefer to do it the "right" way from within Lightroom, if possible.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/nathancarter/6​671149361/

Do the DNGs and Jpegs show up side-by-side in the grid view? If not then they are likely "stacked" and stacks don't show the same behavior as unstacked images.

So, Select All photos (Ctl-A) then right-click on a photo and go to Stacking and then choose Expand all Stacks. The selected stacks should "break up" and since your sort order is set to File Extension the jpegs should end up at the end of the grid.

That's a guess on my part since I'm not sitting at your computer dinking around with things but I know I don't care for stacks because they do "hide" things, and I don't shoot Raw+jpeg and so can't play with things so much.

They don't look like stacks; I think stacks have the little double-bars on the sides of the thumbnail in the grid view, and I think they usually have a number in the corner of the thumbnail, showing how many are in the stack.

Good idea anyway; I'll try unstacking when I get back to that computer and see what happens.