Convert or work around

techky

So, I'm the photo/tech geek in the household. I shoot exclusively in raw format with my Canon Rebel XTi. I have a question for the other Dgrinners out there in a similar situation.

I process everything in Lightroom and use the built in flag/rate system so that in the end I only process a small portion of the pictures I take. Gotta look for the best of the best . Anyway, it's pretty easy for me to go back and look through all of the pictures, but when my wife wants to do the same she just wants to open up the folder and look through all of them without messing with Lightroom. My question is, how do you deal with this, do you shoot Raw+jpg in camera, process all the raw photos to jpg into another folder, use Picasa?

Even with the Canon raw codec it is still a kinda slow through Windows explorer because the file sizes are so large.

Thanks, sorry it was so long!

Miguel Delinquento

You've got a number of ways to provide her with a view of all images.
-Personally I'd just teach her how to use Lightroom and emphasize why this makes both of your lives easier. Let her use folder view, or you create a collection of the latest upload (or use the last imported collection). Teach her how to use the slideshow, that the fastest I would think.
-This is what Smugmug is good for. Just export everything (jpeg) on each export to a Smugmug gallery using an LR-to-SM plugin. She'll have the URL.
-Do you directly import all images only to LR? I prefer to keep all images in dated folders on my hard drive and then reference these to LR. The folder view from LR matches my Mac's Finder (Windows Explorer for you), but more important I have lots of collections. It's all about metadata.
The relevance of this setup to you is that your wife could just go to the desired dated folder in Windows Explorer and view it as thumbnails. All RAW files have a small embedded jpeg that you initially see in LR Library module and in the thumbnail view.
As long as your wife doesn't rename the files or move them or edit them, LR's edits won't be messed up--LR doesn't touch the RAW data, right?
Finally, if you have multiple collections in LR, I'd ditch the pick function and use color coding instead. Picks only stay with the image for the current collection; colors transfer.

M

techky

Hey, thanks for the response.

Teaching her LR is a definite possibility, it is easy enough to use I suppose but I would rather have something more automatic.

Here is my setup.
2 laptops (mine, hers)
1 desktop

The files are not directly imported into LR, I use a card reader and import them to my laptop that is arranged like you mentioned; dated year/month/day folders. I then copy them with the same hierarchy to the desktop computer where they are mirrored to another backup drive. I maintain this same hierarchy on my Mac inside LR where I do all my edits.

The only hesitation I have to her using LR (and she would pick it up quickly) is the speed of the process. I know that LR has auto import functionality where I could set it to monitor a specific network drive but then there is the rendering of the previews. I guess I wouldn't have to do 1:1. That would be faster.

If I rendered all of the raw files to jpeg to upload to Smugmug then I would have those files locally as well.

Thanks for the tip on the color coding. I use the "p" pick shortcut on my first time through new pictures with the lights off "L" to narrow them down.