1 Reply Latest reply: Feb 20, 2013 8:45 AM by web-weaver RSS

    Help: best Lightroom practices using a Drobo

    jb2sprint Community Member

      Hello,

       

      I apologize in advance for what will be a long post.  I'm a newbie when it comes to Lightroom, so forgive me if these questions seem elementary.

       

      Background: I have a Drobo b800fs, connected to our network via gigabit ethernet.  I have roughly 225,000 photos on the Drobo - stored by year and then by event.  We're adding roughly 30,000 photos per year to the system.  Searching for specific photos is an absolute nightmare at times.  That is why I am looking at purchasing Lightroom.  It'll be a massive project, but if we can add tags/keywords to our photos, the search feature would then be a breeze.  Not sure if it is important to note, but I dont anticpate using Lightroom to alter the images much (if at all) - it'll mainly be used a giant search tool.  Assuming Lightroom is my best option for tagging all of these photos, here are some questions I have...

       

      1) Can I store the catalog file on the Drobo, in the same location as the original images? My reasoning for this would be so that I could access that catalog file from any machine in our office that is running Lightroom.  If not an option, what is the best location for the catalog file to reside?  Obviously speed would be a big factor here.

       

      2) Can I run one master catalog for all of our photos or would that be too cumbersome?  If not, would it be better to run a separate catalog by year?  Obiviously, the more catalogs I have, the more searching I have to do... but I also don't want to wait 5 minutes for a enormous catalog to load.

       

      3) What happens if a drive fails on drobo and I have to insert a new one? When the drobo regenerates files, will that screw up the catalog association with the images?

       

      4) I currently have all original photos on the Drobo backed up to separate external WD hard drives (one for each year of photos).  To speed up the keywording project up, could I hand these drives out to my team members and have them run Lightroom and keyword all of the photos on each respective drive, and then merge all the catalogs onto the Drobo without having to copy over all the original photos (since they are already on the Drobo)?

       

       

      Thanks for any tips, opinions, and help you can provide!

        • 1. Re: Help: best Lightroom practices using a Drobo
          web-weaver Community Member

          1) The Lr catalog cannot be on a network drive, but photos can. Catalog and photos do not have to be on the same drive.

          Best option for the catalog is the fastest drive that you have, i.e. an internal SSD drive.

          Lr constantly writes to and reads from the catalog. That means that the speed of the drive hosting the catalog is a big factor in Lr performance.

           

          2) It seems there is no practical limit for how many photos can be in one catalog. There were posts on this forum of people / organizations / companies having about 250 000 photos in one catalog.

          Having one catalog is the preferred method. For instance you cannot search across several catalogs; a search is always confined to one catalog.

          Opening a huge catalog should not take very long, since Lr does not load the whole catalog but addresses only the images opened by folder or by collection.

          If you have several catalogs, and you want to switch catalogs, Lr will close down and open up with the new catalog. That might take longer than opening Lr in the morning with one big catalog and then not having to switch catalogs.

           

          3) It shouldn't as long as there is no drive letter change involved. I don't use drobo , so can't say for sure. But I had one of my RAID 1 external drives rebuild one disk, and it did not screw up the catalog.

          The catalog stores - among all the other things - the name and location of the image files. As long as these two don't change, the catalog will be fine.

           

          4) Several people cannot access one and the same catalog at the same time. So, several people working on the keywording project would necessitate that each person creates a separate catalog.

          The keywords could then be imported into the master catalog. Since importing the sub-catalogs would create duplicate images, the best method for importing the keywords would be: Once each sub-catalog is completed with keywording, the keywords are "written to file" (via the feature <save metadata to file>), and then in the master catalog the keywords would be imported by reading the keywords from file (via the feature <read metadata from file>).

          There is one caveat with this: <Read metadata from file> overwrites the catalog data for the images in question. Thus it would be mandatory that no work is done in the master catalog before the keywords are "read from file". After that, new keywords can be added in the master catalog, or photos can be edited, etc.