SSD organization

[mhpsd]

Hi,

I'm probably not the only person moving to Lightroom right now, so I thought I would throw this out and see if anyone has suggestions.

I am a hobbiest - so no professional workflow with which to deal. I see myself shooting exclusively raw moving forward as opposed to the raw+jpg I was using for iphoto.

Up to now I have used photo mechanic to import images (raw and/or jpg) from my camera and have stored them on an external drive (plus a backup). I then take my selected images and drag them into iphoto for library management.

With the decrease in SSD prices and the fact that my 256G ssd filled up last week, I have a new 512G ssd to format and put in my Macbook Pro. I would like to have my image catalog on my internal drive with backups on the external.

Is there any advantage to partitioning the drive? If so, which partition would you put the LR catalog?

Would anyone recommend continuing to use photo mechanic to cull prior to importing to lightroom?

Thanks for the help,
Mark

 

[swordio777]

There's really no reason to partition your new SSD.

The only advantage I can think of is if you wanted to back up your files and OS separately.

But if your backup disk is a traditional HDD then I'm guessing it's already bigger than your new SSD anyway.

Hope that helps.

 

[maflynn]

Is there any advantage to partitioning the drive? If so, which partition would you put the LR catalog?

No advantage what so ever.

I keep my current year images on my SSD and have my prior year images on an external drive.

 

[deeddawg]

Everyone has a workflow. Doesn't matter whether you're a pro or a hobbiest. It might be random, chaotic, and/or inefficient, but everyone has a workflow.

As mentioned there's no reason to partition the new SSD.

I don't know anything about PhotoMechanic. What benefit does it provide as compared to importing via Lightroom? i.e. are you continuing to use it because you're already using it, or does it provide some feature that Lightroom does not?

Personally I see no reason to go to RAW only from RAW+JPEG unless you almost never use an image straight from the camera. If you're trying to reduce storage usage and you're like many people, you'd do better by culling your shoots more severely. (and if you rarely use an image straight from the camera, why is that? Is it for reasons that can be solved with improved technique or different settings in camera?)

 

[MCAsan]

My LR catalog sits on my rMBA. It takes up little space yet manages over 1000,000 images. The images themselves are sitting in an external library drive. I have zero need to transport all the images I own. In LR the master/original images are in a referenced library (folders in the file system) they are NOT in a managed library database package (iPhoto and Aperture default to that method). The managed library approach may make sense for a desktop Mac with 3TB or more of internal storage. But for a laptop, a referenced library of any size makes more sense.

When I import I put the files on the internal SSD in the folder /2014. There I can culled and edit them with full access to all my LR features and plugins (Nik Colleciton, Perfect Photo Suite..etc). Once the images are done, they are moved from the SSD to the external library drive to the /Pictures folder where they go into a subfolder for the year and a subsubfolder for the day. LR creates the daily subfolders on import. Moving the completed images to the library drive frees up SSD space for the next series of images.

If I want to show folks a series of images, I create a collection in Lightroom. I the collection as full size jpg. I tell iTunes to synch those exported collections to my iPad. I use the iPad to carry around images and iBooks. My iPhones contains over 400 CDs of music. I don't carry either inside my rMBP's SSD.