Lessons

Lesson Info

Connectivity and Data

So what point does this whole cloud thing need the internet? And so I'll describe that. So if I'm uploading, and let's say, I'm taking a card from my cam and I'm putting it into my computer and I want to import into Lightroom CC on my main computer I don't have to have an internet connection. It will import the images into my computer and put 'em on this hard drive without internet. It will want internet, but it doesn't need it until I decide I'm on the internet or as soon as I plug my ethernet cable in or I turn on my WiFi, at that point, it will recognize it has internet and it will start uploading those files. But you're not backed up in the cloud until it's had internet connection long enough to upload everything. Once the upload has occurred, again, you don't need internet you can work on these files and you can play with 'em and you can adjust 'em because you have the files here. Now, this computer over here needs internet in order to get the stuff down to it. But once it has the...

proxies, so even though it has none of the photos on here it has proxies that pretend to be the photo, once those are all down, this doesn't need the internet. And I can work on those, however, if I adjust images here the only way for them to get to the rest of my devices is for the internet to come back on. Once the internet comes back on, the changes that I've made will go up to the cloud and then they will come back here. And this would need internet in order to suck those changes down. Now, most of us on our computers have internet constantly because we're at work and there's WiFi or we're at home, and there's WiFi so that's not gonna be a problem. Usually the place that you find internet issues is like, I'm traveling, I'm in a plane. So I'm not gonna have internet for five or six hours while I'm gettin' on a plane and then I'm going on the plane and them I'm getting off and I go to the hotel and then all of a sudden I have internet again. So, whatever you do you're doing it on this computer and then as soon as it gets connect to the internet all that stuff goes up, as long as the program is on. Now, that's a little different for Lightroom Web, because obviously if you're on Lightroom Web, you are on the internet. So the stuff that's happening there is happening instantly, simultaneously. As you're working on it, it's on the internet so it's already there. It doesn't need to synchronize or anything like that. On your phone, or your laptop, let's go, let's actually look on my or sorry, on my iPad, let's look on my iPad here and I want to show you a setting that has to do with that. So if you're looking at all your images here on your iPad or your phone or whatever you'll notice that there is a Lr symbol in the left hand corner that's your Lightroom...settings. If you click on that, you get all these settings down here. There's just a couple of them that you need to know, but one of them is Cloud Storage & Sync. When you click on Cloud Storage & Sync you can tell it to use or not use cellular data. If I turn that off, it will never use cellular data, it will never use your plan, you won't run out of data, stuff like that. So, for people who have a limited amount of data make sure that that's off. And then that will only use the connection to the internet when you are around WiFi. However, I have unlimited data, I'm on a plan with unlimited data and so I just keep it up. Now, the next section right here this one, says: Only Download Smart Previews. I don't want this whole iPad to be filled with a hundred gigabytes of photos. There's no reason for that. And so I'm telling it to 'Only Download Smart Previews' which are basically the same thing that this is downloading here, so this computer is downloading basically Smart Previews or proxies. This is downloading proxies or Smart Previews to save space. But I can still adjust 'em, I can still work on 'em, but it's just downloading 'em faster, and it's saving space on my device. Still needs the internet to send the adjustments up. So if I adjust something on my iPad, I need it to get back to the mothership. The way it does that is internet. If I allow it to use cellular data for that, it (finger snap) goes like that. And it doesn't use much cellular data because it's just like a two, three byte signal. Hey, change this to that, that's it. Change the slider to this position so it's just a very small amount of data. So your phone or your iPad can be using cellular data to adjust images and it won't have a problem at all. You're not gonna overload your data plan on adjusting images, but you might overload your data plan on sending photos up and down. So you have to decide how much data your willing to use on your data plan. If I'm going somewhere and I'm gonna be uploading and downloading a lot of photos and stuff like that and I'm worried that my data plan's gonna like for instance if I go overseas, I have unlimited data but they throttle me at like a certain amount and then I can't even look at Maps, it's horrible. So at that point I'll come in here and say turn off cellular data, that way it only happens on WiFi. So you just make that call whenever you decide is right. Okay? So that's important. If you are on the internet it will be sending the changes you make whether you're on cellular or whether you're on a WiFi or a hard line. So, you need internet in order to send changes and to send photos, that's the only time you need it. Any other time, you can just work on it as though it's all resident on your computer. Now, if you're on this computer over here and you want to go ahead and print one of these or send out a full file to a client or something like that, at that point you gotta be on the internet so that you can actually suck the original photo down from the cloud, to then print out. So anytime you wanna send out the original file you've got to be able to connect to the original file. On this one, because remember this one, this is our secondary computer, this is the one that we have none of the photos on it, so that we can just travel around with it it's our little tiny computer. Whereas this one has all of 'em resident here on this hard drive, it never needs the internet connected unless I want things to start backing up. Or to see changes that I made on some other device. Okay? I think that answers that question very thoroughly. Yep. Okay, good. Do we have any other questions before we kinda start pushing ahead that need to be asked? Any questions from you guys, any? Yeah? I just had a question about your hard drive, you said it's a RAID, it's a solid state drive, I know you've talked about it in other classes you have but just mention what it is. Okay, yeah so, hard drives. Hard drives are faster if they're solid state rather than spinning, so my preference is to always have solid state. I have a solid state inside this computer, most laptops are now solid state, but I also have solid state inside here. So you can get a terabyte, even a terabyte and a half sometimes even two terabytes at a decent price nowadays for solid state, so I would go solid state because they're faster, if you accidentally drop them they don't break as easily, they don't like jostle around, anything I'm traveling with I always have solid state because I don't wanna have to barely set it down, you know what I mean? If I bump it a little bit it doesn't destroy the drive, where a spinning drives are very volatile. Spinning drives are also more prone to get little glitches on 'em and like, if the needle happens to strike the spinning disc it'll nick it and then all your data's gone. So spinning drives are just troublesome. So solid state, and then my preference is a RAID 1 hard drive. What a RAID 1 hard drive I'll show ya this I'll turn it towards you, but you can see it's got two drives. So the two drives are so that you can have drive one, is getting all the data. So you put your photos on drive one, and drive two is always an exact duplicate. So as you're putting the photos on drive one they're also going to drive two at the same time. So drive one and two are always the same which means that if for some reason drive one was to die, which sometimes happens a hard drive will just stop working, drive two is still good, and it's the same thing. So all you have to do it take drive one out, put drive two in drive one...you're back online, everything's good, because you have that copy and you just put it into -and then you take a new drive and you stick it into drive two position and it takes everything on drive one, puts it on drive two. So it's just always making a copy of whatever it is you have, so you have two copies of everything. You just need to, if it's data, you need to be protected and that's the way to protect is having some kind of a duplicative system. Some people will use other types of RAID systems, like a RAID 5 and a BeyondRAID and all those kind of things. The problem with those is they're so complicated that if something happens to them you have to send them to the company to fix it. Whereas if something happens to this box that these hard drives are in I can actually just pull the hard drive out and this is a little cheapo, it's plastic, and it's uh, 35 bucks at the computer store. And I can just plug this in, and I can take any drive from here, shove it into this little thing like a toaster, and it'll go onto my computer and it'll be like I've never, like this, it'll look just like it was in this. So, a RAID 1 makes it much more possible to uh, fix things in a pinch. If something breaks on this, I can pull the drive out, shove it into any other box, and it'll work. Whereas if you're on a RAID 5 or some other crazy system then you end up having to send to the company to repair their box. So, that's why I prefer a RAID 1. But most importantly it's just 'cause I have two copies of everything. But now that you have the cloud, you have that copy up there in the cloud that probably has 15 copies of it across various different places because they back everything up and then they have 12 copies inside of every server farm and they've got, you've got millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars backing your stuff up. And you have an IT professional whose job is just to watch the discs. That's what you're paying for when you pay for your Creative Cloud service. You're not just paying for Lightroom and Photoshop you're paying for Lightroom, Photoshop, and an IT professional to watch your disc drives for you. Right, so that's a pretty good deal. So there's a lot of different plans when it comes to what they're doing for Lightroom Creative Cloud plans. There's even a plan, if all you wanna do if you're the type of person that just takes pictures with your phone and looks at 'em on your iPad and you don't care about your computer at all or you're willing to just look at 'em on the web Like on, if you're on your computer and you wanna look at your photos, you just look on 'em through Lightroom Web, like through your web browser there's a plan for that for $4.99 a month. And you have access to the cloud, it shares everything to all of your devices, like your mobile devices, unlimited just as many devices as you install Lightroom on, and sign in they'll all be there, and then you can go on the web and you can look at it there as well, you just won't have the actual resident computer program Lightroom CC on here. So that's one option for $4.99 a month, which is great. So that's the first option and then there's other options like for instance, a lot of people are on the Photography plan right now which is $9.99 a month, that actually increases to $14.99 a month, but for the next year, people can stay on the $9.99 a month and then it will increase one year from now, I think. So that's kinda the details on that. But that one has, the Photography plan has access to 20 gigabytes right now, but if you go for the $14.99 a month you have a hundred gigabytes I think, or maybe it's a terabyte, I can't remember. So anyway all of the information is at that link. And then of course there's the plan that has all of the different software, like: InDesign, and Photoshop, and Illustrator and Premier and all that, and then that gets up into the $49 range a month. So, there's a lot of different plans out there something that can fit everybody so follow that link to figure out more and find out what you wanna use. And again, a lot of you are gonna need to wait until the end of this class before you decide what to do. And that's the purpose of this class is to help people figure out: do I wanna be a Lightroom CC user, or do I wanna be a Lightroom Classic user? But I guarantee you that those who are Lightroom Classic users, you're still gonna wanna use Lightroom CC for certain things. So you're gonna use both.