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barts3811330
barts3811330
Participating Frequently
February 26, 2020
Question

Help Picking Best Photo Management App?

  • February 26, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 1982 views

Help. Going a bit bananas. I am diving back into my old photography hobby more seriously and need help selecting the best Adobe program to use. 

Last week, I used Lightroom CC to import >60,000 images into a consolidated directory. I chose to copy each original into a new location (networked drive) and, in so doing, de-duped many thousands of images. Images previsouly spread across iCloud, Google Photos, DropBox etc are now consolidated into this single Lightroom originals folder. This equates to ~400GB. There is another ~700GB of video to be imported, although this may contain significant duplication. 

Next comes the digitization of 10 years worth of slides and negatives (which, of course, has zero meta-data).  Before I embark on that endeavor, I want to have my photography collection management strategy dialed in.

 

Lightroom CC is steadily working to cloud sync. Process is very slow, but steady. Additionally, my network drive is backed-up to cloud (Backblaze), so I feel this collection is well backed up. 

Performance of Lr CC is very slow. I suspect this is due to (a) storing images on a network drive and (b) using a business laptop that is not really optimized for graphic or media work. I am currently looking at a new Dell Precision laptop with 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, 4GB VRAM, etc. So, I should be able to relocate most images to an internal SSD soon, which will surely help performance. 

Still with me? (Thanks)

 

Is Lr CC the best app for me? 

In my very brief experience with it so far, I'm surprised at the limited functionality for batch changing file names or meta-data at import. Personally, I am not wild about the originals being buried in some cryptic folder structure. I appreciate the ability to simply use my operating system's (Windows 10) file browser to explore folders of my original images. this is something that I could get over.  

 

I used desktop Lr and Bridge long ago and seem to recall more functionality. 

 

My application:

I do not need a lot of editing functionality. (If I really need to edit, I can use Photoshop.) My main concern is organization and management of my photos. I want the ability to find an image quickly. Searching by date, location, or other metadata. To really get there, I will need to edit (and add) a ton of metadata. I want to continuously "enrich" the metadata of my photos with comments, tags, locations, ratings, etc that make the entire collection more navigable. In a perfect world, I could use a program that would edit this meta-data at the image file level. (Not by creating some separate database/library file that can be corrupted or thrown out of sync if the original files are moved around.)

 

What is the best program to use? Lightroom cc? Lightroom desktop? Bridge? Bridge cc?

 

 

Connected question: can Lightroom and bridge be used together to work with the same underlying directory of images? Or, will changes from one program screw-up the library and database from the other?

 

I have read extensively about each of these programs and watched a number of online videos, including the wonderful ones by Terry White. Still, I do not feel that I have the answer.

 

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

 

Regards,

Bart

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Jim Wilde
Community Expert
Jim WildeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 26, 2020

Quite possibly you are using the wrong version. Note that there is NO "Lightroom CC", Adobe dropped the "CC" last year from almost all Adobe apps. Today there are 2 types of "Lightroom", one is called Lightroom Classic (which is the latest version of the Lightroom that you may have been familiar with from years back), and the other is now simply called "Lightroom" and which consists of a set of apps which have the Adobe cloud as the hub. Confusingly, one of the "cloud"apps runs on Mac or Windows desktop systems, as of course does Lightroom Classic.

 

The "Classic" version requires all images to be stored locally, whereas the "cloud" version requires all images to be stored in the cloud (though the user can opt to have a copy of the cloud originals also stored locally). The "Classic" version has all the functionality that you may have been expecting, whereas the "cloud" version (being a much more recent product) has a lot of catching up to do in that regard.

 

You might like to read this blog post for a comparison between the 2 Lightroom "systems", it should help you figure out which version of the subscription plan you might need" https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-cc-vs-classic-features/

    john beardsworth
    Community Expert
    john beardsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 26, 2020

    Clarify this, please, which Lightroom are you trying to use? There is nothing called Lightroom CC and in fact Adobe have dropped the CC generally.

    There are fundamentally two Lightrooms. One is called Lightroom Classic and has been around since 2007, and is maybe what you used before. The other less-functional one is now officially called Lightroom, sometimes Lightroom Cloudy because it uploads all the originals in the cloud and regards them as the master files, applying adjustments to those files. Any local copies are just cached. I suspect you've been misled by Adobe's naming into installing this, and it's busy syncing your originals up to the cloud.

    Go to Help > System Info and paste the first line here, so we can then move forward.

      barts3811330
      barts3811330Author
      Participating Frequently
      February 26, 2020

      I am using Lr cloudy. I have it set to copy all originals to a directory on a shared drive. 

      My understanding of how this configuration works:

      1. Previews are stored with the application on my laptop's c:\ drive. I can browse previews offline. 

      2. Full-res originals are stored on the folder I designated on my local network server drive. 

      3. Those originals are also synced to Adobe cloud. 

      Does that sound correct?

       

       

      Question:

      as I work metadata to add keywords, tags, ratings, locations, change dates, etc... are those changes being stores on each image file's meta data, or are they associated with the file via some separate library database?

      john beardsworth
      Community Expert
      john beardsworthCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      February 26, 2020

      I'll rephrase a little:

       

      "1. Previews are stored with the application on my laptop's c:\ drive. I can browse previews offline. "

      Yes

       

      ". Full-res originals are stored on the folder I designated on my local network server drive. "

      Copies of the full res originals are stored... as a local cache. They're for convenience, to let you edit full res when you are offline and not as backup-quality storage.

       

      "Those originals are also synced to Adobe cloud. "

      The originals are synced to Adobe cloud. If you delete a file, it will also be deleted from the local cache - which may be desirable, or not.

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