I sure this has been discussed before so sorry if this is redundant. I am looking for a photo cataloging app that works well for files stored on a network drive. I have all my photos stored on a NAS and I would like to fined a program that can catalog all the photos but loose the information when the network drive is not present. I have tried picasa and every time the drive connection is disrupted picasa has to rescan the file location.
I have no idea if this would work, but what if you installed picasa on the drive only... when, it would only be used when you have the drive connected. Again, im not especially tech saavy, so I have no idea if this is possible.
Lightroom confuses me. I sort my photos on my hard drive with windows explorer. I know exactly what folder they are in...etc.. when I use lightroom for editing, It makes me import these photo that are already on my computer. This is annoying.. I don't know if it's making a copy of the files that I already have in place and putting them in a new place.. I don't really know where it's putting them when I import. Same concept as elements...which drives me insane.
I understand it makes the program run faster and smoother..but hard drive space is valuable for anybody who takes alot of photos, and the fact that I don't know if it's copying files when I import makes me uneasy.
A friend of mine swears by ACDSee. It is pretty inexpensive but again, it is on the recommendation of a friend - but he REALLY likes it for photo cataloging
Lightroom confuses me. I sort my photos on my hard drive with windows explorer. I know exactly what folder they are in...etc.. when I use lightroom for editing, It makes me import these photo that are already on my computer. This is annoying.. I don't know if it's making a copy of the files that I already have in place and putting them in a new place.. I don't really know where it's putting them when I import. Same concept as elements...which drives me insane.
I understand it makes the program run faster and smoother..but hard drive space is valuable for anybody who takes alot of photos, and the fact that I don't know if it's copying files when I import makes me uneasy.
You don`t have to copy the files, you can always move them with an import (the option is at the top of the import screen). You can even import them and leave them at their current location. Importing them into the catalogue is a far better move in the long run especially if you expect to have tens of thousands of images in the next few years. I understand where you are coming from though as when I first went to Lightroom from Rawshooter (ahhh, what an app that was!) I couldn't understand why I couldn't just navigate inside Lightroom to the folder and work on it from there, but once you get used to the tagging, importing etc you realise it is a VERY well thought out application. I find I now do 90% of my post-processing in Lightroom these days.
For my general stuff I just import into folders named with a date, as sub folders of the current year e.g s:\photos\2009\June 12 however with weddings etc. I have a more refined import method setup. Just make sure you backup the catalogue regularly.
Oh, and Lightroom is designed to work with network drives and other drives that may not be available all the time. But yes, it could be seen as expensive compared to some of the other software out there.
A friend of mine swears by ACDSee. It is pretty inexpensive but again, it is on the recommendation of a friend - but he REALLY likes it for photo cataloging
This one looks interesting. I will check out the free trial. Thanks
My wife uas into scrapping booking and she bought a program from Creative memories Called memory Manager. This is great, because it let you sort the photo into folders and sub folder, and put photos in multible folder. It also has some basic editingtools and will keep track of different versions of the photos. You can also sort the photo by multible folder as well as import date. It has mant features for back ups and you can even create a shadow copy of your "vaul" on another drive as a full back up. The big draw back is you have to import your photos and it stores them in a non liner way. It takes a while to get used to just importing the photos directly into memory manager, and after several years I still have not finished importing alll my psat photos, But on the whole it is a really great way to keep tabs on all my photos, sort them, and find the ones I want rather easily.
