Uplodaing Questions.

SierraWolf · January 23, 2009

Ok, I have been searching the threads for this answer but I cant find it anywhere.

My question, should I re-size my photos before uploading to SmugMug?

Basically, my photos are about 1.5-2.5MB on average. Lately I have been resizing to about 800X600 which makes the file size pretty small. Is this the way I should be doing it? If I upload the full size right out of the camera, doesn't smugmug downsize it anyways?

Also, im thinking about signing up for a Pro Account, I have a Power now. I thought I read something that I can upload a Full Res photo for printing but have it show a low-res photo for viewing.

I guess Im looking for a proper workflow for uploading to Smugmug. Some help and clarification is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike A.

anderiv · January 23, 2009

SierraWolf wrote:

Ok, I have been searching the threads for this answer but I cant find it anywhere.

My question, should I re-size my photos before uploading to SmugMug?

Nope, unless you're on a really slow internet connection and want to speed up your upload times, there's no reason at all to resize.

If you don't want others to be able to see/download your full-res pictures, you can always set the size limit down to XL or something for your galleries.

anderiv · January 23, 2009

One additional point - if you (or anyone else) is going to be ordering prints from your gallery, you want to make *sure* that you're uploading the full res copies.

By default, Smugmug will always use the full res copy for prints. If you want to limit what size people can view/download, you can do that with any account level.

SierraWolf · January 23, 2009

Thanks! That helps out a lot.

Mike A.

Picturesofthelowcountry · January 23, 2009

problems with print Size

anderiv wrote:

One additional point - if you (or anyone else) is going to be ordering prints from your gallery, you want to make *sure* that you're uploading the full res copies.

By default, Smugmug will always use the full res copy for prints. If you want to limit what size people can view/download, you can do that with any account level.

I am using LR 2.2 and many of my photos are to small to purchase what is your suggestion, can i go back and re import them in full size will that correct the situation?

Thanks
Mike

anderiv · January 25, 2009

Picturesofthelowcountry wrote:

I am using LR 2.2 and many of my photos are to small to purchase what is your suggestion, can i go back and re import them in full size will that correct the situation?

Thanks
Mike

Hi Mike, you should always work with your full-res images, and RAW if at all possible, especially since you have Lightroom.

To answer your question directly, yes, re-import your full-res images and then you can (carefully) use Lightroom's sync to copy your edits over to the new images.

Just out of curiosity, why would you not import full-res into Lightroom to start with?

-Erik

Picturesofthelowcountry · January 26, 2009

anderiv wrote:

Hi Mike, you should always work with your full-res images, and RAW if at all possible, especially since you have Lightroom.

To answer your question directly, yes, re-import your full-res images and then you can (carefully) use Lightroom's sync to copy your edits over to the new images.

Just out of curiosity, why would you not import full-res into Lightroom to start with?

-Erik

Hello, i am new to both lightroom and smugmug, there are many things that I need to learn. i have been shooting Raw + Jpeg Fine on My D300 which i think might be hurting me in the long run if i am correct. I am now going to shoot raw only and convert in lightroom to jpeg. the thing that tiped me off is that when you go into my Galleries and hit the (Buy Multiple Photos button) it shows two things 1 pictures that are ok 2 pictures that are to small. this is a problem for me because i didnt understand the way that i was eporting from light room to smugmug. with a litle time and patients and help from people like you in these forums i am sure to learn alot and get better results daily.

also i have a big mess in my organization of my folders on my external hard drive which has multiple duplicates i am currently working throught this. let me ask you this, when you move a file into the export to Light room folder do you leave it ther permanitly, and is that a copy or the original file itself?

One more thing "(carefully) use Lightroom's sync to copy" could you please clarify this a little more fore me please?

thanks Mike

anderiv · January 26, 2009

Picturesofthelowcountry wrote:

Hello, i am new to both lightroom and smugmug, there are many things that I need to learn. i have been shooting Raw + Jpeg Fine on My D300 which i think might be hurting me in the long run if i am correct. I am now going to shoot raw only and convert in lightroom to jpeg. the thing that tiped me off is that when you go into my Galleries and hit the (Buy Multiple Photos button) it shows two things 1 pictures that are ok 2 pictures that are to small. this is a problem for me because i didnt understand the way that i was eporting from light room to smugmug. with a litle time and patients and help from people like you in these forums i am sure to learn alot and get better results daily.

Yes, I'd agree that you'll probably just fine shooting in RAW only. RAW+jpg is nice if you have a need to do a quick preview of your images before properly processing them in LR, but those jpgs should never be imported into LR, only the RAWs.

Picturesofthelowcountry wrote:

also i have a big mess in my organization of my folders on my external hard drive which has multiple duplicates i am currently working throught this. let me ask you this, when you move a file into the export to Light room folder do you leave it ther permanitly, and is that a copy or the original file itself?

In the LR import dialogue, I believe you're given the choice whether you want LR to leave the target file in place or if you want it to copy the file to whatever location you've told LR to keep its pictures. Personally speaking, I have LR automatically organize the photos on import into a structure like this:

YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD/
2009/2009-01-26/

LR takes my RAW images directly off of my CF card, creates the above folder structure, copies the images into the appropriate location, and then imports that image into the LR database. Oftentimes after import, I'll go back in through the LR library module and add on a more descriptive name to each folder, so instead of the folder being: "2009-01-26", it gets renamed to something like "2009-01-26 Dad's Birthday".

With regards to the question you asked about the "export to Lightroom" folder, I'm not quite following you. Can you clarify? If you mean what I think you mean, you're asking if, after exporting an image from lightroom, is it the original image or a copy. Also, what happens to the original image during this process. In lightroom, once you import an image (be it a RAW, jpg, tiff, whatever), aside from copying the image to the appropriate location, lightroom never modifies the image. All the edits you do to an image are noted in Lightroom's internal database. When you go to export an image, it looks through its database to see what edits you've done, then it takes the original RAW, applies those edits, and outputs a jpg version. This exported image is what you'd typically use to make prints, upload to the web, whatever. It's really not necessary to keep this image around - after I upload my images to smugmug, I delete the jpg versions. I can do this because I know I can very easily re-create the edited jpg versions whenever I want by just exporting from LR.

Picturesofthelowcountry wrote:

One more thing "(carefully) use Lightroom's sync to copy" could you please clarify this a little more fore me please?

In both the library and develop modules, you'll frequently see a "sync" button show up at the bottom of the right panel. In the library mod, you're able to use this to synchronize the metadata settings from one photo to one or more other photos. Similarly in the develop module, you're able to take the edits you've made to one photo and sync them to one or more other photos. For instance, if you've taken a bunch of photos in the same lighting conditions, you only need to adjust the white balance on one of them. Once you have the WB nailed on the one photo, you can select all the other photos and click "sync". When you do that, you'll be presented with a bunch of options - this way you can select which types of edit you want to sync. In this case, you'd just select "white balance" and then hit okay. Voila - all the rest of those photos now have the correct WB.

Does that make sense?

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