Newbie question on managing catalog files & external drives

I'm new to Lightroom and just downloaded a trial version of LR4 earlier this week. I'm an amatuer photographer (and I really mean amatuer ) ... and serve as a volunteer for a local summer baseball team (college players). I've taken - on average - 5,000 photos per summer for each of the last 5 years. In addition to posting the photos of each game to my Phanfare.com site (where players and families can download them), I create a keepsake DVD with video clips and a slideshow for the players and coaches at the end of the season. If I decide to become a LR4 user, I would be organizing those photos from the past...as well as on a game-by-game basis this coming summer and into the future. In addition to backing up all of my photos to DVD and Phanfare.com, I have a designaed external hard drive for these photos. On the external drive, I have a different folder for each year and subfolders for each game. In the past, I've kept the current year photos on my laptop and back them up to the other locations as the season progressess.
As I map out my plans, I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage the past years photos, current year photos and the related catalog file(s). I won't always have the large external hard drive with me....and I don't have enough room on my laptop for all years. There are times I need to search for photos across multiple years; there are times only in the current year...although I have no problem restricting myself to using the large "master" external hard drive for those multiple year searches. I do have a portable 160 GB hard drive at my disposal that I can use and take with my laptop at all times if needed.
Would appreciate any advice on how best to set up the catalog files so that I can manage current year and past year photos...meet my mobility requirements for the current year...as well as the master external hard drive.
Thanks in advance for your help. (Hopefully my explanation and question makes sense)
Ralph
(PC / Windows 7)

Advice #1: use one catalog -- don't even think about multiple catalogs; multiple catalogs will not help, this will only hinder you in your work. Inside of Lightroom, you can easily organize different years, different teams, different players, different sports, and anything else you want to organize.
With regards to travel, you can export portions of your catalog to whatever HD you want to take with you.

Similar Messages

Cannot open Lightroom Catalog on External Drive

Please excuse the screen name. I tried so many when registering but they were all taken so I was pretty sure this one would be available.
I am migrating from a PC to a Mac Laptop.
I copied my entire photo drive to an external drive which is what i will use with my Laptop. My catalog and photos are stored on this external drive and when I try to open the catalog, I get the following Error:
Lightroom cannot launch with this catalog. It is either on a network volume or on a volume on which Lightroom cannot save changes. But I have no problem opening an image in Photoshop so I know the files copied over in a readable format.
Ideas?

Hi
I've just moved from a PC to a Mac as well and is having the same problem as the original comment:
"Lightroom cannot create a catalog named “AATKM82011” on volume “/Volumes/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive/AATKM82011” because Lightroom cannot save changes to this location."
I do understand moving the file(s) (which I have several files in this external drive) to my internal HD...so my question would be, that my external drive can not be accessed (written) unless I reformat the drive? Is this the only way for me to use this drive or is there any other way that anyone can suggest?
Thank you in advance for the help.

Move photos & catalog to external drive

I am filling-up the hard drive on my iMac. I want to move the pictures & Lightroom 3 catalog to my external drive. Is there an easy way of doing this. Also, I have some old photos & a Lightroom 1.4 catalog on a Windows NTFS formated hard drive. I can move the individual folders onto a thumb drive & manually re-enter them in Lightroom on my IMac. Is there any way to save the Lightroom 1.4 catalog?

Van,
I did not think of that way of moving files from within the organizer.
Unfortunately, the 'move' feature for selected files works is meant to move files from any location on your computer to a single new folder. That should keep your catalog on the same location than before, with the albums, categories and tags unchanged. I don't understand how you can have lost your albums in the process.
That's not what you want, and the 'move' feature is rarely used because there is always the risk to move files with the same filename into the same destination drive. Since that is not possible in the explorer, the organizer is supposed to rename files to avoid that problem. In older Elements versions the 'move' command had several bugs which explains why it is rarely used.
I hope you had a backup of your files before your move ?
Of the two recommended ways to move folder trees within Elements, I prefer the backup and restore method. The second method is rarely used, although I have tested it successfully with a big catalog in PSE12. With a big catalog like yours, a backup is necessary anyway, which means you don't save time. The usual result of the backup/restore (totally safe process) is that the catalog itself is also moved to the new drive; but you can get it back simply to the default location on C: from the catalog manager (catalogs accessible to all users).

LR2.7 second (new) laptop can't open catalog on external drive

I've installed and updated the same version of LR on a new laptop which I'm still setting up (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit). It sounds like it's ok to have two installs for one user at home, but the second one is still in trial mode so far. I wanted to see how much faster/better the new laptop handles the catalog which is on an external drive. The old laptop is Windows XP SP3 32-bit.
If I connect the external drive to the new laptop and try to open the catalog, it says it can't use the catalog "because it is not writable and cannot be opened.
This could be caused by incorrect permissions or because another Lightroom application is using the catalog...".
I am an Administrator on both machines. I don't see a lock file, and the Windows permissions for System and Administrators allow all (but Special Permissions is unchecked).
There are some photos on the old c: drive that I haven't copied over yet, but that shouldn't make a difference.
And I can still open the catalog on the old laptop.
What should I do?
Thanks in advance.

I hear that on Win 7, running as Administrator is not sufficient--you need to make sure that your account "owns" the files or directories that it's trying to access.
Also, with LR not running, check in the directory that the catalogue is in and if there's a file with a ".lock" extension, delete it.
Hal

Managing iTunes with external drive

I just recently moved my iTunes music folder to an external drive. It's working beautifully.
It's easy enough to make sure that I have the external drive attached when listening to or importing new music from CD's. However, if I have my iTunes constantly open so that it downloads new podcasts, can I do so without always having the external plugged in and then "consolidate library" to add newly downloaded podcasts to the external?
Not sure if that makes sense, so let me clarify how I THINK this would work. If my external is plugged in, it will automatically place new podcasts in the music folder on the external. However, what happens if it downloads (or attempts to download) a podcast when the external is not plugged in (but iTunes is running)? Does it then place the podcasts on the internal drive until I later plug in the external? Then I would just have to "consolidate library" to move the newly added to the default external drive?
Sorry for such a convoluted explanation. Hopefully one of the top gurus understand what I'm trying to say. I know that I've seen it discussed and posted about before, but I can't seem to find the past posts that address this specific question.

I just do this manually because I'll end up deleting the content from the internal library anyways. You might want to check if consolidate merges content from your internal library /volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/you/Music/iTunes/ to your external library if the external library is selected when you launch iTunes. If that works, then you should be fine; however you would probably want or need to delete the files from your internal anyways. I've always considered consolidate to be a method of bringing referenced files into the library (you have songs that you imported without having the add to library checkbox selected).
I have been using an external on a machine hooked up to my HDTV for a couple of years and sometimes I need to sync items to that system from the internal or another machine (network). I just keep that library on the external selected and either transfer purchases or copy over a podcast (if I'm using sneaker net) and double click it.
For example, if I subscribe to something like GROOVELECTRIC, download a podcast, then simply double-click the actual file, it is added into my podcast directory on the external and placed in the correct location in the podcast tree.
So, if consolidate doesn't do the trick you can try just selecting the files in your library and launching them to have them copied to your external or you can try using the Add to Library function from the file menu. Figuring out a way to delete the files from the internal after merging/importing/consolidating seems to be the last piece I need to work on.
I haven't revisited this for a while, but I'd like to hear about any trick you come up with.
You will still need your internal library set up to mirror the podcast subscriptions you have on the external, so a full deletion of that library does not seem to be the solution.
Good Luck,
-j

Questions regarding setup of new external drive in disk util?

Hello I just got a new HD and external enclosure i will be using for storage. The Drive is a 500gb seagate sata in an Thermaltake max 4 enclosure that is hooked up via usb to my macbook.
Now I have a few questions about how to best to format the drive for use. As this is my data drive I plan to be able to use it on my linux box by mounting it as HFS+ if needed for some rare occasion(ex: macbook breaks and goes in for repair) since this is my only mac.
So the main question is what should I chose as a partition scheme for this new drive?
Is the default Apple Partion Map ok? will linux be able to read it as HFS+(MAC OS Extened(Journaled)) using that scheme. I wont be booting of this new drive so thats not an issue. Also my linux pc's(older boxes) don't have the EFI bios that GUID uses supposedly if that makes a difference.
The last question is do i need to have the Mac OS 9 disk drivers checked when creating the partition? I don't think I need as I don't have OS 9.
I guess the best thing would be if anyone here has any experience using an external drive on both mac and linux using HFS+. How did you guys setup your drives?
Thanks

Hello I just got a new HD and external enclosure i will be using for storage. The Drive is a 500gb seagate sata in an Thermaltake max 4 enclosure that is hooked up via usb to my macbook.
Now I have a few questions about how to best to format the drive for use. As this is my data drive I plan to be able to use it on my linux box by mounting it as HFS+ if needed for some rare occasion(ex: macbook breaks and goes in for repair) since this is my only mac.
So the main question is what should I chose as a partition scheme for this new drive?
Is the default Apple Partion Map ok? will linux be able to read it as HFS+(MAC OS Extened(Journaled)) using that scheme. I wont be booting of this new drive so thats not an issue. Also my linux pc's(older boxes) don't have the EFI bios that GUID uses supposedly if that makes a difference.
The last question is do i need to have the Mac OS 9 disk drivers checked when creating the partition? I don't think I need as I don't have OS 9.
I guess the best thing would be if anyone here has any experience using an external drive on both mac and linux using HFS+. How did you guys setup your drives?
Thanks

Basic Question: How to partition an external drive and then set up TM?

Hi. I am going to be using an external hard drive (Western Digital - 640GB) on my MacBook for the first time and I think that I'd like to partition it so that part of it is for Time Machine and part of it can be used to just manually drag and drop my files (like any other USB external drive).
1. How to I partition the external drive for Mac?
2. If I insert my drive (not yet partitioned) in my MacBook for the first time and the MacBook automatically asks me if I want to use it for Time Machine, I'm assuming that I need to say "no" so that I can first partition it, right? If yes, then after partitioning it how do I set up the one partition for Time Machine?
3. If I have 640 GB external hard drive space and my MacBook has about 100GB of space, how much of the 640 should I allocate for Time Machine?
Thanks! Happy New Year!

coffeecoffee wrote:
Hi. I am going to be using an external hard drive (Western Digital - 640GB) on my MacBook for the first time and I think that I'd like to partition it so that part of it is for Time Machine and part of it can be used to just manually drag and drop my files (like any other USB external drive).
1. How to I partition the external drive for Mac?
select the whole drive (the model, not the name) in disk utility and click on the partition tab. set the number of partitions. set the partition scheme to GUID in options. set the format to mac os extended journaled. hit apply.
2. If I insert my drive (not yet partitioned) in my MacBook for the first time and the MacBook automatically asks me if I want to use it for Time Machine, I'm assuming that I need to say "no" so that I can first partition it, right? If yes, then after partitioning it how do I set up the one partition for Time Machine?
in system preferences->Time machine.
also see TM 101 for basic usage instructions.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
3. If I have 640 GB external hard drive space and my MacBook has about 100GB of space, how much of the 640 should I allocate for Time Machine?
it depends on your computing habits but it's generally recommended to have TM drive to be at least 2-3 times bigger than the total amount of data you are backing up.
Thanks! Happy New Year!

Time Machine Question: How does it handle external drives?

Hi,
To date, I have only been backing up my HD (macbook pro) though Time Machine onto a dedicated back-up external drive.
Today, I backed-up and forgot that my 2nd external drive (for music) was plugged into my Macbook. So, Time Machine seems to be backing up both my HD and my Music. This is not a bad thing. But, I have one question - worded two different ways:
1. If I back-up again next week and my Music External drive is not plugged in, will the future back-up simply write over the music back-up?
2. Do I need to plug in my Muisc External drive next time I want to back-up my HD?
A third, related question:
3. I also have a 3rd external for pictures and movies. Will Time Machine back this up as well? Is this a reliable way to back things up?
Thanks in advance,

Read Pondini's TM page here
http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Home.html
My advice is not to let TM become a catch all backup because it's placing all your software eggs in one hardware basket. Hardware fails just as much as software does and a catch all TM failure takes it's all down in one shot. Not only that TM also traps your data.
Maintain two seperate hardware backups of your data in easy accesible (from any computer) as possible.
I use a 50/50 partition on my main boot drive and Carbon Copy Cloner to auto-clone A to B nightly, but this only offers software protection, then I have a external drive clone spaced back a few days, and then a another clone spaced back about a few weeks or months. The external clones offer hardware and software protection.
This might not work in your case, each person's needs are different, the key is to have a multi-based approach to give you diversity in case something goes wrong.
More good advice here
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201

Question on iTunes libraries on external drives

Back a few years ago I put my itunes music library lived in a NAS drive. If the drive was not mounted however when you launched iTunes the library would reset resulting in a blank iTunes.
This was such a deal breaker for me in the end I ditched the nas.
Now I have my itunes library on an external USB Harddrive. If for some reason the drive is not attached when launched, all that happens is you see your library of music but when you select anything a little alert icon goes next to it with a warning the music could not be found. When you attach the harddrive all is well again.
A friend has an extreme base station with his music folder on. And has just explined to me the self same issue as I used to have.
Can someone explain why iTunes will sometimes work fine, and sometimes reset depending on how it feels? Is there a way to predict this, and more importantly ensure that iTunes simply says it cannot find the tune, and not reset the whole library. Which is a most odd behaviour anyhow.

Your iTunes folder on your Startup Drive (in your USER>MUSIC>ITUNES folder) contains a file that is the roadmap to all of your songs, ratings, playlists, etc. Your iTunes application (in the applications folder on the startup drive) is, well, the application (like an engine) that runs iTunes.
By default, your iTunes Library (where all your actual MP3 files are stored) is in that iTunes folder (in your USER>MUSIC>ITUNES folder). However, when you store it on an external drive, you usually change it's location (in Preferences) so that iTunes knows where the Library is located.
So.....what's probably going on is that you have iTunes set up right for an external drive and it will run properly when that drive is plugged in. iTunes knows where everything is because all that info is contained in the file I mentioned. When you start iTunes and your external drive is not plugged in, iTunes will default to the iTunes Library in the folder on your Startup Drive (USER>MUSIC>ITUNES folder), which is probably empty. It knows where all your songs are on that external drive, but can't access them b/c the drive is off or disconnected.

Location of iWeb files - External Drive ?

Dear members:
I would like to have my iWeb files residing in an external hard disk. How can I set up iWeb so that it stores its associated files in a external disk instead of my home directory ?
Thank you in advance for your help,
Joseph Chamberlain

Wyodor:
Thank you for the link. The information is very helpful and I have already moved the domain file as the article suggests. It works great.
Another issue that this article does not address is how to move the site location to an external drive. Although I had noticed that the domain information was kept in ~/Library/Application Support/iWeb I have also noticed that the site files seem to kept in ~/Sites.
How can I move my sites and files to an external drive ? In case this is possible I would prefer to keep the different files in separate folders so that their associated files don't become mixed. Can I move the files to an external location ? Assuming this can be done is there a way to set this location in iWeb or should I replace the Sites folder with an Alias pointing to the external hard drive ?
Thank you in advance,
Joseph

Managed LIbrary and External Drives

I want to transfer my Aperture library to an external drive, continuing to operate on a 'manage' basis, as I'm rapidly running out of room on my internal drive.
This external drive will be exclusive to Aperture and I wish to back this up to another external drive (again only to be used for Aperture back up) using time machine.
Currently I'm backing up to a 1TB drive which I wish continue to use via time machine for everything else.
Am I asking too much? If not can anyone advise how to do.
Many thanks.
F S
Aperture 3.2.4

The previous discussion at the link may be of interest:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/17064093#17064093
Currently, I do my primary editing on my rMBP, with a dedicated Thunderbolt drive as the host of the Managed Library (about 2 TB current). I now do my first clone backup to a USB3 drive, which can then be used as a source to further clone back to a dedicate drive in my old Mac Pro.
Hope this helps.
Ernie

Can't launch LR catalog on external drive after upgrading to LR 4.

Today I realized I was using LR3 instead of the LR4 upgrade. I quit LR3 and launched LR4. (Note: I did upgrade the catalog when I installed LR4.) The catalog opened just fine, but I noticed that edits and some library additions I had made while back in LR 3 were missing. I quit LR4. Relaunched my computer. Now I can't open my catalog in either LR3 or 4. The catalog is on an external hard drive. I'm getting the message "Lightroom cannot launch with this catalog. It is either on a network volume or on a volume on which Lightroom cannot save changes." I am not on a network. The external drive is attached to my desktop Mac. I have been launching with the catalog on the hard drive for over a year. I am at a loss to solve this. Help. I need to get to my pictures.

Okay I fixed my own problem. I quit everything again and restarted my computer again. This time LR launched okay. I went back to LR3 and found I was using an older catalog. Then I quite that, relaunched LR4, selected the older catalog, and checked the box that says "upgrade again". I let this run and got a catalog with a new version number. The library is now in synch and I am happy again.

LR 5 issues with catalog on external drive - laptop works fine, iMac does not.

I've just upgraded from LR 2 to LR 5 on my mac laptop and simultaneously gotten an iMac, on which I installed LR 5. I'm trying to work on both, so updated my catalog to a new location on the same external drive as my photos. Everything works fine on my laptop, but I'm having major issues on the iMac: the program finds my photos, but does not display them (just a gray box where they should be). I sometimes get an image if I go into Develop, and then it will show up in the bottom bar among all the gray boxes. When I go into a folder I just created, I get a message about "Access Denied" but am able to work with this folder just fine on my laptop. Please help!

You need to check all permissions for the drive I believe.

Cataloging Multiple External Drives?

Hi everybody. I have nine external FW drives of various sizes littered with projects and files from years of work. Is there any simple way of maintaining on my boot drive a searchable catalog of what is on what drive? I dont want to have to constantly plug in nine drives when I am trying to find some old fcp file or media. Like is there any way to have spotlight index all the drives and keep a copy of the index on the main machine to search? Or some little third party shareware gizmo that does this? I can't imagine that this is not a common problem with media folks. Thanks in advance for any help or pointers.

I don't know if this is what you want, but it works for me with a similar sort of need. I have burned a TON of music CDs, and just want to know WHICH CD has a particular song. What I did was create an Applescript that I run when I finish burning a CD, and it saves a text file to a folder called MyDisks (yes, it works on disks as well as CDs). When I want to find a particular song I open the MyDisks folder and search by content on the name of the song, so the find result returns the text file or files that contain the song name, and each text file is named whatever the CD or disk was called. So if I want to find which CD has the song "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" I open the MyDisks folder, hit Command-F, check "MyDisks" as the place to search, and in the Search For box type the song name, surrounding it by quotes so it doesn't pull up files that have all the words, but not necessarily that song. In this case the results returns two text files, Random17 and Random16. I then go to my CD collection and look for those CDs.
Here's my script:
choose from list (list disks)
set the_disk to the result as string
set the_path to quoted form of POSIX path of alias the_disk
do shell script "find " & the_path & " -name '*' > ~/Documents/MyDisks/" & (word 1 of the_disk) & ".txt"
I used to have a fancy catalog program, way back when, but have found this works perfectly well for my needs.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

Quick Question: Will TC Use an External Drive Like the Internal?

I use an AEBS with the "unsupported disks" hack to mount a Drobo disk over AFP. I back up regularly over 802.11n (Apple Version), and it has been working very well since December. There's no question that it works. I have done a couple of restores, and regularly browse to ensure backup integrity. I do offsite backups of important/secure stuff, but that's not a Time Machine regimen. It's much more a classic "dump n' burn" type of thing.
If no one is familiar with a Drobo, it's a pretty nice piece of kit. It's a "slobo," so you want to use it over a network, but it is robust as ****. A LOT cheaper than RAID 5 (I set up about 1.7TB of redundant storage for about $700).
What I get tired of are extremely long "Preparing" and "Finishing" sessions in my backups. The backups are not considered done unless all three phases have completed ("Preparing", "Backing Up", "Finishing"). In many cases, the "Preparing" phase is a lot longer than the "Backing Up" phase. I'm pretty sure that this is because Time Machine is sorting out the prior backups on the disk. It probably does this in a fairly primitive manner across the mounted file system.
I am assuming that Time Capsule has a client/server architecture, where the TC unit does a lot of the "sorting out" in the unit itself, as opposed to making the computer do it. What concerns me is that it does this only for the internal disk, and external disks are treated in exactly the same manner as they are currently treated by the AEBS. I have asked several people at Apple (including so-called "geniuses") about this, and have received blank stares, so the prognosis isn't good.
Unless Apple can convince me that the TC will offer a significant improvement over my current system, I see no reason to get one. This isn't aimed at people like me. It is aimed at home users who have never had a backup in the first place. I don't think they lose any sleep over the thought that I won't buy a TC for my setup.

You said "In order for TC to be attractive to home users, they must be offloading a lot of the administrative work to the unit." If this was a question... The answer is that there is no real "server" intelligence built into the Time Capsule. All the "administrative work" for Time Machine is done on the Mac running Time Machine.
As a side note - Apple employees will very, very rarely enter discussions in these forums.

Newbie question on managing catalog files & external drives

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for