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My Three Favorite Lightroom Questions at Book Passage Conference
I'm back in the US and taking a short break from teaching at the 16th Annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers conference in Corte Madera, California. The attendees are great, and several of them are quite accomplished photographers. It's going to be easy to pick two winners of the photography contest to receive copies of Lightroom donated by Adobe.
I always find audience reaction to Lightrrom very valuable, and interesting. For example, yesterday, before I even demonstrated the application, I was asked:
#1 "How many images can I import into a Lightroom catalog?"
I've heard of users boasting 200,000 images, but that number always seemed high to me. Not wanting to give a misleading answer, I waited for a break, and called my DAM buddy Peter Krogh. Luckily I reached him "on vacation". He also questioned the 2000,000 image figure and said his advice, depending on computing power, is to stay within 50,000 to 100,000 images per catalog. Ok, that sounds reasonable to me.
The other question was one I had a relatively quick answer for.
#2 "How do I create a slimmed-down"Portfolio" catalog with original-files, that I can carry with me on my laptop to show clients on the road?"
It's easy.
1. First, create a new catalog (File> New Catalog). Name it, and choose a destination on your hard drive.
2. Select Import From Catalog from the File menu. Navigate to one of your master catalogs and select Choose. The following dialog box will appear. Make your selection of images you want to include in the "Portfolio" catalog. Under File Handling, select "Copy New Photos to a New Location and Import". Choose a location on your laptop.
3. If you have other catalogs containing files you want included on your "Portfolio" catalog, repeat step two. Obviously, since laptop storage is limited, you'll want to limit the number of images in your new catalog. I like including the original files because I can process them on the road if necessary.
Finally, my third favorite question was:
#3. "Where are you going for Lightroom Adventure 2.0?"
All I can say for now is, we are working on it. Stay tuned!
Comments (4)
Feel free to invite me ;)
The portfolio idea is a very cool and useful tip Mikkel.
not 200,000, but 50,000 to 100,000.
I'm sorry, but 50-100 thousand images is a huge difference - why say that if you wouldn't say 200,000?
I think it could handle any number in reality,as soon as they get the performance out of the gutter.
3mp jpegs on a 6month old computer take how many seconds to render 1:1 zooms?
In PSCS2, Picasa, everything else: In Lightroom: 5 seconds+
Dan, computing power makes a HUGE difference. One of the conference attendee's was using an older Mac Powerbook (I think it was 1.4GHz) with only a few thousand images in a catalog and boy it dogged. Even using the Develop module to perform simple tonal changes was frustrating. But I'm using the new MacBook Pro (2.4GHz) and I'm not running into any speed bumps, albeit with only a few thousands images in a catalog.
Mikkel,
I have 124,447 images as of today in my Lightroom catalog. My performance is fine on my MacPro (4x Intel with 8GB RAM). My question is; as long my system's performance keeps up, is there any danger in having such a large catalog? Am I living dangerously?