On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 6:10 PM, paul stenquist <[email protected]> wrote: > > Good to know. But I'm rather stuck in my ways and probably won't change. If I > had you here to tutor me for two days or so, I might consider it:-). But I > just cringe at the though of converting my 100,000 plus digital files to a > new system.
Not that I'm trying to convince you to change to LR, but your statement represents a bit of a misconception which should be clarified for others' benefit as well as yours: If you were to start using Lightroom, you don't have to 'convert' anything. Your existing image file library remains exactly as it is, where it is. You instruct LR to know about whatever portion of it you choose to manage with LR (all, only new stuff, some portion of it, whatever) in place. For all TIFF, PSD or JPEG files, they remain exactly as they are, render as they are. For raw format files with XMP sidecars or DNG files with XMP data embedded in them, LR will simply read them in and set up the processing parameters to match the existing development instructions, if any exist. You can remove anything from the catalog you don't want to be bothered with looking at, read it in again later if you do, etc. And you can work with anything you don't import exactly the same way you've been working with it so far too. My image file library spans well over 280,000 original image files of all types now. The active or in-progress portion of that known to the catalog that Lightroom is set to open by default is comprised of about 65,000 of those files. I have another catalog which looks at only the recent (past four-five years) "finished" work, and a couple of other catalogs which I open occasionally to browse through older work which I'm not actively engaged in editing or working with. If I browse one of those older repositories and find interesting images I think might be germain to a current project, I export that subset as a temporary catalog and import that temp-catalog into the default catalog where I can integrate it with the currently active work. Lightroom is very flexible on file management ... you manage the files however you like. LR simply does what you tell it to do. It reads what you want it to know about so you can work with it. It can optionally move or copy things for you on import, if you want it to, or not. Importing 100,000 files in one go, into one catalog, is of course a time consuming task. But I've done it occasionally just to find out what all I had on a drive that I hadn't looked at in several years. Set it up, tell LR to import it, and let it work at it ... Nothing moves -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
