I note with horror that I have not written anything for ages, maybe as I haven't had much to write about but in truth, there has been quite a lot going on, both personally and in photography, so maybe have to do a bit of catching up.
Plenty of my fellow Cambridge Camera Club members put a lot of effort into their blogs, both visually and with text, so I will have to do better.
At the moment I am ratifying and clearing my back catalogue, which has thousands of never again needed files, duplicates, web size images, copy folders, and in some cases a Raw & Jpeg file, (I know, crazy, NEVER do that again, Mr H.)
A monster of a task, compounded by them being scattered and backed up in different hard drives, my aim is to have a clean catalogue, and copy that to an offline drive or two, and then fresh work will be backed up, after serious culling, to another drive.
Lightroom is amazing, used properly, with keywording, stars, virtual copies, metadata reading to help handling images.
I use Lightroom Duplicate Finder http://www.lightroom-plugins.com/DupesIndex.phpto find the bulk of the duplicates, though it is a bane to have to go through the results as all copies are shown, and you have to do some work as well. Also the time of shooting is not limited, so a sequence burst will show all those files as duplicates. However for £8.50 it gives a great start.
Another problem is that the Previews on Lightroom, if not 1-1, can take a while to show fully, a problem even my new Dell has not solved, but I am hoping a smaller catalogue will solve that to some extent.
I did consider making a whole fresh catalog , with "Don't Import Duplicates", which may have to be an option later.
I really want to cull the duds, so I have a clear view forward ( a Virgo, so everything really has to be just so, in my limited capabilities, so I have been using Picasa, which is a free and fast viewer, to do quick deletes, both of folders and files.
After scanning all the drives, a Folder Tree is produced, without needing to look drive by drive, so one can see all the folders of a particular name, across several drives, which is so helpful. Numbers of images are shown too (not XMP data) so a direct comparison can be made. Thus a duplicate folder can be deleted or images moved from one folder to another of your choice.
Previously I have used dates as the start of folder naming, so an Event, Festival or Trip would have a group of folders, rather than one, so now I will use one file name for all the days, as metadata will give me particular dates.
Thus 2017-10-03_London and 2017-10-04 will now be 2017-10-03_04_London, with the folder name being designated at import.
Now I can cull using Lightroom, or via Picasa, which is useful in some cases, if I have generated a lot of images (not so likely now, as most Festivals are not likely to be a feature in the future, but one never knows.
In the most correct way, all file movements and deletions should take place in Lightroom, as the Database will not know of those changes, but in Library menu, Synchronise Folder takes care of that, for an individual folder, or an entire drive. Always put the folders in a "My Pictures" folder, as on main drive, as then one can right click " Synchronise Folder" to do the whole drive, which works a treat.
One thing I have learnt from this exercise is what images have a shelf life, whilst most are relevant just after taking, and so I have been savage with events and the like, unless local, and dumped a lot. That is quite painful in a way, but looking at all my work, I realise a lot of time has been wasted on stuff, apart from paid work, so the new maxim is to "take" fewer shots, but "make" more images. We shall see how that works as time goes on.
After all, cameras only do what you tell them to..
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