Lightroom with smart previews and multiple drives

Hello all,

I am about to embark on changing over to Lightroom. I’m trying to be very specific with my questions so I’m not a PITA to you experts.


Plan: I want to have Lightroom on my desktop and Macair. Not the on-line version with on-line storage. I’ll then
keep the raw photos on an external drive, a RAID Drive. And have a back up copy of photos on a few portable drives. (I have four 1 TB SSD). Put the Catalog files on the desktop SSD on my Mac .
(Put copy of catalog on laptop to use with smart previews BUT have option of full raw files on external portable SSD.)
Work edits on desktop with RAID drive plugged in. Etc.

Question: if I then unplug primary RAID drive and plug in my second drive, same photo files and directory structure but raw files not yet edited, then open Lightroom, will smart preview then apply all the changes to those yet untouched raw files on the next drive?

I want redundancy but if I leave a backup drive untouched for some time and want edits to be also then backed up at some later date I don’t want to just overwrite the whole drive every time.

Second question grew from first. If I edit on my laptop with my travel drive what’s the easiest way to apply the edits to the main drive files back home.

Thank you,

Mike

Aronis wrote in post #19003025
Question: if I then unplug primary RAID drive and plug in my second drive, same photo files and directory structure but raw files not yet edited, then open Lightroom, will smart preview then apply all the changes to those yet untouched raw files on the next drive?

Only if the backup drive is set to have the same name/drive letter as the NAS.

The Lightroom catalog is just a list of file locations and edits. It stores the path to the file and if you unplug one drive and plug in another it will often have a different drive letter, so the path to the files will not be the same.

The first point to note is that RAW files (on your NAS or external drive) are never edited. RAW Developers like Lightroom and Capture One do not edit the RAW data. All they do is store a list of proposed edits and create a preview JPG. The edits are only ever applied when you export a final JPG/TIFF or send a file to Photoshop for editing.

Your Lightroom edits only exist in the Lightroom catalog, so if you want to back up your edits you only need to back up the catalog. Lightroom does this for you periodically. You can adjust how often the catalog is backed up by going to Edit > Catalog Settings > General.

Important: The default location for the catalog backup is the same drive as your working catalog. This is a bad idea because if the drive fails you will lose the working catalog and the backups. You should change the backup location to be the NAS or external backup drive.

Important 2: The Lightroom backup only copies the catalog.... not the RAW files. So you need a separate backup system to back those up.

The easiest way is to select all the holiday images and File > Export as Catalog (ensure Include Nagative Files is ticked) You can then import this holiday catalog/Images into your working catalog.

Thank you very much.....



Learning a bit more each day!

Mike

Aronis.
Adobe has made something simple into difficult.
What you need is Lightroom Classic.
Lightroom has Cloud Storage for your images.
Lightroom Classic has local storage, like External Hard Drives for your images.
I use Lightroom Classic.

I found this video helpful.

https://helpx.adobe.co​m …troom-smart-previews.html