lightroom 3 image processing

rickp

I'm running out of room in my laptop so I'm thinking about moving my images to an external HD.

What I'm looking to do is edit the preview images with the EHD disconnected and then sync the changes to the full RAW images in the appropriate folders.

I know i can preview the images with the EHD disconnected, but can I edit them too?

R.

arodney

You sure can. As long as the LR application is on your boot drive, you can launch the library and access all the images that reside on the external drive. I’d put all that on the external drive. Then you can mount it to any other system that has a copy of LR on it, click on the library and off you go.
Be sure to setup your preferences to store presets with catalog, then they too travel with that external HD.

rickp

Just to make sure i understand it. With the EHD disconnected I can edit the preview images then reconnect the drive and sync the changes.

The EHD is just that, LR is in my mac so the EHD is nothing more than a storage device.

colourbox

I do not think you can use the Develop module when the selected image is on an unmounted volume. Lightroom will complain that the image is offline. Luckily, LR will recognize the image and let you edit it as soon as you mount the volume; no need to exit and restart Lightroom.

I think you can do metadata edits in the Library module, though, like keywords and captions. But not raw edits.

rickp

Thanks for the info, its much appreciated. I guess I'll move all the completed images and only keep the new ones until they're done.

Again thanks for the info.

R.

eoren1

Rick-
You can't edit the preview files and have those sync with LR
I have a catalog file on my laptop and keep files being worked on there. Once processed and posted to Smugmug, I move them to the external from within LR (so it keeps track of location of files)
Hope that helps
E

arodney

If the images are off line, you can’t do anything in Develop module, it requires the full rez raws (and ACR cache files). But you can edit metadata in Library (add keywords etc).

But just keep everything on the external drive and this isn’t an issue. Put all originals (raws, TIFFs etc) in a well organized folder structure on that drive. Then have the LR files as well (lrdata, presets etc). If everything is well organized on that external drive, you can plug it into any machine, Mac or Windows that has a copy of the LR app and have access to all your data! And if you want to back this all up, its easy to do with a clone utility. You can turn off the LR backup routines that only backup the library, cloning will backup everything including your images.

rickp

thanks eoren1, that's what I'm going to do.

R.