@mikemyers In PM you can specify in preferences which sidecar files to keep with your photos when you move them. By default, PM knows about .dop files so you can very safely move your files and .dop move with them.
Presumably, if I move the entire folder containing the image file, any and all files in that folder will be moved. I think weâve agreed on that.
Lightroom prefers to keep settings in the âcatalogâ, but in the next few weeks, I plan to issue the command to Lightroom to export any and all data it has saved in the catalog so it is then in the sidecar files. I have no idea when/if I will once again open Adobe Lightroom. Once I do that, and everything is settled, Iâll issue that command, and hopefully Lightroom will do whatâs needed.
So far, for what itâs worth, when I re-open one of the images from way back when, I find that I can do a far better job of editing in PhotoLab than I did years ago in Lightroom, so even if I lose all my old Lightroom work, Iâm no longer sure how big a loss that will be.
You presume correctly
Happy Birthday, Mike!
Ainât it so. There is so much hyperbole out there. Getting older (Iâm 73) makes so many of us very skeptical of almost everything we read and hear because we have seen so many examples of less-than-informed â and even less-than-honest â reporting, everywhere. Can you say, getting cranky and crotchety? Personally I try to keep my mind open but to stay careful with my wallet until I think I know enough to be pretty sure that I donât make too big of a mistake. Doesnât always turn out that way but a lot of the time it does. Oh well, thatâs life
You might find this interesting: Why The Leica M11 Might Have a Touchscreen-Only Interface | Fstoppers
Ye gods! Thatâs it, the end of real photography as we know it. What next? I know, why donât we shove all that camera stuff into something even smaller with a touch screen? How about, I donât know, just for the sake of thinking, a mobile phone that can take pictures?
YesâŚ
- the end of the dinosaurs (driven by interstellar marketing)
- the end of petroglyphs (driven by Caran dâAche)
- the end of humans (driven by humans)
Times are changing and so do we, possibly, except for that last item on the list maybeâŚ
Can I suggest a change to what you wrote:
Thatâs the end of Leica as we know it.
Many people in the âL-Camera Forumâ are already upset at me for reporting this post in DPReview: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3517431
Thought #1 - with my regular progressive glasses, I can not read camera menus. They go down to âreading distanceâ, but when Iâm viewing my camera screen as Iâm using the camera, I need to be inches away, not feet. So, my good friend at Aravind Eye Hospital had them make me a special set of progressive glasses, where the top is âinfinityâ, and the bottom is several inches away, so I could make videos for the hospital without constantly needing to change glasses. I prefer these new glasses for walking around with my camera. So Iâm already not too thrilled with camera menus.
Thought #2 - if I canât turn off the touch screen function, I will have the same problem as people in the thread I linked to already have noticed - things change without any obvious reason. Now we know why - touch screen.
Thought #3 - The Fuji X100v is supposedly better than my X100f, BUT it has replaced the old menus with a touch-screen⌠which is why I have never updated from my present Fuji X100f.
None of this Leica stuff has been officially released, but to me, if Leica makes this change, Iâm done buying new Leica cameras, even if I could afford them, and at a estimated $8,000 or so for the Leica M11, to me, that is outrageous. It took me two years to buy the $5,000 Leica M10 that I use now. That I could sell it for $5,000 used, if I wanted to, takes some of the sting out of this - Nikonâs multi-thousand dollar cameras come down to multi-hundred dollar cameras as they age. On the other hand, in a few years, Joannaâs D850 will probably be worth much more than she paid for it, as itâs âthe end of an eraâ.
I keep reminding myself that my camera is JUST A TOOL. We tend to use the best tool for the job, when possible. I mostly accept that my D750 is a better tool than my Leica M10 in so many ways, especially so for the types of photos Iâm usually posting in this forum. To be honest though, I need to think of this as âwhich tool is best for meâ which changes things considerably, in many waysâŚ
Thank you @sloweddie
I already have enough problems with my iPad, touching things on screen by accident and being sent off to somewhere I wasnât intending to go.
Anyway, if everythingâs on the back, that means you could change the menu with your nose when looking through the viewfinder, or is the VF going to disappear as well? At least it means that you have to take the camera from your eye just to change something simple like shutter speed, aperture or ISO.
One can but hope.
I must admit, nowadays I use my D850 as a âbestâ camera for high quality digital work and, sometimes, as a walkabout camera if I think the walk might yield something unplanned. Otherwise, I have a 12Mpx camera in my iPhone (that can take pictures in almost pitch darkness if necessary) in my pocket at all times for the totally unexpected. Mind you, the little bird on the branch at 10 metres away can be a tad difficult
Not quite. Shutter speeds should still be controlled by a wheel on top of the camera, and aperture will still be controlled by the aperture ring on the lens. The camera body and electronics has no way of knowing the lens aperture that has been selected.
Unless they mess this up too, there is a pop-up knob at the top left of my M10 that can be used to select many ISO speeds, but the full list is listed only in the camera menu.
My M10 has no touch-screen, so my nose or any other part of my body canât change menu settings unintentionally. I used to think about the M10R, with more resolution, but I just found out there is no way to turn off that touch screen.
Quite often, I seem to be using my M8.2 as my âwalkaboutâ camera, when I have no idea what Iâm going to want to photograph. I know it has limitations, especially with my $280 China-made lens on it. It doesnât have an anti-IR filter in it, making it a wonderful camera for sharp B&W images, somewhat like the very expensive Leica Monochrom cameras. One fault it has always had, is green trees turn out yellowish green trees, because of the infrared light. I tried my anti-IR filter for the first time yesterday, and for the first time ever, green trees turned out - green! It has no fancy tools or settings - just aperture, shutter, and focus. I havenât been using automatic-anything though - light balance is set to 5600K, and I set my exposure mostly by the built-in light meter. And, with no built-in anti-IR filter, I can put an infrared filter on the front, and capture images as real infrared, or near infrared (depending on the filter). I think it currently has a 2GB Kingston SD card, which means I carefully expose each image rather than âspray and prayâ - if Iâm not thoughtful, and if I donât format my card after each session, my SD card can easily run out of disk space.
The photo below is not a great photo, but at least people arenât sending my nasty notes that my trees are too yellowish!
No filter:
The M10 is a better camera than the M8.2 and my D750 is the best camera I own.
When I held the D800 and the D750 in my hands at B&H Photo five or six years ago, I decided the D750 is the best for me. It canât match the performance of the larger and heavier D850, but I canât match the performance of you, either. Besides, if I buy a Nikon Z, @Wolfgang feels Iâll need to buy all new lenses too. I canât afford that. (âŚand thatâs a smiley face, not a frown!)
Says who!!! How long have you been at this game? All you need is to keep away from the Leica juice for a while and concentrate on getting up to speed with the far more flexible Nikon DSLR of your choice, along with learning more about PL. Weâve said it before, itâs not the gear, itâs you who makes the photos.
Back to disk space - I have two â4-TB Western Digital external drivesâ arriving by Monday. One will be used for Time Machine. The other will be for all my video (mostly edited with Appleâs Final Cut Pro. This will free up 1/3 of the space on my 2018 Intel Mac Miniâs 1TB internal solid state drive. No urgent concerns about freeing up space from my existing photos.
The new 4TB Time Machine drive will back up both my computer, and my new external drive for video. By the start of 2022, I should be all set.
Future issues will be to tell Lightroom to export all the data in its catalog for all my Lightroom images. I imagine that will take some time, but Iâll no longer feel so dependent in Adobe.
After all this, I will most likely select PhotoMechanic Plus to act as a database so I can find my images more easily.
I have yet to read the full review up above, but will do so before I start to use PhotoLab as a Digital Asset Manager.
Getting PM Plus will cost as much as two years of Adobeâs Photo subscription. Instead of fighting with something new (PMP), you could stick to what you know (Lightroom) and sit out the two years that DxO will take to get its DAM functionality up to what weâd expect from it. I know that it can feel good (at least for a few weeks or months) to get a new toy, but I still donât see a need for you to jump from managing your assets with Lightroom to managing your assets with PhotoMechanic⌠If youâve managed your assets half-heartedly so far, what will PM do to change that? If youâve managed your asset according to your own needs in Lightroom, why change? Itâs going to be you whoâll have to type in titles and captions, no matter if you (donât) do it on Lr or PMâŚ
I dunno - I used to use Lightroom for that, but I havenât used lightroom in five or six years. I decided I was going to dump Lightroom, but every so often, I use Photoshop for creating special images, and Lightroom comes along with it. Oh, and I still own a license for the original Lightroom 6.
As to PhotoMechanic, Iâve used that for as long as I can remember. Thatâs how I get my images off my memory cards and into my computer, and for years now, it creates custom folder names and custom image names. As to PhotoMechanic Plus, I upgraded to that a year or two ago, canât remember, but I didnât want to start indexing my images until I had them arranged in a system that I can stick with for the future - and while I always feel that way, this time I think Iâve got it worked out as a âfinalâ way of doing things.
My method of ADM is currently my memory - not a very good system, since I tend to forget a lot of things. Youâre right, Iâve obviously managed my assets half-heartedly so far (actually much less), but many years ago I did it better. Iâm hoping PMP will make it easy for me to index images, including those Iâve already taken.
I suppose I should open Lightroom just to make sure it still âworksâ. Iâll try that now. No idea what itâs going to tell meâŚ
Well, Lightroom opened, set up a new database, and itâs up and running. Quite a few missing images though. Almost all of them so far are because I renamed my folder for PhotoLab photos from PhotoLab3 to simply PhotoLab when version 4 came out. Itâs easy enough to correct - just go through them one by one, find the new path, and tell Lightroom. Iâm pleasantly surprised. I expect much worse. And, truth be told, at least for now, I only access those images from PhotoLab, not Lightroom, so thereâs no real need to even fix things, other than my liking things âfixedâ.
Best thing is to stick to what you know best. Apps that you donât use regularly donât add much value and might well be dumped or ignored in order to NOT distract from the apps that get your things done.
Reconsidering your situation, the plan would be to
- Leave the current state of folders as is (donât rearrange folders just yet)
- Update LrC to its current version
- Have LrC read metadata from (all) files, which will
read metadata that youâve added at a later date in PM or PL - Have LrC write metadata to (all) files, which will
add the settings and metadata entries stored in the LrC catalog - Make LrC check its catalogâs consistency
- Quit LrC and never open it again - unless you want to see older edits you did in LrC
Going through the above will update files and/or sidecars to whatever customising and metadata have been added in LrC and PM. I put (all) in brackets, because the above might be necessary for all your top folders that contain your photo files. If all photos are below one top folder, one run will do.
Go through the steps until ALL folders that contain photos are done, then you can copy/move the folders to a new destination, be it with or without reordering things as outlined on this page. Future use will be easier if you put all your folders into one top folder.
Once you start using PM PLUS seriously, youâll have to âingestâ the new structure to make PM read the metadata stored in the files or sidecars. After that, you should
- not rearrange folders with the finder, or the PM (and PL) databases/catalogs will not mirror whatâs on your drive(s) - or have PMP reread the structure if you change it externally.
- not add or change metadata im PhotoLab in order to keep the database of your leading system (PMP) intact.
Wait a while before going through the steps above, maybe that someone will add a hint or comment to complement the procedure.
Iâll wait a while before doing much more, other than maybe telling Lightroom where the missing files are actually located.
Step 1 of 6 is static - I wonât be changing existing files and folders.
Step 2 of 6 is done - Lightroom is now updated.
Step 3 and 4 of 6âŚwill wait a few days, then search for how to do this.
The rest is simple, I think, I believe there is a way to check the catalog accuracy, and (unless I need to go back to old edits in Lightroom) I plan to close LR and leave it closed. 99.9% of my expected editing will be in PhotoLab and DarkTable (and if it wasnât for my Leica M8.2, all of my editing would be in PhotoLab!)
Starting January 1st, ALL of my previous photos will become âstaticâ, no need to make changes. All new photos will go into a top level folder for the year 2022.
Thanks - you make this sound easy and organized!
You have a few years to catch up on me! Perhaps itâs worthwhile considering what you have so many images for. I donât know about you but I donât expect that the many gigabytes of images are going to be looked at when Iâm gone. Itâs a pretty depressing thought process but it leads me to think that I should be organizing those photos so that I can enjoy looking back on them while I am around, and that my children can also enjoy them later (they likely will have much stricter interest criteria)
That leads me to the conclusion that I need to be pretty drastic in reducing my active database to interesting, and usually decent photographically, stuff. Probably only 5% of my whole database qualifies (I am in the middle of doing it). although I will keep all my shots on backup storage that means that I can have much a smaller properly indexed âselectedâ database. I will keep that on external ssd for transportability, although the part of the database which I am processing will remain in my Mac mini internal SSD.
Just a suggestion of a different way of looking at the problem
tom
I overwhelmingly agree with you. My ârulesâ used to be that I never delete images. Nowadays if I capture 50 images, all but the best 10 usually get deleted. I have a huge number of useless images, some taken for âtestingâ, some for âbracketingâ an an even larger number taken while attempting to capture one âperfectâ image. So, since I enjoy looking at my old images, thereâs no reason not to get rid of what I now think of as âuselessâ images.
I fully agree with this. Maybe I just need to spend an hour a day, starting with the largest image folders.
No way, for me. I have lots and lots of âbackup storageâ, much of which will never be looked at by anyone, except for the rare occasions that for some unusual reason Iâm wondering what is there. When I was working, that made sense. Iâm long past when I might actually âneedâ any of those images.
I had two long talks with the tech people at Apple âFinal Cut Proâ (video) support, and by moving a lot of huge files to a new external drive, my disk storage now looks like this:
There is no longer any urgency to any of this, but while Iâm in the mood, itâs as good a time as ever to clean up my image folders, removing useless âstuffâ that I no longer care about. Of course, I still have my negative albums, boxes and boxes of slides that I havenât viewed in maybe 10 years⌠So many memories.
The best tool I have ever found for doing this sort of thing for macOS is a utility named âDaisyDiskâ.
https://daisydiskapp.com
I used to use a similar tool for Windows, but this new graphical way is SO much easier to use, and gives better results. I can drill down through my folders and instantly find out which folders are the largest âdisk hogsâ, which are the best places for me to start in getting rid of no-longer-needed-files.
My old rules came from this place:
www.sportsshooter.com
This place is mostly for professional photographers, who generally speaking do not delete old images, as they never know when one might be requested or needed. If I ever considered myself a professional photographer, that stopped when the paychecks stopped, and I can easily say I am now retired.
Oh yeah, and one more thought - my photos back in the early days came from when I was either shooting film, or early model digital cameras, such as the Nikon D70. File sizes were tiny. In todayâs world, where I could shoot a gazillion shots per minute, each one 100 megs in size, that would overwhelm my image storage, my internet speed, and my ability to even view them, let alone edit them. Iâve mostly called it quits with my D750 and M10 cameras. âŚand shooting film too. I enjoy film, but out of a 36 exposure roll, if I scan even 1/10th of my images, thatâs a lot⌠but when shooting film, I am now, and have always been, much more âfrugalâ.
(I would like to know how the rest of you deal with your image collection, especially Joanna, with digital files and also LF image files. I shot 4x5 for a while, during and right out of college. All of that has vanished somewhere along the way, but I bet Joanna has kept, and can find, every image she has taken over all these yearsâŚ)
Glad to see we are on the same page here. So far as keeping all images is concerned, disk is cheap enough and I have been working on the basis that âyou never know when you might need itâ. I suspect, âneverâ is the answer. I do delete testing shots which take up a lot of space, especially when I have a new camera or lens. I come from an era where film was precious, so am not too bad at avoiding âspray and prayâ. I may be missing something by not using burst enough!
I can explain how I deal with my collection, but my system is pretty primitive and I would like to hear how others do it first before I explain in detail.
As an old time IBM IT guy, I use simple folders and to aid culling, Fast Raw Viewer (since transition to MAC) and previously Fast Picture Viewer on Windows. The objective is to end up with a keepers folder for each month which is processed with PL5 and exported to a set of subject folders.
I keep multiple copies of images in subject files, but have not found a logical and simple indexing (keyword) system. External disk is cheap especially after drastic culling!
I do funnel all images from all sources into the same system. If I need to know which camera took them, the exif is there. Who cares, at the end of the day, itâs the image which counts!
I will be adding video clips to the mix, as I get more comfortable with the technology (I have been primarily a stills guy, but a bit of video can certainly put stills into context in a record of an event or place)
tom