Organising my images?

[ernstk]

Hi

At present I have no formal way of storing and organising my images.

I'm considering using Lightroom. I'd welcome your thoughts and opinions on this. I'd also like to be able to do basic editing in the same environment.

Thanks
Ernst

 

[gilpen123]

Lightroom is very good in organizing photos plus a great editor as well.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Lightroom is fine if you have few photos, and it allows editing, but for a large collection, it becomes very slow. I'm running a Mac Pro with 8 processor cores and 12 gig of ram, so there's no reason for it to run slow except the software is not able to handle the work.

For organizing, if you have a lot of photos (more than 1000), a dedicated database program like Phase One Mediapro is what you need. This software was originally called iView Mediapro, and I began using it back then. They later sold to Microsoft, who called it Expression Media, but they sold it to Phase One pretty quickly. I'm using the Microsoft version now, and it works beautifully. I'd upgrade to the current (Phase One) version, but I don't see any reason to spend the $$$ since the MS version works fine for me. It is costly at $199, but it is WORTH IT if you have a lot of images to catalogue. It lets you keep the photos anywhere, and it catalogs them in their original places and automatically pulls metadata from the files, like the camera info and any descriptions and keywords you've added in other software. It is very fast on my machine, even with several thousand images in one catalogue.

 

[lynnb]

I use Lightroom, I have over 75,000 images catalogued in it on firewire drives and I've had no performance issues. Using a 3 year old Mac Mini with 4Gb RAM. Chris - I wonder why yours is slow? My biggest individual folder has ~15,000 images.
I use LR for 90% of my processing - the remainder in CS4.

 

[ernstk]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Chris, I'll also have a look at Phase One Mediapro.

Ernst