Author

Terry Ebdon

Resurrecting Lightroom

I restored my photo catalogue, onto the main system, having done nothing with it for around a year. I have 4 months backlog to import, i.e. the photos taken after last year's Great Failure, then should be good to go. I was pleased to find my collections were still in place, as I'd spent a huge amount of time curating best-of sets for each of the last few years and also an all-time-best collection. Recreating them manually would have been very frustrating.

I plan to export the collections as slide shows, but want to add some music. I'll need to spend some time researching good sources of suitable free / royalty-free music

Corel instead of Adobe

The next step is to reinstall my old copy of Corel AfterShot Pro and see if I can keep the two in synch. Pretty sure that ASP version will not work with all my raw files, as it predates at least one of my cameras. But a new, non-upgrade, copy of ASP is half the price of an Adobe annual renewal, so I want to keep that route open. I also have PaintShop Pro, as a Photoshop alternative, and almost all my PS add-ons should work with PSP (done that before).

The full restore details

Restoring my Lightroom setup, on a different system, was a lot easier than I expected. Lightroom defaults to putting the smart preview cache in the same folder as the catalogue. I keep the catalogue on an external 4 TB USB 3 drive, so that just worked. The photos are on a 6 TB USB 3 external drive, but both computers had that drive setup as a mount point on the C drive, in the same location. So again Lightroom instantly found the files. But Lightroom was incredibly slow, even worse than if the preview files were missing. The fix for that is to disable video acceleration. This shouldn't be necessary, as I'm using an NVidia card on a HP desktop, but it did dramatically speed up Lightroom. I pretty quickly set this machine up to a configuration that took maybe a week to establish the last time I tried it.

19-SEP-2019 👈 Top of page 👉 03-DEC-2020

© 2020 Terry Ebdon.

Find me coding on GitHub, networking on LinkedIn, answering questions on Stack Exchange and hanging out on twitter.