Maximum number of images to export at once?

[duncanl98088127]

Hi

I want to do an end of year back-up, exporting every edited image from this year as high resolution jpegs to an external drive.

That's around 40,000 images though - can Lightroom (Classic) handle this or is it better to do it in manageable pieces?

Thanks

[Per Berntsen]

I assume that you already have backups of your originals as well as the catalog? That's all you need.

Besides, exporting jpgs is not the same as doing a backup.

Personally, I only export when I need a file for a particular purpose, and when the exported file has served its purpose, I usually delete it.

To answer your question, no I don't think you can export 40,000 files in one go, it's possible that you can't even export 500 files in one go. Exporting is very resource intensive, and you would probably get frequent Out of memory errors.

But there is absolutely no need to do this, as long as you have backups of the originals and the catalog.

[duncanl98088127]

Hi Per,

Thanks - I have back ups of all Raw files and my catalog, but I need to have remote access to all the years' edited files as jpegs.

If I'm away from the office and a client wants a shot I did in March this year, I don't want to go back into LR and export it, I want to be able to send them an already edited file.

I think the second part of your reply answers my question though, which is that I will have to do this folder-by-folder. 😞

Thanks

[Just Shoot Me]

I'm in the process of exporting 18000+ images, about 45% completed so far, and the memory use is at 34% with 16GBs available. No out of memory warnings and that is with 5 tabs of Chrome open, a Win Explorer window open and Win Task Manager.

The export is a separate folder on a different drive than where the originals are and they are not being added to the catalog.

So unless you have a very limited amount of RAM available I would say you can do all 40,000 at one time but it will take multiple hours to complete.

CPU usage moves between 50-95 %.

[duncanl98088127]

Hi, thanks for this - sounds like you're doing something very similar to what I need - can you give me an idea how long the export took to get to 45%?

Many thanks

[Just Shoot Me · Accepted solution]

Well it has been 1+ hours since my last post and now the progress is at 75%. But I think I'm now into larger RAW files than earlier during the export process. So that seems to be about 1+ hours for 30% which would be about 6,000 images.

This is on a Win 7 PC with a second Gen i7 CPU overclocked to 3.4GH. So if your system is newer and faster for your 40,000 about 7 hours +/-.

I did this just to check if LR could/would export large amounts of images at once. Once it completes I'll delete all those exported files.

I kind of work the way Per works.

I export to JPG only to send in an email and If I'm going to print an image I'll send to PS and create a TIFF file to print myself of send to a pro printer in my area.

[duncanl98088127]

Thanks, this is really helpful. I can split my 40,000 into a couple of separate exports and do them over a couple of nights.

I also work the way you and Per have described, but just want to do an annual export to a cloud service so I can access edited images at any time. Thanks for your input, much appreciated.