Running out of disk space

@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 we’ve agreed on that.

Lightroom prefers to keep settings in the “catalog”, 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, I’ll issue that command, and hopefully Lightroom will do what’s needed.

So far, for what it’s 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, I’m no longer sure how big a loss that will be.

You presume correctly :slightly_smiling_face:

Happy Birthday, Mike!

Ain’t it so. There is so much hyperbole out there. Getting older (I’m 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 — and even less-than-honest — 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 don’t make too big of a mistake. Doesn’t always turn out that way but a lot of the time it does. Oh well, that’s life :expressionless:

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You might find this interesting: Why The Leica M11 Might Have a Touchscreen-Only Interface | Fstoppers

Ye gods! That’s it, the end of real photography as we know it. What next? I know, why don’t we shove all that camera stuff into something even smaller with a touch screen? How about, I don’t know, just for the sake of thinking, a mobile phone that can take pictures? :roll_eyes: :crazy_face: :flushed:

Yes…

  • the end of the dinosaurs (driven by interstellar marketing)
  • the end of petroglyphs (driven by Caran d’Ache)
  • the end of humans (driven by humans)

Times are changing and so do we, possibly, except for that last item on the list maybe…

Can I suggest a change to what you wrote:
That’s the end of Leica as we know it.

Many people in the “L-Camera Forum” 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 “reading distance”, but when I’m viewing my camera screen as I’m 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 “infinity”, 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 I’m already not too thrilled with camera menus.

Thought #2 - if I can’t 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, I’m 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 - Nikon’s multi-thousand dollar cameras come down to multi-hundred dollar cameras as they age. On the other hand, in a few years, Joanna’s D850 will probably be worth much more than she paid for it, as it’s “the end of an era”.

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 I’m usually posting in this forum. To be honest though, I need to think of this as “which tool is best for me” which changes things considerably, in many ways…

Thank you @sloweddie

I already have enough problems with my iPad, touching things on screen by accident and being sent off to somewhere I wasn’t intending to go.

Anyway, if everything’s 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 “best” 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 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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 can’t 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 “walkabout” camera, when I have no idea what I’m going to want to photograph. I know it has limitations, especially with my $280 China-made lens on it. It doesn’t 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 haven’t 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 “spray and pray” - if I’m not thoughtful, and if I don’t 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 aren’t 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 can’t match the performance of the larger and heavier D850, but I can’t match the performance of you, either. Besides, if I buy a Nikon Z, @Wolfgang feels I’ll need to buy all new lenses too. I can’t afford that. :slight_smile: (…and that’s 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. We’ve said it before, it’s not the gear, it’s you who makes the photos.

Back to disk space - I have two “4-TB Western Digital external drives” arriving by Monday. One will be used for Time Machine. The other will be for all my video (mostly edited with Apple’s Final Cut Pro. This will free up 1/3 of the space on my 2018 Intel Mac Mini’s 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 I’ll 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.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/4396086400/camera-bits-released-photo-mechanic-plus-dam-speed-efficiency

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 Adobe’s 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 we’d 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 don’t see a need for you to jump from managing your assets with Lightroom to managing your assets with PhotoMechanic… If you’ve managed your assets half-heartedly so far, what will PM do to change that? If you’ve managed your asset according to your own needs in Lightroom, why change? It’s going to be you who’ll have to type in titles and captions, no matter if you (don’t) do it on Lr or PM…

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I dunno - I used to use Lightroom for that, but I haven’t 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, I’ve used that for as long as I can remember. That’s 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, can’t remember, but I didn’t 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 I’ve got it worked out as a “final” 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. You’re right, I’ve obviously managed my assets half-heartedly so far (actually much less), but many years ago I did it better. I’m hoping PMP will make it easy for me to index images, including those I’ve already taken.

I suppose I should open Lightroom just to make sure it still “works”. I’ll try that now. No idea what it’s going to tell me…

Well, Lightroom opened, set up a new database, and it’s 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. It’s easy enough to correct - just go through them one by one, find the new path, and tell Lightroom. I’m pleasantly surprised. I expect much worse. And, truth be told, at least for now, I only access those images from PhotoLab, not Lightroom, so there’s no real need to even fix things, other than my liking things “fixed”.

Best thing is to stick to what you know best. Apps that you don’t use regularly don’t 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

  1. Leave the current state of folders as is (don’t rearrange folders just yet)
  2. Update LrC to its current version
  3. Have LrC read metadata from (all) files, which will
    read metadata that you’ve added at a later date in PM or PL
  4. Have LrC write metadata to (all) files, which will
    add the settings and metadata entries stored in the LrC catalog
  5. Make LrC check its catalog’s consistency
  6. 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, you’ll have to “ingest” 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 what’s 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.

I’ll 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 won’t be changing existing files and folders.
Step 2 of 6 is done - Lightroom is now updated.
Step 3 and 4 of 6…will 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 wasn’t for my Leica M8.2, all of my editing would be in PhotoLab!)

Starting January 1st, ALL of my previous photos will become “static”, 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 it’s worthwhile considering what you have so many images for. I don’t know about you but I don’t expect that the many gigabytes of images are going to be looked at when I’m gone. It’s 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 ‘selected’ 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

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I overwhelmingly agree with you. My “rules” 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 “testing”, some for “bracketing” an an even larger number taken while attempting to capture one “perfect” image. So, since I enjoy looking at my old images, there’s no reason not to get rid of what I now think of as “useless” 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 “backup storage”, much of which will never be looked at by anyone, except for the rare occasions that for some unusual reason I’m wondering what is there. When I was working, that made sense. I’m long past when I might actually “need” any of those images.

I had two long talks with the tech people at Apple “Final Cut Pro” (video) support, and by moving a lot of huge files to a new external drive, my disk storage now looks like this:
Screen Shot 2021-12-30 at 07.43.54

There is no longer any urgency to any of this, but while I’m in the mood, it’s as good a time as ever to clean up my image folders, removing useless “stuff” that I no longer care about. Of course, I still have my negative albums, boxes and boxes of slides that I haven’t 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 “DaisyDisk”.
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 “disk hogs”, 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 today’s 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. I’ve mostly called it quits with my D750 and M10 cameras. …and shooting film too. I enjoy film, but out of a 36 exposure roll, if I scan even 1/10th of my images, that’s a lot… but when shooting film, I am now, and have always been, much more “frugal”.

(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 years…)

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 ‘you never know when you might need it’. I suspect, ‘never’ 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 ‘spray and pray’. 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, it’s 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