Hey Guys, My mum is doing semi professional photography and I am at my wits end. It’s a human and technological problem. I did a quick object count she has like 70k photos roughly 4tb. This happens because she takes every picture in raw and JPEG and a lot of series captures. The begin of the story is that she had at first a ssd, then a second, then a third and so on. I already bought a synology nas. And threw everything at it. But everything is messy and unsorted and she is not happy because she doesn’t get her chaos together and adobe Lightroom performs bad with network drives, and I don’t get why … but this seems to be a known problem… Anyways she uses Lightroom for her editing which is nice, but she is using more like a library and not to perform the actual changes, that’s the reason that the catalogue which is a db of the changes is a 17 gb.
She is not happy at the current state. Do you have suggestions, for a strategy to clear this chaos ? Or a cool tool for getting a folder structure? Maybe any tips and tricks for synology and network stuff ?
I Already tried to move files and get a structure but Lightroom hates this and loses track of the file. So a powershell script which sorts the items into year folders was a good idea but I am scared of bricking the db
The nas and the mac are all wired up on 1 gbit and I am sure it should be ok because the big raws are only like 70mb per file
Regards :)
There is no way she is working with 4TB of photos on a regular basis. Keeping all of that stuff around, probably 10’s or 100’s of thousands of photos is of course going to be slow.
Cool thing with Lightroom is you can export photos as a catalog file and retain the negatives with that export. For archival purposes, you would do exactly that and export to your NAS, then delete the photos you just exported from the main catalog (of course, after checking they were exported to a new catalog successfully by loading that catalog in Lightroom).
That will keep the photo edits in the lrcat database and the original negatives intact. Goal is to shrink your working catalog down to something more manageable.
PS, Lightroom can import photos from a camera and sort into year month day folders. This is setup at import time.
Photos can also be reorganized as such by creating folders and moving photos directly in Lightroom itself. Unfortunately I do not think there is an automatic way to do this, but I have my pictures organized by year, then month, then day and can remember having to fix that in the past when Lightroom was reinstalled onto a new computer and those import settings weren’t remembered.