Lessons

Lesson Info

Questions on Lightroom® & Lightroom® Web

I have a client who wants absolutely zero geotagging on some of the pictures. So I can turn that all off on my camera obviously, but if I forgot to do that, I can turn it all off in Lightroom? Yes, but I would say that the best philosophy for geotagging, anti-geotagging, is to keep the geotagging for you, and then when you export and share, that's when you turn it off. And that's why in Lightroom, one of those preferences is to turn off geotagging, no location information, and then Lightroom has the same option in the export dialog box, at the bottom it says remove all of that location data. Even if you leave the rest of the data, the location gets turned off. So any time I share photos either via mobile device or on the computer, I always turn off the location data. So that protects me in two different ways, it protects children and people so that people don't know where I was shooting the photo, but it also protects my locations, because I work very hard to find them. You had a que...

stion. Is there an easy way to move your, is there an easy to move your existing working catalog from your desktop to an external hard drive? Yes! Good question. So if I wanted to follow Jared's philosophy, and I wanted to change my whole life and make it better, I would go to the folder that has my, usually your folder would be inside of your Pictures folder inside of a folder called Lightroom, then there should be a folder called Lightroom Catalog, and then this is what you're looking at. So this is what you would need to move. You would simply need to take the Lightroom catalog and you would take it, you would grab a disk like this, and you would grab this, and drag it into there. And once it copies, then what you wanna do is you wanna take this one, and if I were you, I would put it in the trash, but don't empty the trash. That way the computer sees it as gone, but you can always resurrect it if it needs to be. And then, you go to this one here and you open this one up and test it, make sure it works, make sure everything's correct, and then two, three weeks down the road delete that other one. Okay. Now, keep in mind that you might see more than this. So this is the bare minimum that you will see on an active catalog. So this is the Catalog, this is what contains all the information, like the keywords and the stars, and where the photos are, and stuff like that. And then this one is the Previews, basically the little JPEGS that you're looking at in the grid, that's all JPEGS that are created by Lightroom to show you what the RAW photo looks like. So they're just previews of your photos. If you have an active catalog, you may actually see this. So here's an active catalog and you might actually see Catalog, SmartPreviews and Previews. So if you've created Smart Previews then you're gonna have a folder of, it's like a little packet of Smart Previews. And this is an interesting education by the way. So the Catalog is only three gigabytes, so it's very small for, how many did I see were in there, 37,000 images. So 37,000 images equals 3.16 gigabytes of data, information. Not photos, information. This one is the Previews, and it's 42 gigabytes of information, of previews. And then the Smart Previews are only 26 gigabytes. Now, remember, the JPEG previews are worthless, and they're twice as big as the amazing, very useful Smart Previews. So that tells you something. That tells you that you can, with impunity, build Smart Previews constantly. And Smart Previews can be built several different ways and I'll show them to you right now because we might as well tell you about it. First off, if you have a series of photos that you wanna have Smart Previews to, before you disconnect, so these are all of my images from that wedding that we were just looking at, so before you disconnect this drive, you need to highlight all the images in the wedding or in the portrait session, go up to the Library menu and go down to Previews, Build Smart Previews. So you can highlight anything that you currently have in your catalog and build Smart Previews for it, that way the next time you unplug the drive, no big deal, you just keep working. Because your previews are still there. So now if you look at these, I have this image and you'll see right up here it tells me, I have the original is connected because it's on this drive right here. I also have the Smart Preview. If I were to disconnect this, then you would only see Smart Preview, the original would no longer be there. And, over here you would see a question mark on the folder 'cause it wouldn't know where it was. That's okay, then I just travel around with this. As soon as I plug this back in, then the question mark goes away, and it will say original plus Smart Preview again, and that's when I could hit export to a larger file, to print a 16 by 20 or whatever. Right? Now, I will say this. Smart Previews are great, but if you have a choice or you have the ability to, when you export to make, say you wanna edit it in Photoshop or something, don't edit from the Smart Preview. Plug in the drive, edit from the original RAW. Because it's a difference in size. Smart Preview's this big, original's this big, so you've lost all that data that you could be working on, especially when you're retouching and doing like minute detail work. So, edit from the original. And that's why if you were to right click this image, if I had disconnected, let's just go to an image here, let's go to, say, this, so here this photo isn't available right here. See, just Smart Preview, but if I right click it and I say Edit In, doesn't allow me to. That doesn't mean I can't do it, it's trying to keep me from doing it because like you're gonna be unhappy if you find out that you edited this and just didn't know you should've plugged in the drive. So it's warning you. The only way to do it is to go to the export dialog box and then you can export it all day long to whatever size you want, you can do anything you want with that Smart Preview from the export dialog box and then go open that file inside of Photoshop, it's fine. You can do that. But you just can't Edit In from the menu, from the right click Edit In menu, because what would happen is people would invariably do that and not realize that they were editing the Smart Preview, and then be like argh I just wasted 10 minutes retouching a crap, small thing. So, that's what that's all about. The other way, and then I'll answer your question, the other way to create your Smart Previews is on import. So when I'm importing a job, and this is how I do everything, when I'm importing a job I can build the Smart Previews right here. So that little check mark right there, you click it and then everything that comes in the door has a Smart Preview already ready. And I will tell you this, I have a friend who's in the wedding business, and he was on vacation last year with me and my wife, he and his family were on vacation with us. And someone broke into his house and stole everything. Everything. So all of their, and they're professional photographers, all of their hard drives, all of their computers, and even the safe that was so heavy that they did $20,000 worth of damage getting it out the door. That's how heavy it was. It destroyed the staircase, they had to break the door down to get it out. And they got it all out, they got it. He lost every file that his clients had. You know the only thing he had with him? The catalog. And you know what was in the catalog? Smart Previews. He was able to take a family portrait from a Smart Preview and print a 30 inch print, and make the client happy. I can't tell you how devastating that would've been to his business if every single client he had would've had to get the answer "Sorry, we lost everything." But because he had Smart Previews for most of his stuff, and he didn't even know he was really creating them, he just kinda had done it, just by happenstance most of his stuff, some of it didn't, some of it did, but most of it was fine because of that. So Smart Previews are amazingly useful, but they're also the fail-safe. And so I keep everything that I'm currently working on, has a Smart Preview in the cloud. Everything. So if I'm doing a wedding, if I'm doing a portrait, on the way in it's being built with a Smart Preview and it's being synced to the cloud. So that that way if something happens while I'm editing pictures that I don't have a backup for, which I always have a backup for but anyway, if for some reason all things failed, I would have that Creative Cloud backup that would save my bacon. Now we can talk about a whole bunch of other backup scenarios that I have in place, and I have never lost a file in my entire life, and I don't even have wood to knock on. (audience laughs) So I've never lost a file. There was one time, that I thought I lost a file, and then it turned out I was wrong, and I hadn't lost the file. The client thought I had made something, but it turned out that their designer had done the design work, not me. And so it was their designer that lost their own file, and I was like "oh I didn't make that file, you guys did." And so the one time I thought I lost the file, I was actually wrong. The only time I've been wrong in my life I was wrong about being wrong. (audience laughs) Anyway, so backup is really really essential, and I have entire, I have lots and lots of stuff on Creative Live, lots and lots of lessons on Creative Live about backing up, so that's a whole 'nother discussion. But, this is a very simple way to back up, it's super simple so do it, use the Smart Previews. Yeah, your question. With regards to the external hard drive, your working catalog. Yeah. You said that's backed up to Google Drive, at least that one is backed up to your Google Drive. This one right here? The whole drive is not backed up 'cause that's not necessary. Just the catalog. The catalog is backed up, Okay. So every time I shut down, and it asks do I wanna back up the catalog, I say yes and it takes the catalog itself, just that little three gigabyte thing, and it compresses it and puts it in a folder, and then it gets sucked up into the Google cloud. And the reason, and by the way, you could put that backup in your Creative Cloud. So if you don't wanna have to have five different systems or whatever, you have Creative Cloud if you have these programs, so you might as well use that space for your catalog backup. And if you just say every time I shut down I want my catalog to be stored inside of the Creative Cloud files, that area that we showed you today, then it would just automatically go up to the cloud and you'll just have a daily backup of everything. And then later on, maybe once every six months, just go back to that Creative Cloud folder and delete half of 'em. Just throw 'em away because they're old. And all you really need is the last couple. Right? Yeah, and then that way you're totally protected here so if this, something happens to this, you just download your catalog and then you tell it to resync to all of these and it'll just find them all again and rebuild all the previews. Yeah. Considering we're living in earthquake country it's always good to have an out of state or up in the cloud solution for redundancy backing up. Absolutely. Yeah if you live here or if you live in like Tornado Alley, or if you live in flooded areas, like for instance New Orleans. I mean there were people there, photographers who lost everything and there's no way to get anything back from that, 'cause all their drives were under water for weeks. And so the only people that made it through that catastrophe were people who had cloud storage. And back then there wasn't a ton of cloud storage, but there were some who had cloud storage and they were okay 'cause they could download all of their original files. Not their original, it was JPEGS at the time, but they could download the JPEGS. So, yeah you can protect yourself, especially in earthquake country or places where there are catastrophes. It's a good idea to have things out of state.