hey all.....enjoying lr2 now! Question:
I import say 30 pics. I develop them all and then export to a separate storage hard drive for somewhat safe keeping. Now, I am done with these photos unless I want to go cs3 or paint shop. When I load lr2, it brings up everything still, all the photos I already exported and edited. How can I prevent this or is this just lr2's way of saving my pics?
This is the way LR works... its catalog is a way of organizing your pics. Thats why it has the extensive keywording system... its a way to sort through potentiallly thousands of pics when used. (But note that the catalog does not CONTAIN your pictures, just links to their location on disk.)
Depends on your workflow, but you may be better served using LR a little differently (and a bit more as how I see it was intended.)
See, all your edits are stored as text instructions in the LR catalog... completely non-destructive. You really don't NEED to export your images and take up more disk space at all until ready to print, upload to web, or further edit in PS. That's one of the powerful things about LR... you can do you LR editing (even multiple version of same image) and not need extra files filling up your drive. As far as backups go, you would still want to backup all your pictures... but also be backing up the LR catalog to external drive, as this is where all your edits reside.
My backup drive is a mirror of my pictures folder on my local machine... same file/folder structure completely. I also backup the LR catalog to that location. If need be (reinstall of OS, disk crash, etc) I put my folder structure and catalog back in place, and when I open that catalog in LR, edits and everything still in tact.
- note... if all this doesn't quite make sense, you may want to see if your local library has any of the LR2 books by Scott Kelby or others. They've got some good real-life workflow examples.


