How to Start Over please!

[clarep17051824]

I can't find my exact situation in the search and I'm pretty confused by all the references to CC....and I feel too uncertain to wing it because of the implications of getting it wrong. 

I did an Import to LR Classic from my local and external drive of one terabyte of photos because I was curious about how LR would do with facial recognition.  A week later I have 55,000 faces and LR maxed out my local drive with what I'm supposing is an index file - what was I thinking?! 

Now I'd like to 'disconnect' all my photos from LR and start over with more selective Imports.  Would someone please help me with directions to do this.  Thank you very much for your kind and gentle assistance!

[gary_sc]

Hi Clare,

OK, I'll see what I can do.

First, a couple of things. LRs face recognition is actually quite impressive, but you do have to teach it what's what. I had brought in several thousand family photos and during this learning process, it was asking if some guy with a beard was my mother. But after a while, it was recognizing my mother as a young girl, not as the woman I knew her by.

When you have that many photos, it's really not wise to place all of them on your main hard drive. As you might already know, the more empty space on your computer's hard drive, the more efficiently it works. Try not to fill it up beyond more than 2/3 or 3/4 MAX (I leave mine at around 50%). The way that I do that is most of my documents and all of my images are on an external 4 TB drive. As a backup I have a 2nd 4 TB drive that I back up drive A to drive B at least once a week (more often after a big session in LRC). Lastly, I subscribe to a cloud service incase of fire or some other catastrophy. I completely subscribe to the addage: "There are two kinds of computer users: those who've had a hard drive crash and those who've not had a hard drive crash yet."

So yes, get those images off of your main hard drive.

As far as how to import the images into your computer, I have to ask how do you have them organized now? Do you have any organized folder structure for how your images are placed? By holiday? By year? By family?

One of the things that LRC does NOT do is to respect folder structure. If you have Folder A that is inside Folder 1 that is inside Folder I, after import you will have one folder of all of the images. Personally I do not like that. I like an organized folder structure INSIDE LRC. There is a way to do that though that might help you in what you are trying to do. 

Let me also state that LR doesn't care where the images are located, where the catalog is placed, the only thing that LR cares about is that you ONLY work on the placement inside of LRC. If you go to your Finder or Explorer and move a folder. LRC doesn't have a clue as to what happened and now it doesn't know where that folder or the images are located. It's relatively easy to fix but it's better to not have created the problem in the first place. 

So before you bring any images into LRC, create a folder that will be the repository of all of your images (Clare's Images). Now right click on that to show the dialog Create a folder inside Claire's Images and give it a name Trip to Ohio. Now, take the folder of your trip to Ohio and drag it into the Library Grid view of LR, you will see a plus (+) symbol. Let go of the mouse. You will now go into Import mode. Because you dragged the folder to LRC, you do not have to tell LRC where you're importing from. But you do have to "point" to LRC where you want the images to go to. Since you've already created the folder "Trip to Ohio," select that and "Move" the files to that location. It might be a good idea to start working on faces at this point to start the learning process both for LRC to know faces and for you to learn LRC. It's beter to make mistakes with 100 images than with 10,000 images. Don't ask me how I know.

I've given you lots of information I hope some of this helps you. I've simplified a lot of stuff here so do read up on everything I've mentioned. Go to Lightroom Queen for great information (https://www.lightroomqueen.com), she also has a free eBook that's very good.

Good luck!

[clarep17051824]

How I've got it organized:

  Local drive has new work (I use PS pretty exclusivly).

  As my local drive reaches 50-60% I move finished work to my 2T external drive and delete from local.

  I back up both local and T2 with Carbonite online.

  The file structure is Year/Month/Day.

When I did Import to LR I identified my local drive photo folder and the entire T2.  LR showed everything, seemingly, with the file structure intact.  (Now I don't see how I did that!)

It took a long time for the file structure to populate and at the same time it started identifying faces.  Half-way through the facial recognition there was a new file on my local drive associated with LR that filled up all the space.  At that point LR was half way finished identifiying faces.

What I'm hoping for is to start over.  I will read the link you suggested.  Maybe the answer is there, because I'm so sorry, I can't figure out what I should do to start over with LR.

Thank you for your time!

[clarep17051824]

Maybe I need to uninstall and then reinstall Lightroom?  Is there a way to do that?  Somehow I need to Start Over!  Thank you.

[dj_paige]

Uninstall/reinstall does not "start over".

I would think that fixing the problems you have would be better than starting over, and you have been provided a lot of information to help you fix those problems.

If you still want to "start over", use File->New Catalog, give the new catalog a name, and import all the photos again. Please note that information (such as person names, all editing, all user-provided metadata) will not transfer this way, it really is starting over.

[DdeGannes]

Excellent post Gary, very informative. Thanks