Inherited a relative's gear and Lightroom catalogues - where do I start?

[cjsuk]

Quick update on this. It was his funeral today - was nice to catch up with family but a sad time.

On the way back I picked up his computer and photography equipment. It was a lot more than I expected. Managed to fill my entire car. Going to start filtering it for keep/dispose/don't know.

Again thanks for everyone's suggestions - I have a good strategy and a lot of work to do now. I better get on with it.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Quick update on this. It was his funeral today - was nice to catch up with family but a sad time.

On the way back I picked up his computer and photography equipment. It was a lot more than I expected. Managed to fill my entire car. Going to start filtering it for keep/dispose/don't know.

Again thanks for everyone's suggestions - I have a good strategy and a lot of work to do now. I better get on with it.

No rush. Better to take your time than regret deleting something.

 

[cjsuk]

Quick update on this one.

I've exported everything in Lightroom as flat JPEGs at 90% quality full size with metadata to Apple photos first of all. This was done in year blocks. This took a couple of days of futzing to do which was mostly waiting for Lightroom to process stuff, then 4 days to upload 300 gig of stuff. This allows me to be able to share stuff with the family as I go. All Lightroom catalogs are now consolidated onto one high quality TB3 SSD and one spinning rust backup. The spinning rust backup is being stored off site. I've consolidated all his other files into iCloud Drive. This gives his widow access to them as well as she has an iPad tied to his account available at her disposal (photos too!). We are maintaining his iCloud account for the foreseeable future.

The intent is to leave the Lightroom catalogue alone and slowly work through the iCloud photos library as it's easier to manage for both of us now working on it. We've already shaved off about 20 gig of crap without too much effort. If there are any specific images that I want to pull out I will do so in RAW format from the LR library.

As for the hardware, I've cleaned tested and inventoried all the Nikon gear. It's all nearly new. The Z6-ii has 3000 shutter activations, two of the lenses are new and never even been out of the box. I will be keeping some of it. I now have 7 Nikon Z lenses which is a little excessive so need to consider clearing things out a bit!

 

[Ben J.]

Sounds like pretty much perfect strategy and good work. 👍
Your passed relative, wherever he is, would be thankful, I think.

 

[cjsuk]

Quick update again. I spent a week with the Z6-ii and quite frankly I don't like it as much as I like the Z50. It's much much heavier and bulkier, the lenses have considerably less reach and it's overkill for my meagre requirements. It has however let me sit down and focus on what I need out of a camera. So it's the Z50, the 18-140mm DX lens and the 24mm f/1.7 getting kept. All the FF ones are going, the Z6-ii is going and the primes I have are going. I always get caught short and it's mostly about flexibility and travel friendlyness for me.

Have deleted over 5000 photos from the collection as well which are either out of focus, the same subject tens of times and/or test shots. Getting smaller slowly!

I've got several thousand negatives to rummage through and boxes of family photos as well so I need to come up with a decent scanning solution. I currently have an HP M148 office AIO laser which has an "ok" scanner on it but no good for negatives. I get the feeling some contraption with a light box and the Z50 will emerge out of this one

 

[Ben J.]

I've got several thousand negatives to rummage through and boxes of family photos as well so I need to come up with a decent scanning solution. I currently have an HP M148 office AIO laser which has an "ok" scanner on it but no good for negatives. I get the feeling some contraption with a light box and the Z50 will emerge out of this one

Scanning solutions are mostly very time consuming and lots of work, so if you can find a solution to use a camera, remotely controlled from the mac, it will be night and day in the time it takes. My solution nearly twenty years ago, to digitize my ca 4000 mounted slides was to set up my Nikon D200 in a room without windows, directly above the projector lens projecting on a small canvas, and control both the camera and projector from the adjecent room, on the mac. Click next slide on the projector - click expose on the nikon software - check the exposure on the screen, and repeat. All done in seconds. And I'm still very happy with the results.

But of course there are lots of different solutions out there.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

This thread may give you an idea to the approach I used with the Z50 I purchased specifically to digitize negs and slides.

Nikon Z50 First Impressions.

I bought this camera primarily to speed up digitizing a huge whack of 35mm slides, B&W negs and colour negs. I chose to go with the 50mm ƒ-2.8 macro and the 18-140mm zoom. Preferring a single lens to cover my ordinary shooting range. I have an old Epson scanner which does really well with...

forums.macrumors.com

Beyond what I said in the early part of that thread, the light source is a Kodak 8x6 inch LED light box. My final solution for negs was to use the 35mm film strip carrier from my Epson 2450 scanner. All but one frame is blocked off and I slide the film strip along for each exposure. I use a target level on both the light source and camera to make sure I am not introducing distortion from tip or tilt. Rather than shooting through the film base, I shoot emulsion side up. Therefore the camera image needs to be reversed post process.

NOTE: Since I have a good (if ancient) scanner, I use the scanner for scanning films larger than 35mm, but no reason the camera could not be used for these as well. Yes I have also used this camera rig to scan 4x5 negs.

 

[Alameda]

So I spent a couple of hours on this yesterday with the intent of pulling some contextual stuff for his funeral. There are very few collections set up in the catalogue so it's a dredging job for sure. The structure is roughly one year folder since 1997 until today and then days in it (default Lightroom import format) and some of the folders have been suffixed with something useful after an import. There is a huge amount of garbage in it so it should be fairly easy to chunk through over time leaving what I hope is a both concise and comprehensive collection. Under 20Gb is feasible looking at the hit/miss ratio and JPEG export. There are some very interesting folders with memories in so it'll be emotionally hard. I also found several boxes of negatives and prints so I will be scanning and archiving those over time as well.

I've picked a random photo to post here. This is lake Lucerne in Switzerland, a place I know well from family holidays going back 30 years. I was planning to return here myself next year 🙂

View attachment 2374385

The idea of a RAW image is not to export to JPEG. This will just give you the same result as shooting directly to JPEG.

But if we look at the image you’ve posted, it could be better. It’s up to you… you might want to color of the sky to be richer, remove the haze over the mountains, and you might want to brighten up those dark windows of the boat. This is the sort of thing you can do with a RAW image which you cannot do as well with a JPEG. And, it doesn’t matter how perfectly you shoot the photo, there are details you can bring out in the RAW which are thrown away in the jpeg that comes out of the camera.

It’s only after this round of edits that you export as a JPEG.

You have 24 TB of images… that’s many years of shooting, and tens of thousands of RAW images. You cannot possibly export them all. You could spend the rest of your life going through so many images. He probably already did this and edited/exported many into JPEG.

When I do a photo shoot, I take 300 to 1,000 images, and I select ten to thirty for editing and final export to jpeg. I save all the RAWS, but it’s unlikely that I’ll go back to them.

 

[cjsuk]

Approaching his workflow first, it appears it was mostly left in Lightroom and occasionally printed. There were no JPEGs other than a few exported to Photos.app. The objective was to take the state of what was in Lightroom and make it available so the family, with no technical ability in that area, could actually see and benefit from the images. Effectively digitally printing them. Of course they will remain as RAWs but archived away and referred to when required. The key problem is really that there were multiple libraries across different disks and each of those was at risk because there was no 3-2-1 backup strategy which is difficult to set up when you have a large quantity of data and this distribution of disk sizes and contents of disks. This is done now. Phew. The sorting commences...

My personal strategy, having spent a good chunk of my life shooting on film, is to spend more time doing the photography before pressing the shutter. Hence I don't take a lot of photos. My own camera is a Nikon Z50 I've had since they were released. This replaced an ageing D3100. Looking at the shutter count I've taken 5000 photos on it in total in about 4 years and I've taken it all over the planet so far. This is counter to my phone which is used to machine gun anything and filter through. The objective for the camera is minimal editing, at most correcting white balance where I futzed it and occasionally running it through a B&W conversion.

I occasionally screw up a shot (who doesn't?) but I learn from it rather than have a large sifting job later on.

Couple of jpegs from my recent holiday in Malta - good enough! Off to Azores next...