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Find a Missing File & Folder

How do we go back to that one? Remember, the import that we did? The Seattle one. Now you know why I set up the Seattle shoot and how I set it up the way that I set it up. This is where we start talking more pasta sauce. Imagine over time, if I'm working on something, I tend to have a strategy called a hot, medium and cold strategy when I work with anything inside of workflow. Hot means I have yet to be paid. For the most part. But imagine if at one point over time, when you're working on pictures, your pictures are very very important. You're working on a job, you're doing this stuff, you have not been paid, you are actively working on that picture. At one point, you stop working on that picture and you're not accessing that much. If I told you, "When was the last time that you took "a look at your pictures from last year's vacation?" Probably not all that often. And if I told you, "When was the last time that you "took a look at your pictures of your vacation "five years ago?" You co...

uld argue that it was a lot less. So what happens is over time, that thing degenerates. Your views of these kinds of pictures degenerate. Over time that stuff will lose itself. You won't look at them all that often. So I say that to say when you work with things do you really need to carry all of your pictures with you all the time? You'd like to think that you do, but you don't. And that's where people's workflow strategy messes up, 'cause what happens is you walk around with a giant bag of 50 different hard drives 'cause you're like, "I need 'em, I need 'em." And I'm like, "When's the last time you saw "that vacation that you did five years ago?" It's in here somewhere. But are we okay with that concept? That is the cornerstone of admitting that you have a problem. (laughter) Understand that there are times when you really look at these pictures all the time and then there are times when you don't look at these pictures all that often. Now, what we're doing is when I leave this on the desktop, this right here means that it's hot. Matter of fact, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna hope that it works. And when I say that, the producers are like, "Oh snap, he's gonna do something that's not gonna work." I'm gonna click on Google Chrome. Oh, it's not gonna do it. Anyway. I usually have black text with just the word focus on it, 'cause I'm so ADD about things. I can't pay attention to anything. I could get lost outside. I can't do it, so I treat my desk like I treat my desk at the office. If I am working on something, it is on my desk, and that is the only that has my attention until I'm not working on it. I keep my desktop just like this. Completely bare. This is the job that I have to work on right now. That's why I leave it there. I also leave it there, because I don't want to move it to secondary drive or NAS drives or any of that stuff because what'll happen is if I move it, I might forget to clean it. I might forget to get rid of the rejected part. I might forget to do any kind of treatment to it, and I don't want it to be away. I want this thing to have all of my attention right now. So it stays there. This is a hot project for me. The hot project means I'm actively working in it. The check has not come in. Now, the moment that that project is completed, it moves from a hot project to a medium project. A medium project is a project that moves with me on a removable drive. I'm using these drives now. They're basically drop resistant and things like that. This is an SSD drive. I didn't want anything spinning around when I'm working on stuff. This thing takes a drop for over a meter. And you can actually import cards to it, which I think is kinda cool. You stick it, hit a button and it imports cards. They're neat. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna plug this puppy in. Oh, and it also does, while I'm plugging it in, it also broadcasts, it does its own wireless signal. So it can be broadcasting and you can thumb through it on a phone, which I think is great. I'm gonna plug this puppy in. It's got its own battery, which I think is great. And I'm gonna leave that there. Now, what'll happen from here is, I hope, yep there it is, my passport, done. Now, I'm gonna grab this thing here at the desktop and I'm gonna grab this file here and I'm just gonna drag it over here. And we'll just go move that over. As soon as that's over, I have it on the removable drive. I'm gonna grab this thing right here on the desktop and I'm gonna delete it and then, nothing up my sleeve, I'm gonna empty trash. I'm that confident. (laughter) Famous last words. And now, Lightroom freaks out. Photo is missing. Not good. This is the problem. What has happened here? It is literally the equivalent of somebody breaking into your house, taking the box of pictures that are in the bathroom, running them over to the kitchen, putting them on top of the fridge, and never writing it down on the notebook. So now, you come in and you're like, "Ah, I'm gonna go see where that, "oh, they're in the bathroom." And you're staring, and you're looking at the toilet bowl and you're like, "They were here, says they were here, says they were here, "says they were here, says they were here." You're stuck in a loop. You don't know what to do. So what do we do now? We gotta turn around and we gotta tell Lightroom, "Hey, listen, we moved those things. "It's cool, it's cool. "It's alright, we got it." So what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna give it to you as a two step process. The first thing that I usually do is I right click on this and I go to go to folder in library. You could do it using show in finder, find the picture and then go from there. Don't. Instead, use go to folder in library. It will show you that there is a folder that's missing. Right click on that, and then select find missing folder. Sometimes you might wanna select show parent folder. But I'll talk about that in a second. Find missing folder. Where is the missing folder? Well, it is in my passport, and I happened to put it over here. The moment that I find that, and I can select choose, I'm gonna come over here, go to the develop module. Game on. Everything is fine. The moment that I say, "The passport," and I disconnect it, please work, don't make a mockery of me. The moment that I disconnect it, the file could not be found. But it's off my computer, it's totally fine. The moment that I reconnect it, this is the part that's, come on you can do it. You can do it. No. (laughter). As soon as it comes back, we should, I'm looking right here inside of this one section, so it'll come back and as soon as it comes back, I should be able to go back into it and it will connect to itself. I don't have to carry that with me all the time. What I can do is I can keep that thing with me, and I can keep it inside of my bag. Just because, oh come on, just because it's in my bag doesn't necessarily mean that I can't do any kind of disconnect. I can't rank, I can't sort, I can't pick. I can do all of those things with it. The moment that I plug it back in, all of that information will then be married to it and everything should be fine. Now, that's my medium thing, and usually one of the first questions that you have with that is, "Well, how does that work then if I grab this "and I put it away, how do I then back this thing up?" What do you do? A lot of the times, what I have is at home I'll have a Time Machine, Apple has a Time Machine program, or Windows will have Windows File History, and you can use that to back up. So I have my Time Machine set up so that it takes this and it backs it up to the drive that I'm using for Time Machine. And then it's also backing up this computer. So at any point in time, I always have these two things with me. Good? That'll take care of the back ups that I need for that one spot. But now, what we'll do from here is we need to be able to take the files that are from here and then get them into cold storage. What happens when you're done with this and you need to then get them out of here further. So this is what I'm going to do. I don't need these here anymore. It's connected, it's totally fine. I can bring this back here, that's good. But I don't need them here anymore. So I'm gonna go over and I'm going to connect to rubber chicken. So rubber chicken is my server. This is what's called a network attached storage device. And what a network attached storage device is it's basically a glorified hard drive that, instead of being connect to your computer, is connected to your network. You plug it into the back of your router. And it stays on, so this has 16 terabytes. But I set it up so that it's backing up one drive so that it's eight terabytes of information that sits inside of it. Now, I'll grab the folder that sits inside of my passport. There's the Seattle skyline, and I'm gonna drag it into the DSLR backups folder. I set up a folder inside of rubber chicken so that I can put all of that stuff inside of there. Come on rubber chicken, let me in. The moment that I grab this and I move this back inside of here, what I am saying is, "I am done with carrying you around. "You are the vacation of three years ago "that I don't need to carry with me all the time." That can live at home. And all I have to do at that point is just grab it from here, delete it, and do the exact same process that I did the first time. Right click, go to the folder in the library, right click, update the folder location, tell it that it's on the NAS. Once we have that set, then I don't have to necessarily worry about it. It's all done. Whenever I'm outside of my house, I don't have access to the files unless you can set, you can set these things up so that you can access them via the cloud, but you can't map the drive. You can't do any of that stuff. But the moment that I come home, I plug in my computer, into the network, I fire it up, it sees the rubber chicken and all of my files are there with me. So that's a great way for us to be able to work. There are a couple of other things that you could do with this that could make it a lot better, because you don't always have to run around like this. Here, this is already done. I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna grab this Seattle skyline off of my passport. I'm gonna delete it. This thing's gonna freak out, 'cause it's not there. No it's totally fine. Right click, go to folder in library. Once you find that, see it's under my passport. Right click, find missing folder and I'm gonna go to rubber chicken and inside of rubber chicken I'm gonna go to the back ups. There's Seattle skyline and choose. Now that it finds everything, we can go ahead and start working in the files, because the files are here. I'm working on the NAS. A lot of the times when people turn around and they say, "Well, is it good, is it safe, is it fast enough for you "to be able to do all of these changes with the NAS?" And I'm like, "It's fast enough." It's pretty good. They have gigabit connections that you can get through it. But again, I'm not really, it's not like I'm hitting it all the time to be able to work on it, because this is the cold storage. That would mean that I'm working on pictures that are five years old all the time. If I need to have concurrent use, or immediate use, or all of that stuff, it would be here, or it would be here. Now, there are instances where you might want to make some changes to these pictures, and you don't wanna be able to work in this disconnect and connected environment. And there's something that's called a smart preview. So I have this file here, I'm gonna show you something. I can take these pictures that I have, and I can make them into a smart preview. Watch, I'm gonna show you here. Here's all my, or let's just do it with these, with picked images just in the interest of time. I can grab this, and I'm gonna right click, or actually here I'm gonna go to library, I'm gonna go to previews, I'm gonna build something called a smart preview. I know it's not a smart collection. We're gonna get to that in a second. A smart preview is basically a file that is bigger than a one to one preview that you would normally have inside of Lightroom. You'll see that at the very top, once it builds these, we go to the develop module and inside of here it's gonna tell you that it's an original plus a smart preview. Now, that means that the moment that I turn around and I disconnect from a drive, and this is the benefit of the smart preview. The benefit of the smart preview is that you can work and do develop changes and do all these kinds of edits on disconnected drives. That's how they sell it. And what'll happen is I disconnect and once I disconnect, I really wanna pull it so that I can do it, but I'm trying to resist the urge in case it blows up. But when it works, ah, I'm just gonna do it. (laughter) Because the moment that it doesn't work, if you do that, look, smart preview. The good part about that is that inside of the develop module, you could still do edit changes. All of the stuff that you didn't have options to do, because the previews were a different kind, you still now have the ability to do. There's a problem with that. And I'll talk and vamp until this thing connects, but here's the inherent problem with that. When we were doing the import part of the pictures, you'll notice that during the import process you see something that says standard, one to one, full, there's preview sizes. Your previews on your thumbnails for your images take up space on your computer. Small ones don't, one to ones are much bigger. The more of these previews take up space, the more space you're gonna take up on your computer. This would make you think that the best thing for you to do would be to just make smart previews of everything. But not necessarily the case, because the smart previews are even bigger than your one to one preview. Lightroom knows that these previews can be a bit of a pain in the butt. If you look inside of here, under the file handling section, you know that you can discard previews after 30 days, so it already has a mechanism to say, "These previews are big. "We don't wanna keep this things all the time. "You gotta dump them." But they don't have a mechanism to tell you how many one smart previews you have. So how do you keep track? How do you know how many of these things you have in order for you to be able to do stuff? Wouldn't it be nice if you had a way to be able to create a collection that had some predetermined characteristics to keep in mind how to organize this stuff. That's where smart collection comes in. So a smart collection allows you to click on the plus sign here, and we'll make a smart collection. Notice that you can add criteria to this, so you can say, "Show me stuff." Let's say like rejected images. So inside of here, show me anything that has a pick flag that is rejected. You click create and notice that I have, across my entire Lightroom catalog, 14 images that are rejected. Or make a smart collection that says, "Show me anything that happens to be of a rating that's "greater than five stars or that is five stars." That's five stars. I like making the rejected images. I use that for garbage collection. If that number gets really high, I go back and I take a look at all of those images and go, "How much of this do I have to get rid of?" I'll make a collection for PSD files. I'll make a collection for TIFF images, so that I can keep track of stuff. What about making a smart collection that, inside of here, has something that says, "Smart preview is true." So now, when you click on this, if you start losing space, come over to this smart collection and see if this number's really high. If it's high, select library, previews, discard smart previews. And then you're done. There's only one last thing that I wanted to be able to show you that had to do with Scott was it, that talked about merging catalogs? Let me show you one thing. I'm gonna go back to my original catalog, and inside of my original catalog I have a giant notebook that's organized that has everything that I need. What if I wanted to mash these two things together? I can go over here and I can go file, and notice that I can import from another catalog. I can click on this and I'm going to purposely go over to these catalogs and, let's see, go to catalog collections. There's my catalog, and I can choose that. And the moment that I do, it turns around and says, "Oh, you're in this one catalog. "Guess what? "This catalog has got all of these different things." "You have all of these different folders "that I wanna put in. "I've found that between these two notebooks, "there's 105 new pictures. "What do you want me to do? "Do you want me to add them to the catalog? "Do you want me to copy those folders "into a new location? "Do you wanna not import them at all? "And if there's anything that's changed, "do you wanna keep stuff that you have "in the old catalog, or do you wanna replace "just the metadata and develop settings?" If anything is existing, it gives you an option to be able to copy and move them around. So it's actually pretty smart, and there's really not that much to it from merging from one catalog to another. They do take a lot of that stuff out of, a lot of the pain of having to manage most of that stuff, provided that you do one thing. That you have a solid workflow strategy from start to finish, good catalog organization, good collection and collection set organization, and a process to make sure that you have all of your images, not only off of your computer, but into a spot that's safe. Thank you very much everybody.