Request for Advice Regarding Use of Lightroom for a Historical Archives Project

[genealogist1780]

I’m archivist for a volunteer community project. We have scanned approximately 15,000 photographs from the 1800s and early 1900s. We add more daily. These items are organized on a computer hard drive in folders by collection, series, and sometimes subseries. Notepad documents are created to match each photo file, these contain all description and citation data. We use museum software to share the photos with complete documentation online for free research access via our website.

It is clearly time for us to update our scanning equipment and photo processing software. We really want to incorporate metadata and upgrade our processing time and options.

One concern is maintaining hard drive access to our organized collections. If we import our photographs into this software will that structure be maintained? Can we still access it on the hard drive? As we update photos in the software and add the metadata, will our hard drive files be automatically updated? We share these hard drive files via OneDrive to local historical and genealogical societies for daily research access, so we can’t lose that capacity. Having said that, we are willing to offer it in other ways, if there are options to do so.

We also have an Accessions folder for new scans that we then organize into the permanent collections folders. Is it difficult to reorganize images in a folder and between folders? If these changes are made in the software will they also be changed on the hard drive?

We hope to reduce some of the redundancy in our current process.

These are some of our initial considerations. If anyone has advice, ideas, or other input, we would be glad to receive it. Thank you!

[john beardsworth]

There are ways in which an experienced user of Lightroom Classic might be able to achieve what you describe, and certain things are easy (eg hard drive based, reorganize images in a folder and between folders, metadata). Metadata can be saved back to the files in the hard drives.

There is a second Lightroom which is cloud based (Adobe have confused everyone by calling real Lightroom "Lightroom Classic" and naming their cloud service "Lightroom"). That Cloudy Lightroom doesn't have much capability, so you'd be applying keywords and a limited range of other metadata, and it would be trapped in the cloud. You could get it out to copies (exports) of files. But again you'd have to know it pretty well.

Fundamentally both Lightrooms are single user applications. Lightroom Classic is the best choice for you, but it's on the assumption that one person remains very much in control of it. You can find ways to get others' cooperation, but it's more a question of you managing the folders and workflow, and by gaining enough experience of Lightroom Classic.

[genealogist1780]

Thank you for your reply. This is very helpful information. Generally, as lead archivist, I would be the person managing the software. The organized and edited hard drive files would be the ones we would want to provide shared access to, so if those would be updated automatically as I work in Lightroom Classic, that would work well.