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Lesson Info

Archiving

now, this whole concept of cloud based computing, where we have this great program on our computer and on our IPad and on our phone. And but there's a cloud component. This is a really cool idea, and it allows for me to be completely backed up. So I put my images into my computer. They immediately go up to the cloud. So now I have a backup of those images. It makes it very safe. I love it, But there's a flaw, and the flaw in the system is that that cloud can get full. And the reason the cloud could get full is because your your subscription only comes with one terabyte of space or some subscriptions only come with, I think, 20 gigabytes of space. And so and you can always ADM or terabytes, you can add, you know, to to terabytes five terabytes 15. I mean, you could just keep adding terabytes. So if you are running out of space and you want to keep everything in the cloud, go ahead and up, upgrade to another terabyte. That's fine. That's a perfectly good solution. But there's also anothe...

r way to do it, and that is the process of archiving. Okay, so every photo shoot that you do, you're gonna have a certain number of images that you shoot. So let's say in this case, I have, you know, 50 images, I think 40 images, So I have 40 images that I took, but I don't necessarily need to keep all of those images, because in this case, it's a portrait. So I'm going to deliver the portrait's to the client, and then I don't need to keep any images that I don't want. And so I could maybe choose five or 10 images that I think are really great that I want to keep for my portfolio. But I don't necessarily need to keep the entire 40. And by choosing to not keep the entire job or the entire trip that I took, I am able to remove images from the cloud that I'm not going to ever be looking at. I'm gonna archive them. I'm not going to delete them. I'm gonna archive them. And the way I do that is really quite simple on I'll show you how to do it. But the point of archiving is you still have the images you still could go back to the images. You can reimport them if you wanna work on him again, if you wanna play with him again, you could look at them in another software if you wanted Thio. But you're gonna archive them so that you have them. But they're not tying up space in the cloud and tying up space inside of your computer. Let's do that. So here we are, looking at the portrait session that I did with Devon and I. You can see that I've got different star ratings. I've got two stars and one stars and four stars and five stars. So you're gonna have to choose at what level your star ratings becoming are there just archival? Or if they are, portfolio where the images And that's just something you have to choose. Which of these images do you want to keep? And for me, I'm just gonna choose all these five star images to keep. But before I do that, I need to archive the entire set of images. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna Hi, I'm gonna go to the job. So I've clicked on my, uh, my album, and now I'm looking at all the images I'm gonna hit, command A to select all of the images. Then I'm going to go to the share button. That's right up here in the very top So you can see that little box with a narrow. I'm gonna click on the share button and one of my export options is toe export. The original images plus settings. This is a This is your archive option. It really should say archive. Um but it just says you're exporting the originals with settings. And so that means that if I export something that is a raw image, it's gonna export the raw image, plus an ex MP sidecar file that tells me what I did to it. If I exported DMG, which is a digital negative, that's a raw image that has the information in it. It's going to export the DMG with the original changes that I made in light room inside the DMG. If I export a Photoshop document that I did some work too in light room after the fact, it's gonna export the PSD plus the ex MP sidecar file that will tell light room what I did with so you see the point. Everything's getting exported as what it iss with the settings that you've worked on. And that includes star ratings, flags, keywords, uh, metadata. Everything about this image that you've done in light room is going to be attached to it by either virtue of a DMG internally or by that X and P sidecar file. So let's go ahead and export the original images to all of these, and we're going to go to an archive folder. So we're going to the archive drive, and I suggest that you have a drive, a hard drive that is just for archives, and you could do one per year. Or you could have a really big archive drive that you can put years and years and years of things into You could have a raid system. It's really up to you how you wanna archive these images, but choose a drive and that becomes your archive drive. So when you're done with a job or when you're done with a trip, you're gonna take the whole trip and you're gonna just archive it that way. All the work that you did to the images is attached to the images they're all gonna be in a place just in case. That way, if something happened to your system, at least this one Dr would have all of the stuff that you've done. All of the changes you made, all of the stars, all the flags that would all be there as a as a last resort. So I'm gonna go into 2020 and I'm going to create a folder for this one. And this is going to be called 2020 10 0. Uh, that's the date that it was shot. You can also add a name so you could actually say what it is, uh, so that you know exactly what's in that folder and then hit, create, and you're archiving that and just hit export. Now all of these images are being copied and put into that folder. It's not moving them, it's copying them. It's taking the drugs, moving them over its taking any Photoshop documents and moving, copying them over its taking any raw images, copying them over. And it's putting all of the information about what it did to those files into that folder, and we'll go find that folder we're going to go to the archive and we're going to go to 2020. And we're going to go to this Devon portrait and you see that it has added a raw file here with an ex MP sidecar file that tells it what to do with that raw file. And then you'll see that there is a PSD that didn't have any changes made to it. And so it's just gonna be the PSD. And then let's see if there's any D and G s. I don't see any D and GS in this mess, So eso we've got the PSD s and C R threes with their X and P files. If there was a d N G or a J peg, it would be there as a D and G or A J Peg. Okay, so now that we've done the archiving and that doesn't take very long, it just simply copies all of those images over. We're safe. We've got all of our images in a secondary location with all the changes that we've made. So now we can do whatever we want to these images. And so what I'm going to dio is I'm going to go up to my image filter appear at the top and I'm gonna click on it. And by clicking on it, it's gonna open up the filter at the top and I'm gonna go up to this star ratings and I'm gonna say I want to see all of my images that are rated less than three stars. Now, let's say less than four stars less, actually less than or equal to three stars. That way I'm getting all of my four and five stars. I get to keep those, and I'm gonna highlight all of those because those are the ones I don't necessarily want. And I'm actually I'm just going to scan through them also just to make sure that there are any images that I want to keep. So I'm scanning, scanning, looking for images. This one I might want to keep here. So let me let me just look at this image. Yeah, I think I want to keep that image. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give a four star and see how it just disappeared from the filter. So now that one is a four star image, so now it's in one of my images that I'm going to keep. And so I'm looking at the ones I'm gonna reject and I'm looking for any additional images. I think the rest of these images Congar Oh, perfect. So now all I have to do is highlight all these command a highlight. All these and then I'm going to right click. And I have two options here, so I could just remove the photos from the album. And if I do that, it's just gonna remove them from the album. But they're still gonna be on the cloud, and they're still going to be in the light room catalog. So I don't want to do that. I actually want to delete the photos. And when I delete the photos, it's gonna ask me Hey, wait a second. Are you really sure you want to do this? Because we're going to remove it from your albums and everything. You've shared it. We're going to remove it from light room photos and they're gonna be deleted. But they're going to be stored on the cloud in a folder called Deleted Full photos for 60 days. And that doesn't cost you any space. That's just like a fail safe eso. If you made a mistake, you could always go grab them within 60 days. But it's going to delete these photos from your hard drive from your light room catalog and from the cloud and from all of your devices. If that's okay with you, click delete. And it should be because you don't want thes anymore. So I'm gonna hit, delete and now the filters telling me there are no more photos in here by that filter tag. And so now if I just close the filter, these are the images that I'm keeping inside of my portfolio. If I find one like this that I don't want But somehow it got a four star rating, I simply right click it and I go to the delete. Oops. I was going to delete two photos. I want to delete one photo, right click it. Go ahead and hit, delete, confirm. And now these are the images that I want to keep. And they could just stay here forever. Because remember, I've got now a copy that these air ever present, always available to me and those air my portfolio worthy. These the ones I really like. and I probably should pare this down a little bit more and Aiken anytime I want. Because I know that part of my work flow is when I'm finished with a job or when I'm finished with editing all my photos from travel, archive it to the archive drives so that I have an extra copy with all the work that I've done. And then I could do whatever I want with these files. I can I can delete them. I can keep them. I can do whatever I want because they are my copy. And the ultimate archive is in a hard drive somewhere. Now, one other point when we're talking about archiving. One other point is you can go to your archive anytime you like, and I have a secondary archive. So a lot of people worry. Well, what happens to that? What if that drive fails? I get it. So maybe you wanna have a raid one where you have a drive, and then that drive is copied. Or maybe you just wanna have that drive always duplicated up on the web so you could get something like back blaze or carbon copy or one drive or something like that where you have a cloud based system that doesn't cost very much. It's just a monthly subscription for an unlimited, you know, data dump on the on a cloud. You can use that. But for me, I actually use Google Drive because I have just unlimited space up there. And so I'm going to take my dry or my folder that I've just archived and all I need to do is open up my Google drive, and when I opened it up, I'm going to go to my archives. So I just go to job archive and I go to 2020 and I'm going to grab this archived image, and I'm going to just drag it there. So I'm grabbing those images that are archived, and I'm dragging it over there. And then once it's once it's on, it's way. As soon as it's up there Now, I've got it not only on a cloud based system somewhere else as an archive, but I also have it as a as a hard drive archived system. So the process of archiving is simply this. Go into light room, highlight all your images from that job, or from that travel session and you're going to export them as originals to an archive drive. You gonna put them in a folder? Identify You know, when they were shot, what the job was or what the what the trip was. And then once you've got them in there, once you've exported them, you can do whatever you want to the images that air inside of light room. You can delete all of them. You could delete all but a few of them your favorite ones, and that's gonna free up space in the cloud. And it's also going to free up space on your computer and on the hard drive that's holding all of those images. So you're gonna you're gonna have more room for new images coming in, but you're also going to be keeping the ones you really like, and those are the ones that are gonna be ever present on all of your systems. It's gonna be on your IPad. It's gonna be on your IPhone. It's gonna be on your computer. It'll be everywhere. But those were just the images you really love. The ones that the rest of them all the images you shot are in the archive drive. And if you also either attached that drive to a cloud based backup system or if you just have Google drive, grab that same folder that you just exported from light room into the archive, grabbed the archive folder and just drag it into Google Drive that will upload it to the cloud. And now you'll have a copy on the cloud for a total final backup. You'll have a copy in your archive drive as a total final backup, and you'll have all your favorites that are ever present everywhere inside of your light room system. That's perfect. You're gonna have You're gonna feel safe. You're gonna have everything backed up, and you always have the ability to go back to your original photos later. And all the work that you did is sitting right there inside of that folder. So when you bring them back in all the adjustments you made, all the stars, all the flags, all the keywords, everything is going to come right back in as though you never left