Lightroom -laptop solution?

Mozziephotography

Mozziephotography

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Name
Stephen
Edit My Images
Yes
Can anyone help an OAP wrap his brain round a marital problem?
When I come back from shooting at a fell race, road race, bike race etc ... I might have up to 1000 images to sort through. The PC is up in the attic space and I can be up there for hours and hours.
"Your dinner's ready!" "I don't see you all day!"
I have Lightroom 6
Question:
Can I work on the images in terms of 1. Sorting out the images that I want to keep 2. Crop if need be 3. Transfer them to my PC as DNG's

Basically, what work can I complete away from my PC but have the originals on my PC?

I know what I mean but I'm probably not saying it in the correct way.
 
I'll have to look that up. What laptop could I buy for this sort of basic editing? Just sorting, cropping and sync(ing) ... no editing in terms of WB, exposure etc. The catalogue on the laptop would be cleared after they have be synched to the PC.
 
Another option is to run the Lightroom catalogue on an external hard drive (or SSD) and import the new images onto hard drive. I do this running Lightroom on a laptop and a desktop. It makes quickly changing between the two easy as I only have to grab the hard drive and its plug & play on both.
 
rob-nikon said:
Another option is to run the Lightroom catalogue on an external hard drive (or SSD) and import the new images onto hard drive. I do this running Lightroom on a laptop and a desktop. It makes quickly changing between the two easy as I only have to grab the hard drive and its plug & play on both.
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I have a hard drive at the moment which has 2 years of images stored on it. It had occurred to me that what you suggest, is the solution I will be using for 2017! Christmas present solved. Looking for a laptop that can cope with the simple elements of editing and isn't too expensive.
 
Don't buy an expensive laptop to run a heavyweight program. Buy a cheap laptop and a lightweight program. Together they will cost you less and your life will be better.

Photo Mechanic is designed to run on lower powered machines and be very very fast. Use it to cull and crop and then import the "keepers" into your desktop Lightroom. It will be faster overall.

For extra credit, use something like Teamviewer to control your desktop from your laptop. Use the power of your desktop to do the work but view what's happening on your laptop.

Or, you know, move your computer downstairs......
 
mossienet said:
Photo Mechanic seems to be very expensive for what it does. $150?
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$150 won't buy you a lot of extra power for your laptop.....

I think I bought it when it was $60 over a decade ago. Used pretty much every day and never paid an upgrade fee.
 
I've started doing something similar, however now I have the originals on my pc in a collection called in progress which is synced with LR Mobile, I then go through all the images and cull/crop on an ipad and leave the heavier stuff to the pc.
 
You don't need a powerful laptop to run Lightroom, it really isn't that resource intensive in general use.

There are lots of threads on this but my solution is to work on the laptop and export the catalogue, others put the raws on both and share the catalogue between them via dropbox or icloud.
 
Nawty said:
There are lots of threads on this but my solution is to work on the laptop and export the catalogue, others put the raws on both and share the catalogue between them via dropbox or icloud.
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You really don't need to do that. Smart previews (which have been available for a couple of versions) negate the need to pass original files around. Theywere added to prevent the need to do this
 
boyfalldown said:
You really don't need to do that. Smart previews (which have been available for a couple of versions) negate the need to pass original files around. Theywere added to prevent the need to do this
Click to expand...

I believe that assumes you have the raws on the main computer / where you want to store them.

I only use my laptop when traveling and delete all raws from it once back so I just export the catalog and raws to the iMac on my return.
 
Yep, just want to process them on the laptop in terms of deleting raw file images I don't want and cropping. Less time spent in the attic. Also for watching you tube training/help videos on photography.
 
Quite interested in this myself but the question i have is if i sync a a collection with Lightroom Mobile what catalogue would i open up in Lightroom on the laptop if the main catalogue is stored on the desktop?
 
Nawty said:
I believe that assumes you have the raws on the main computer / where you want to store them.

I only use my laptop when traveling and delete all raws from it once back so I just export the catalog and raws to the iMac on my return.
Click to expand...


You're wrong in that assumption. Smart previews allow you to edit when the raw file is not available. You don't need to copy them.
 
boyfalldown said:
You're wrong in that assumption. Smart previews allow you to edit when the raw file is not available. You don't need to copy them.
Click to expand...

I get that, but the raw needs to be put somewhere for the smart preview to be built. When that place is my laptop (as I'm travelling) I will export it back to main PC to keep the laptop free of space for my next trip.
 
mossienet said:
Being offered a Surface Pro 2. Would this be okay for the task in hand?
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Dunno much about them I'm afraid, I would guess it would depend on the model.

I would say the most important thing is screen resolution, photo editing was a real pain on my Macbook Air which was 1366x768 but on my new Macbook @ 2304x1440 is plenty enough real estate.
 
Last edit I did in Photo Mechanic was for 4,000 competition shots. It took lightroom over 3 hours to import the images, and then render them to a degree where I could check focus. Photomechanic allowed me to move through them in near realtime without a tedious import stage. By the time you're onto your 4th shoot, the time you've saved has already paid for the product twice :)
 
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