Using Lightroom CC with cloud vs other storage options

[CharlesDAMorgan]

A very broad question, but this morning (again) my entirely fine Macbook Pro from 2012 said it was down to 22GB of available memory. As I have purged the memory numerous times, it is only a matter of months before it runs out, and photos are at the heart of the usage.

I don't really want to replace the thing or get extra memory installed, and I wondered if using the 1 tb cloud storage option with Lightroom CC was an option. I have Lightroom 6.14 installed on it, but I know that is not a long term option.

How do others process and store their photos? An insanely broad question, but perhaps it's time for me to move away from everything on one machine.

 

[tbhv55]

A very broad question, but this morning (again) my entirely fine Macbook Pro from 2012 said it was down to 22GB of available memory. As I have purged the memory numerous times, it is only a matter of months before it runs out, and photos are at the heart of the usage.

I don't really want to replace the thing or get extra memory installed, and I wondered if using the 1 tb cloud storage option with Lightroom CC was an option. I have Lightroom 6.14 installed on it, but I know that is not a long term option.

How do others process and store their photos? An insanely broad question, but perhaps it's time for me to move away from everything on one machine.

I simply keep a few external drives, and move batches of files off the computer - as and when its drive fills up.

Of course, every so often, another external drive has to be purchased, but they're fairly inexpensive these days. 🙂

 

[ileicafilm]

I use multiple external HHDs and cloud storage for my most important stuff.

If you have Amazon Prime there is free unlimited photo storage (in most countries) included with it. 🙂 Stumbled upon that by accident but it's great.

 

[Larry Cloetta]

I try to keep the hard drive/SSD on the computer as unpopulated as possible to maximize performance, so every photo file is automatically downloaded from the memory card directly to an external hard drive which is used for nothing except photo files.
If you are using Lightroom, “Import” can be configured to import the files to any folder location you specify. That folder doesn’t need to be located on your computer, it can be located on an external drive, and probably should be. Preferably a multiple drive enclosure with a foolproof RAID system where the files are “backed up” with multiple copies as soon as you import them.
As others have said, external drives are cheap now, and fast. Just flip the external drive on whenever you are turning on the computer with the intention to do any photo related work. It’s seamless.

 

[lynnb]

What Larry said. You can tell LR to "import" and copy the file from your source card or disk to an external drive, and at the same time to create a backup copy to another external drive. So both are on external drives. The first copy is the one used by the LR library when it attaches a sidecar file to it noting any editing changes in LR.

 

[JohnBeeching]

Hi,
I keep LR 6.14 on the mac and all the LR photos on an external HD, which is automatically backed up to a second HD. To set it up just plug in the HD and, from within LR, move the folder in which all your photos are kept to the HD. Then, when you import from a card set up LR to copy the files to the new location.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

I ditched Apple as computers in nineties. Was selling, installing them as authorized dealer back then.
Any computer closer to ten years better to be ditched.
I have non cloud LR and I have bunch of HDD.
All final images are stored in two different folders (PCs) and I'm paying for the cloud storage (a.k.a. Flickr).
AWS is even better option, I bet Flickr MugSmuggers are renting from them.

 

[ruby.monkey]

I have a LaCie 2big external thunderbolt drive attached to my 2014 MacPook Pro. All I have on the local drive is the catalogue and any smart previews I happen to be using.

I also upgraded the internal SSD to 2tb, so that might be an option for you.

 

[PRJ]

Charles, buy two external hard drives the same size, one for storing your images and one for backup. They are so cheap these days. Get Thunderbolt drives if you want a lot of speed, but USB 3 works fine too unless you have huge scans. Once you get everything moved and backed up you can clean the hard drive in your computer. If your computer still has a regular hard drive in it, you can upgrade it to an SSD and it will be quite a bit faster.

Hope that helps you.

 

[CharlesDAMorgan]

Charles, buy two external hard drives the same size, one for storing your images and one for backup. They are so cheap these days. Get Thunderbolt drives if you want a lot of speed, but USB 3 works fine too unless you have huge scans. Once you get everything moved and backed up you can clean the hard drive in your computer. If your computer still has a regular hard drive in it, you can upgrade it to an SSD and it will be quite a bit faster.

Hope that helps you.

Very much, and seems to be the summation of the combined wisdom here. About the only thing I'm unlikely to do is upgrade the current computer as the screen pretty rancid (early Retina ones just get impossible to remove smears). Then I can think about replacement computer at a later date.

 

[Shac]

Although I subscribe and use Lightroom Classic and Photoshop CC, I don't use Adobe's cloud storage.
Like others above, I have 2 external storage (in addition to my PC's hardrive) and use the free program Karen's Replicator for backing up both images and Lightroom catalogues.

 

[Henry]

I use Lightroom CC cloud storage for everything. It works very well in my experience, and I am able to edit on tablet, pc, and Mac without any annoyance.

I do have it set up to backup my files to an external drive, as well, but so far that hasn’t been needed.

 

[Bob Michaels]

How much of the storage problems would be solved by simply deleting the lower 80-90% of frames, those that will never be used for anything. A big plus is that some might learn to edit. A bonus is that looking for an old but good photo it is not like looking for a needle in a haystack.

 

[Shac]

Bob true - but I have a bad habit of getting rid of stuff only to find 3 or 4 months later I needed it:bang:🙄

 

[ileicafilm]

How much of the storage problems would be solved by simply deleting the lower 80-90% of frames, those that will never be used for anything. A big plus is that some might learn to edit. A bonus is that looking for an old but good photo it is not like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Yep, but if you use good ratings systems and flagging it's pretty easy to find what you want regardless of the amount of content.

 

[CharlesDAMorgan]

I regularly delete photos not up to scratch, with 7 years of stuff on the system (mostly not photos) it's the marginal photo load that keeps pushing things to the limit. I've already offloaded my music and my previous decade's worth of photos on to a hard drive (somewhere).

 

[willie_901]

I also use LR CC without storing images or raw files in Adobe's cloud.

I began using computers daily in 1973 and have experienced countless user interfaces that ranged from hostile to friendly, intuitive environments. I still use them daily. But I can not figure out how to use Adobe LR Cloud storage selectively without having multiple LR Catalogs. So, I don't use Adobe Cloud for anything. Otherwise I would use Adobe Cloud for keepers and local storage as an archive.

I do not think Adobe Cloud automatically backs up the LR Catalog. I'm not sure if one can do so manually. Of course the entire Catalog can be backed up to the cloud using numerous non-Adobe solutions. My Catalog is very large, so even with 100 mb/sec up speeds and a direct ethernet connection cloud back up would be tedious. It would not surprise me if Adobe implemented a Catalog structure that supported incremental back up for CC customers. I would Adobe's Cloud for Catalog back ups in this case.

I have at least three copies of all my raw files and in-camera JPEGs. Much of this data could be purged. Since external storage is so inexpensive, it's not worth my time to purge. I also have multiple copies of my LR Catalog.

I use sneaker net for disaster recovery with an external HD stored at my son's home.

 

[Henry]

I also use LR CC without storing images or raw files in Adobe's cloud.

I began using computers daily in 1973 and have experienced countless user interfaces that ranged from hostile to friendly, intuitive environments. I still use them daily. But I can not figure out how to use Adobe LR Cloud storage selectively without having multiple LR Catalogs. So, I don't use Adobe Cloud for anything. Otherwise I would use Adobe Cloud for keepers and local storage as an archive.

I do not think Adobe Cloud automatically backs up the LR Catalog. I'm not sure if one can do so manually. Of course the entire Catalog can be backed up to the cloud using numerous non-Adobe solutions. My Catalog is very large, so even with 100 mb/sec up speeds and a direct ethernet connection cloud back up would be tedious. It would not surprise me if Adobe implemented a Catalog structure that supported incremental back up for CC customers. I would Adobe's Cloud for Catalog back ups in this case.

I have at least three copies of all my raw files and in-camera JPEGs. Much of this data could be purged. Since external storage is so inexpensive, it's not worth my time to purge. I also have multiple copies of my LR Catalog.

I use sneaker net for disaster recovery with an external HD stored at my son's home.

Adobe Lightroom Classic CC does not really play all that nicely with the cloud, in my opinion. It only really allows you to upload "Smart Previews" to the cloud, and then only from one catalog. This is inherently really annoying. I stopped using it entirely, in part, because I wanted to use the cloud storage for everything. I like being able to access full resolution versions of my files from any device (phone, laptop, tablet, desktop) without having to copy anything around myself.

Adobe Lightroom CC (their cloud native app) doesn't support separate catalogs at all. Their basic solution is to have you copy all of your catalogs into the one monster one (they have a special feature in CC that does this) and then wait while it slowly uploads (it took me about three days with 200gb of images).

There is currently no solution from Adobe that lets you use just SOME of your images in the cloud, while leaving them in the catalogs that you currently have. I switched to CC because I was OK leaving separate catalogs behind (I instead have everything in separate folders in CC).

The naming is dumb, CC is their new program that works in the cloud, and Classic CC is basically just the old Lightroom with catalog files and what not, and limited cloud integration.

 

[Godfrey]

A very broad question, but this morning (again) my entirely fine Macbook Pro from 2012 said it was down to 22GB of available memory. As I have purged the memory numerous times, it is only a matter of months before it runs out, and photos are at the heart of the usage.

I don't really want to replace the thing or get extra memory installed, and I wondered if using the 1 tb cloud storage option with Lightroom CC was an option. I have Lightroom 6.14 installed on it, but I know that is not a long term option.

How do others process and store their photos? An insanely broad question, but perhaps it's time for me to move away from everything on one machine.

I used LR 6.14 until I installed macOS Catalina v10.15.x. Now I'm using LR Classic. I have no desire to use Adobe's "creative cloud" at all, and don't.

All of my original and 'finished' image files, and the Lightroom catalog folders, are stored on external drives connected to my current Apple Mac (currently a 2018 Mac mini with 6core i7/32G RAM/1T SSD) with a USB3 or Thunderbolt connection. Only the application and the application preferences are stored on the internal SSD, as well as copies of the image files I have in Photos and posted to Flickr.com. My original image files and catalog folders currently fill about 3.1 Tbytes of a 5 Tbyte external working drive, and the internal SSD has 300 GB of free space. I use Chronosync (by ECON Technologies) software to manage backing up the working drive and critical data from the internal SSL to two duplicate external archive drives, each capable of storing 6T of data. These three external drives are only powered on and mounted when I'm working on photos or doing an archive backup.

The workflow: Image files from whatever source (scanning, digital capture, mobile devices, etc) are copied to the working drive using Lightroom or Image Capture, depending on what I plan to do in processing them. All still image files are imported into LR; some motion files are simply transferred into the appropriate date-organized folder in the "originals" folder tree for processing with various apps. Whenever I complete the processing of an image or movie, a full resolution version is exported into an appropriately named and dated folder in my "completed work" folder tree, and imported into a separate LR "completed work" catalog for viewing and selection purposes. Other products from the rendering (usually lower resolution JPEG files for posting to flickr.com and m4p files for posting to YouTube) are stored on the internal drive in the appropriate folder places. Whenever I finish an import, editing, or export session, I run the Chronosync backup to archive the work in duplicate.

An additional 1T backup drive is connected and designated as a Time Machine drive for continuous incremental backup; it is connected and running whenever the computer is powered on. The master Photography folder on my internal SSD is excluded from this backup.

The external working and archive drives, configured this way, can be swapped from one Mac to another simply by plugging them in (via a USB3 hub). Critical files that are not photographically significant (like banking records, tax records, etc) are duplicated doubly ... both incrementally on the Time Machine backup and as standalone originals on the Chronosync archive drives.

I've been using this system since 2002-2003. It's transferred easily to any and all of the different Apple macOS systems I've owned and used over all the years. Despite having experienced an occasional drive failure here or there along the way, and only the gods know how many system and app updates, I have never lost a single file due to the triply backed up structure of the system. A drive failure typically means just buy a new drive and duplicate an existing archive onto it. 🙂

G

 

[CharlesDAMorgan]

Thanks all - what an absolute mine of information this place is (gold or land, you decide 🙂)

Time to start with a new drive to relieve the pressure on the current one!