| Joined: | Thu Apr 12th, 2012 |
| Location: | Sausalito, California USA |
| Posts: | 616 |
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Don't put the image files on DropBox - depending on how many files you have, they just plain won't fit and you already see the problem with the time of upload etc.
But it is perfectly safe and very useful to put the LR catalog (and preview etc) on Dropbox. The only snag you might hit would come if you closed down one of the machines that accesses the LRcat before it had completely uploaded the updates to Dropbox (and if you open a LR on a second machine, you will be protected...LR will open the second instance as read only). If you do make an error in shutting down too soon, you will create a conflicted copy of lrcat on dropbox and it is easily corrected then.
I think you should try making some Smart Previews in LR. They can be used to edit your work and do just about everything but print...but you can email a copy and it is pretty good size - I forget how large, but I think it is larger than what you are creating now for your jog's.
What I don't see in your workflow (and which dropbox takes care of) is how do you get the proper catalog on your macbook when you go away. Manually copying etc for me is recipe for disaster.
I agree - finally - that the LR catalog is great. For some time, I tried LR and quit because the Lr cat was so much larger than the Media Pro catalog which works very much the same way (about 140,000 images previews took only about 3 gb of space whereas the same in LR is about 58 gb). But the LR cat shows more than just the thumbnail - the previews are nearly 1:1 but at 72dpi and much easier to find useful, not to mention the smart previews that allow me to work with them. LR has also allowed me to quit Photo Mechanic and Name Mangler for key wording and renaming.
I think you are right about offloading, not just copying the raw files to the archive drive - I've been lugging them around on the macbook just on the odd case I will want to find a printer on a trip and print some old files...not likely to happen and causing too much confusion about what is where etc...leaving me open to database errors.
Cheers,
Tom
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Tom O'Connell
-Lots of people talk to animals.... Not very many listen, though.... That's the problem.
Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh