Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

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> So if I want to take older pictures on my device to share with others, I need to download them at home in advance - that's the weakness of this setup.

I have a solution. My workflow is:

-Import photos into Lightroom from camera to local SSD. Select the option to generate 1:1 previews.

-Edit/trash photos. Publish some to FB, Flickr, Snapfish, whatever I want to do with them.

-Move originals to external storage.

The 1:1 previews stay on the local catalog (they're like.. big JPGs or something). Good enough to show off, even print, but obviously you'd want to edit the originals.

If you're disconnected from that external storage, you can still see the 1:1 previews. If you're connected to storage, Lightroom recognizes it and loads up the originals instead. It's brilliant.

You can even set up a collection that syncs with your phone/tablet. If you're even halfway serious about your photos, lightroom is the way to go.

All nice unless you select previews to purge automatically after x days; which I think was a default setting at some point in time.

Unless a recent Photoshop Lightroom version allows you to manage the photos outside of its library-database, it isn't. At least version 1 & 2 copied all files to an SQL database/hidden directory in the users folder.

Windows (Live) Photogallery is much better in this regard, as it indexes the files but keep the files were the are stored. Also all metadata changes are stored back to the file itself. The same goes for Windows Explorer and OSX Finder+Spotlight.

That's not true at all. Lightroom can add photos at their current location, or import them to a location of your choice. There's no "hidden directory".

Lightroom supports sidecar (xml) changes, or syncing metadata to the files. Your choice.

LR doesn't have true multi-user, but numerous solutions exist that are pretty seamless for handling multiple systems using the same database.

I have my LR catalog on Dropbox, and all of my photos on an AFS share on FreeNAS, which isn't always available (I have a VPN to home, but it depends on the speed of my connectivity). I generate 1:1 previews and don't expire them, so I can use LR with the same settings and edits on both my iMac and MBP. The only issue is having LR running on both, at once.

See: http://johnny.chadda.se/sync-your-lightroom-catalog-using-dr... (and many others).

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