Thunderbolt external hard drive + Lightroom + MacBook Air

[Lals]

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My main computer is a MacBook Air 2014 edition. I use it for both work and personal use. I am new to digital photography and am trying to set up my workflow for my leica M 240. The files seem huge and I think not possible to cram the images into my local disk. I am considering a fast thunderbolt 2 external drive from LaCie and copying from SD card to thunderbolt drive and then importing and editing in Lightroom installed on the macbook air internal hard drive. Will this work and be reasonably fast? I do not fully understand the concept of the catalog in Lightroom. I think it only uses a thumbnail to show the image but the actual raw file actually remains on the external hard drive itself. Spending 300 dollars on an external drive seems better than getting a new desktop with a giant internal drive.

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[Echo63]

I am trying to figure this out also - I have a Mid 2012 11" MBA (top spec processor, with 8gb Ram and 256gb SSD)

 

and i am running out of space (25gb free at the moment, with around 100gb of photos on the desktop) and trying to setup a new workflow - my "work" workflow is simple

take pics, pic best 3-5, edit, caption and send, delete rejects, keeping best 10-50 from the shoot, archive best images on a pair of HDD.

with my personal camera/photos, i am going back into the archive more often, playing around with older pics, and keeping a few projects on the go.

 

what i am thinking of doing is getting a few USB3 portable hard drives (2TB each) and having one as a time machine backup, and one with my actual images on it (plus a second copy stored offsite)

i am worried about the speed though, i don't know if USB3 will be quick enough to allow easy editing like i currently do with the images on my SSD.

 

 

i have some hard drives coming though, so i will give it a go, and let you know how it all pans out !

[robert blu]

I have a Mac Pro but this is not important. The software included LR and PS stay in the computer memory. All my pics (and the LR catalog which in a few words is a file containing all infos about the pictures and the modifications you did on them) are on external HD thunderbolt in an image folder. It works well and i assume it should work without problems on you Mac air as well.

Most important do not forget another HD for regular back ups! I have two different ones just in case something should be wrong with one...

robert

[zeitz]

Everyone's situation is different. You will want to consider redundancy because hard drives do fail.

 

I use a Drobo 5D Thunderbolt RAID with three copies on separate hard drives in the RAID. That still doesn't handle the problems of fire of theft though. All my programs (LR, PS CC, etc) are on the internal hard drive. I use Time Machine on an Air Port Time Capsule to backup the internal drive. So all back up is automatic.

 

Pegasus makes a Thunderbolt 2 RAID, but I believe it is a normal hardware RAID requiring identical drives, while Drobo is more sophisticated.

 

(I use a late 2014 MacPro. The MacPro is cursed with limited internal storage. One 1TB max internal! Come on man. The Drobo 5D RAID is as big as the MacPro.)

 

So all files external and all programs internal. Works great.

[zeitz]

One other thought. Both USB3 and TB2 are limited by the speed of the drive. So even if you have SATA III SSDs, I think the speed is set by the drives and not by the connection. Some others in the forum may have the exact numbers. Since Apple hates USB as much it hates optical drives, I do recommend finding a Thunderbolt solution.

 

On a regular RAID, the speed is set by the drive speed. On a Drobo RAID the speed is set by the speed of the slowest drive. But the Drobo can have a PCIe SSD buffer to raise effective speed. I have a 256 GB buffer in my 5D. I currently have three 4 TB HDDs in the Drobo. It can go up to five 6 TB HDDs.

[Echo63]

Thanks for the Backup advice guys

 

all my work images are backed up on a pair of drives, one lives at home, and the other in my locker at work - if something takes out both together, i have bigger issues than lost images.

 

I have 3 copies of my personal stuff - one on the laptop that goes everywhere with me, one on the "time machine" backup of the computer, and a third that just has the images on it (that will change soon though, when i get a few more TB of storage space)

 

 

 

I may have to add a thunderbolt drive to the shopping list (instead of USB3) just as a working drive for my lightroom library.

(EDIT - after reading again, it seems the actual drives themselves are the bottleneck, so USB3 drives should be fine)

 

Thanks again !

[zeitz]

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Echo, the problem with USB on Macs is that there are so few ports. The MacPro only has four of them versus six Thunderbolt ports, and Thunderbolt can be daisy chained. I had to add a USB hub. I suspect future Mac computers will not have any USB ports at all.

[Lals]

Thanks for the advice. So looks like theoritically what I am proposing should work. Also thunderbolt 2 is much faster than USB 3.0 and even thunderbolt 1 so I am hoping the speed is not an issue.

 

One question to help me understand exactly how Lightroom manages the data during the workflow. So if I go on a trip and have a couple of SD cards worth of pics which I have loaded into the thunderbolt drive, does Lightroom work with "develop" tools work on the actual raw files on the thunderbolt drive or does it make a local copy on the local hard disk during each edit or is it done all in the memory. Is there a lot of read write traffic between the thunderbolt external drive during the process.

 

Another question regarding sizing. I am not a pro and expect to only have photos from occasional family events or photography from travel etc. Given typical sizes of files from MP 240, and that I should get a main external and a mirror backup for that, am I ok with a 2 Tb external drive or should I consider something larger? I don't want to buy something and run out of space in 2 yrs.

[rfunnell]

Before purchasing the Lacie thunderbolt 2 drive make sure your Mac is capable of using thunderbolt 2 as I think it's dependent on the hardware being up-to-date like within the last 6 months purchased?

Also does anyone know whether if you have older thunderbolt 1 drives whether they would be compatible with thunderbolt 2 on the daisy chain?

[Echo63]

Echo, the problem with USB on Macs is that there are so few ports. The MacPro only has four of them versus six Thunderbolt ports, and Thunderbolt can be daisy chained. I had to add a USB hub. I suspect future Mac computers will not have any USB ports at all.

 

It wouldnt surprise me if they got rid of the USB altogether, but for now, my MBA has 2x USB and 1x Thunderbolt

USB also has the advantage of being usable on the work PCs and my wife's older macbook (and being cheaper in the portable drive sizes)

[Jeff S]

How to Import Images from a Hard Drive into Lightroom 4

 

http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/lightroom-training-videos

 

Jeff

[zeitz]

Were you surprised when Apple dropped Firewire? How about the internal optical drives? I think Apple will drop USB in a couple of years because Air Books are getting thinner. So you would need a Thunderbolt to USB dock or a monitor with a dock to continue to use USB. Maybe we'll finally get an Apple optical drive with a Thunderbolt connector.

 

Thunderbolt 1 is compatible with Thunderbolt 2. There are very few Thunderbolt 2 devices made by anyone at this time. Not that there are a lot of Thunderbolt 1 devices either.

 

I think all, if not almost all, external drives that have Thunderbolt connectors also have a USB connector. The Drobo RAIDs with Thunderbolt also have USB. So cross platform is no problem.

[zeitz]

Regarding Lightroom, I'm not an expert because I hate "import" and "catalogs" and "libraries". I only use PS CC with Bridge. But I think LR 5 now stores changes where the raw file is located. For a .dng raw file, the changes are stored inside the original raw file, but can still be reversed. For other raw formats, such as .nef for Nikon, the changes are stored in a .xmp side-car file along with the original file. After PS work, I always save in .psd format which I can place wherever I want when I save it.

 

I hope other forum members correct me if I am wrong. I'm out on a limb here because I don't pay attention to how PS LR or CC saves changes.

[Rick]

My main computer is a MacBook Air 2014 edition. I use it for both work and personal use. I am new to digital photography and am trying to set up my workflow for my leica M 240. The files seem huge and I think not possible to cram the images into my local disk. I am considering a fast thunderbolt 2 external drive from LaCie and copying from SD card to thunderbolt drive and then importing and editing in Lightroom installed on the macbook air internal hard drive. Will this work and be reasonably fast? I do not fully understand the concept of the catalog in Lightroom. I think it only uses a thumbnail to show the image but the actual raw file actually remains on the external hard drive itself. Spending 300 dollars on an external drive seems better than getting a new desktop with a giant internal drive.

 

Yes, this will work. I would suggest creating all of your LR files, master catalog and all other presets etc... on the external drive. Only LR the program should reside on your MacAir. This way, you can always open up your LR catalog from any computer hooked up to your external drive. You can use Carbon Copy to keep your external drive backed up.

 

You will not notice a speed difference by having your photo files on the external drive. LR works with your file from RAM. Importing your picture from the external drive as you work on them should also be seamless.

 

You can also have a small LR catalog on your MacAir to use when traveling or away from your LR catalog on your external drive. This way you can use your MacAir to back-up your SD cards as you shoot to a second location.

 

This is also how I have my LR set up. I often make adjustments on my MacAir or MacBook Pro from the same external drive and then move the external drive to my printing office and connect to the work station there with the good display for printing. although, I lost both of my 27" monitors at the same time and have to replace them. I may just get a 5K iMac after I learn more about how much of a problem gamut and uniformity might present with the 5K monitor. I'm guessing for my printing it won't be a problem for various reasons.

 

Rick

[Dougg]

Regarding Lightroom, I'm not an expert because I hate "import" and "catalogs" and "libraries". I only use PS CC with Bridge. But I think LR 5 now stores changes where the raw file is located. For a .dng raw file, the changes are stored inside the original raw file, but can still be reversed. For other raw formats, such as .nef for Nikon, the changes are stored in a .xmp side-car file along with the original file. After PS work, I always save in .psd format which I can place wherever I want when I save it.

 

I hope other forum members correct me if I am wrong. I'm out on a limb here because I don't pay attention to how PS LR or CC saves changes.

I am a bit out on a limb too as I have not used all of LR's features and do only what I need to do.

 

I also was turned off at first by the "import/export" terminology, which is not really what it sounds like. There is no physical importing in the sense of the old iPhoto for example where whole images are submerged into one large library file and have no other existence (outside of the camera card). You can have LR copy DNGs in off the card and store them on your hard drive, but I prefer to handle that myself manually in the Mac Finder. I have filename changes to do, and perhaps also ExifChanger and CornerFix work before LR ever sees the files. And "see" (or "read") is I think a more useful term than "import".

 

I put the DNGs in folders in groups like a batch of scans from a roll of film, all within another folder. In LR I "point" to the new folder and "import" which is really just LR reading the file for display and creating thumbnails and a bit of other data which is added to the catalog file. All editing data/instructions are saved to the catalog file.

 

But as you say I think you can optionally have LR create sidecar files so that PS can work on an image and bring it back into LR. DNG and other original raw files are not modified or changed by LR.

 

Doug

[zeitz]

Doug, there are well established terms for these functions: open, save, close, directories, folders, files. Changing/upgrading computers and hard drives creates a different set of issues for LR catalogs and libraries, at least in LR 3, which is the last version I really used. And then there are the separate weekly backups LR keeps bothering the user about. Time Machine handles all that, why does LR think it needs to do it? I know reestablishing libraries and catalogs isn't hard to do, but why have to bother at all? Bridge does everything I need with no maintenance and with a much cleaner jump to PS.

[Rick]

Hi Doug,

 

I started out to write a response to your post and realized that LR is such a large subject that I couldn't do it justice in a point by point post. So, I erased it and decided to point you to a really good resource for anyone to read if, they want to be a serious user of LR.

 

These are the LR tutorials from Julieanne Kost. She is as good as it gets when it comes to teaching LR. These tutorials may change the entire way you work, for the better. Pick a tutorial on importing, for example, and you will understand why there may exist a better and more efficient way to work than what you describe. If, you use PS, then pick a tutorial on how to import from LR to PS, etc. Lightroom Training Videos

 

Rick

[sanyasi]

As I write, I am consolidating 9 years of digital photographs spread over 4 external hard drive systems on to 1 LaCie Thunderbolt 12 TB external drive. One of the external hard drives is a Drobo system that I used for four or so years. When I am done copying everything, I will use SyncKit to duplicate the 12TB external drive to another 12 TB external drive. Observations:

 

Lightroom. I don't like LR because of the catalogue. It forces my files into a proprietary system. I dropped LR, now use Photo Mechanic (instead of Bridge) to bring files into my computer from the cards. I organized files by year Folder (2015) and then subfolders (01_16_2015_Subject of Photo Shoot). I can usually find things pretty quickly.

 

Drobo. I started out as a big fan of Drobo. Not anymore. Nothing went wrong, but once again, I realized that I was subjecting my system to a proprietary system that could become outdated and no longer accessible. More important, the Drobo, as is any RAID system, is somewhat illusory in terms of security of files. The files may be duplicated over multiple hard drives, but if you have a flood or a fire, you are screwed, which is why I started keeping hard drives off site. The backup 12 TB Lacie will be kept in my storage locker (six floors below me in a concrete building). I am also going to take another look at online backup for final print files (and the associated .dng file).

 

Clean Desk. When this is all complete, I will regain lots of desk space and more slots for plugging stuff into my computer.

 

Cost. I have no doubt that in three years I will be transferring everything to a bigger system, but Thunderbolt is making that a pretty quick process. Fortunately, the cost of external storage is very inexpensive.

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[Rick]

 

Lightroom. I don't like LR because of the catalogue. It forces my files into a proprietary system. I dropped LR, now use Photo Mechanic (instead of Bridge) to bring files into my computer from the cards. I organized files by year Folder (2015) and then subfolders (01_16_2015_Subject of Photo Shoot). I can usually find things pretty quickly.

 

This is almost exactly the import structure of my LR catalog. LR makes importing pictures extremely simple and I can see no reason it would not import your photos like this.

 

The advantages of working and importing using LR out way any learning curve necessary to understand the file import system. Some advantages include, applying presets and develop choices on import, ability to quickly make global adjustments across multiple photos and changing all photos to the current version of DNG on import.

 

Give Julieanne Kost a read. She has at least one great tutorial on importing and file structure for LR.

 

Rick

[sanyasi]

Thanks.

 

I was a LR user, but found that Photoshop served my needs better. I found the implementation of masking and adjustments lawyers to be very useful, particularly when combined with ACR, so it has been about 3 years since I used LR. This is a case of each to his or her own. For me, Photoshop proved to be the easier workflow. I know others don't find that to be the case.

 

BTW, I have been using Lynda.com for training. Excellent. I spent a year with the Kelby training website, which was also very good, but a little more limited.