Kathleen

Oooh lol see still learning, ok I have 1 TB on my Mac hard drive. lol thank you!

Ooooooh thank you!!! Thanks for your patience and for giving me so many details, I seriously appreciate it!! I definitely don't have that much Ram on my internal, says I have 8gb. I am going to buy a 1TB hard drive as I am a newb and don't have much work. I will use your method, it makes sense to me. I see that Crashplan is $59 a year for single computer so that is not too bad and I have been reading good thing about it today. I never even knew about Time Machine until today and I am still on an old OS for Mac. I need to upgrade to El Capitan so I can download other programs like MS Office that I just purchased through work but I wanted to make sure I had everything backed up first which brought me to all of this. Which is a good thing because I have learned so much already. I am still operating Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 so I am hoping there are no complications when I upgrade.

Hi Christina…. I am beginning to understand what you mean. And yes your right I would have to pull each catalog back in from external and then get what I want from each… I agree ridiculous, guess I didn't think that far ahead before. I definitely felt like I was doing something wrong. So I did some youtubing and I am understanding opening external drive from within LR and then moving files around that way. I was concerned with having all of my files saved to my hard drive on computer so that is why I was thinking exporting as a new catalog to an external hard drive would be better. But I now understand what problems this could pose now. So I am going to keep my files all in one catalog. Can you help me understand how to backup my photos to an external hard drive then? In case my computer crashes one day. I have lightroom setup to do backups when I close the program but as you said LR doesn't hold the files themselves. How would I go about saving a copy of the images to another place like external drive?

Hi Damien! Congrats on the new page, looks great so far! I was a bit concerned about my exporting/saving/backing up process out of Lightroom. I currently use Lightroom then move to photoshop for bigger edits then back to Lightroom as a final step in editing. I then like to export my catalogs to my portable hard drive. So I right click on my folder with images, select EXPORT THIS FOLDER AS A CATALOG then save to Portable hard drive and check the boxes EXPORT NEGATIVE FILES, INCLUDE AVAILABLE PREVIEWS. Then I delete the catalog right from Lightroom to empty space. So that is basically my process... Couple of questions... When I do this, I still have to go back to the photos in my hard drive and delete them from there right? If so, is there a less time consuming way to do this? (I am hesitant to save to my hard drive from the get go because I always delete many images from my folders before the final save) I included a screenshot of what my files look in my portable hard drive. An additional question, when I was looking at the files in portable hard drive, I noticed the images in the picture folder were not edited and did not include all of the files I saved. But when I click on Lightroom Ircat folder and reopen in lightroom they are all there in final edit form. Is this a safe method that I am using? Hopefully this makes sense, thank you for your help!