I purchased downloaded and installed Lightroom last weekend to manage some of my photos and provide a quick way to organize and quickly correct photos. Currently the process flow I’m thinking of using is to bring photos I shoot directly into Lightroom first, then go through and remove the images I don’t think should be there, then export a low res copy of the photos to iPhoto ’09 and export the full res photos to one of my two SmugMug sites.
I like the idea of using Lightroom to quickly browse through and correct photos, and then get them up to SmugMug after any corrections. The problem is I’d rather use iPhoto for basic viewing of the images on the laptop or to show them to someone. I also like the concept of the Faces and Places in iPhoto though I may not use them if I can’t figure out a way to get the data back into the Lightroom catalog or the original raw images. From iPhoto I like the Facebook uploading and synchronizing. I don’t want to store a full res copy of all my images in iPhoto because my laptop’s hard drive has limited space, but if I can keep a copy of all my images at a low res without it taking up too much space that would be ideal, because then I can browse and present the images wherever I’m at quickly and it doesn’t take up as much of a chunk of storage as my raw images. I like the non-destructive editing in Lightroom and the preservation of the raw images. The other thing I’m trying to accomplish is that I want to store the original raw images on my home server, but I will likely start out with them on my laptop first then migrate them to the server later. I plan on using Lightroom on my laptop make all my changes, then offload the images to the server later. I discovered I can use Lightroom catalogs in an offline fashion if it has pre-built the preview data for images, but I can’t make edits to the images unless the catalog can see the original images. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to manage this yet. I may end up having all the catalogs both on my laptop and on the server, and then just needing to sync them up whenever I update them on my laptop or something.
My biggest challenge here is keeping everything in sync. I’m likely going to shoot then dump the images to Lightroom on my laptop, or my wife’s laptop, then once home or via some other means transfer the originals and catalog to my home server for permanent storage where I have mirrored hard drives. At some point I will want to export images from Lightroom into iPhoto and up to SmugMug. Then once they are in iPhoto I need to get them up to Facebook or something like that. If I’m moving images around between computers, and moving Lightroom catalogs around this gets a bit tricky, adding to that the time it takes to upload full res images to SmugMug makes it that much more complicated. Then add to that anytime something is updated on Facebook, iPhoto, Smugmug or Lightroom and then getting that information synced back up everywhere, this is a big hurdle.
So my challenge thus far is to figure out how to make this happen and happen in a seamless fashion so I don’t spend all my time just trying to mange my photos, so that I can spend the time I have enjoying my photos.
