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 :)
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Okay, tell her to: Purge all doubles and objectively bad pictures (like unintentionally out of focus ones) from her library and also to keep only the best ones from a series. She should get rid of the JPEG’s or at least save them separately. Yes, weeding out that will take a long time with that many photos. I know the struggle.
Also, adobe lightroom is great, but I’m not sure if it’s that good when only used as a library. Maybe look for some alternatives. They might be even more functional with your NAS. There’s an opensource Programm called Darktable for example. Might be worth checking it out.
I’ve heard many professional and semi-professional photographers are afraid of data loss. So many keep the following precautions:
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Never reuse SD-cards, archive the full ones and buy new ones. Copy them to hard drives and/or external ssd‘s.
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When the ssd‘s are full, archive them and get new ones.
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Have a copy of all pictures in the cloud. I believe adobe offers a monthly plan for example.
Sorry, I’m just a hobby photographer myself, so that are just my 2 cents. Hope I could help at least a little bit.
I’ve done professional photography for a decade and have never seen someone not reuse a SD card…even outside of myself. Most photographers I know use cloud services to back up.
Ah, interesting. I think it heard in several podcasts. But I guess those guys were pretty paranoid about losing data.
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Photoprism! Has a consume folder and handles large libraries well.
Normally I’d recommend Immich but Photoprism is a better fit for your use case
I tried the same thing years ago… wasn’t able to find anything better than lightroom and gave up. Now there are larger SSD’s I would maybe just throw a honking big SSD on her computer and set the synology to backup her PC using active backup or if you just need to mirror the folder to synology I find the program Bvckup to be really good for that.
Here are her choices:
Improved workflow + time investment in cleanup OR BURN BABY BURN THAT MONEY!!!
Jokes aside. She needs to start splitting photos she is actively working on and the ones that are effectively archived. I am sure there are ways to make the it still available either making a lower rez copy that lets her browse them in Imitch or some other tool that she would find more palatable… but there is going to be trial and error phase… not fun.
As for the money burning bit start… just buy bigger SSD… you can put them in DAS (direct attached storage) which is similar to NAS but is available only that one machine has deeper integration inside of system so may overcome the bugs lightroom is throwing at her.