DAM with Laptop?

MooreDriven

I made the decision to move from a desktop to a laptop and have some questions for anyone using a laptop for DAM. FWIW, I have a Macbook with a 160 GB HD, an external Western Digital 500 GB firewire drive, using Lightroom.

1. What is your DAM protocol? With the size limitations of a laptop hard drive, it's impossible to keep my entire library (RAW & JPGS) on the laptop.
2. Do you copy your images to both an external drive, and your laptop when importing your images?
3. I could upgrade the hard drive, but this will only delay the inevitable.

These are my thoughts for a new protocol:

1. Import RAW images to a directory on the external drive.
2. Make my necessary changes/adjustments in LR.
3. Export finished JPGS to both the external drive as well as my laptop.
4. Back up to DVD.
5. Finally, upload to SmugMug.

In addition to the protocol change, I now need to offload the RAW files to the external drive, and re-map the LR library to the new locations. Something I'm not looking forward to doing.

I know there are many Macbook/Macbook Pro users, as well as PC laptop users out there. Any advice is appreciated.

Dale

arodney

I'm also using a laptop for much of my work and LR.

What I have is an external Raid 1 (five drive) SATA box hooked up to the laptop when not on location. The LR libraries are residing there. So plenty of space for catalogs.

On the road I have FireWire external drives (usually 160 gigs) which are self powered. Since I try to keep my catalog 'buckets' at 160 gigs or slightly less, I can if so desired, take a clone of the Raid with me. Or a drive with space for putting images onto when on the road.

Lightroom's import/export catalog is key here. You can build a new catalog on the road and update it to the master catalog at home easily. Or you can export some collections of images from the master directly to the laptop hard drive for presentations and such. Since most laptop drives are of limited size and speed, I tend not to try to put all images there (hence the external drives/Raid). By syncing up catalogs is very easy to do.

In fact, you can have several smaller catalogs (say 10 gigs each) and one really big catalog (say 50 gigs), and move from each, syncing up smaller then larger (or vise versa) catalogs. The key is keeping the exact same folder structure and naming of files.