My Lightroom Storage Workflow | How I use SSD Drives as a Photographer

[@axeltroja9390]

NAND of SSD's has a life time, that will be reduced very fast if you fill up the ssd fast - just keep in mind you let the drive breath, never get it in the red critical area.

[@changez77654]

Thanks for sharing Alex! I have a question about your SSD workflow. Do you store everything lightroom related (including previews and library files) on your SSD, and does that transfer well between computer to computer? I have a base M1 Macbook Air with 256GB of storage and its just not enough space for the humungous files my Q3 is making, in addition to a 15 year old collection of photographs that makes my catalog. So my plan was to fully offload my lightroom files to a SSD and work from it exclusively thus freeing up space in my laptop hard drive. Would this work without significant slowing down my lightroom workflow?

[@ABarrera]

Yes, everything in the catalog is stored in the SSD drive. That makes sure it works on any computer plug it in to.

[@FinnishSuperSomebody]

Thanks for video! Not sure if I understood correctly, but: a) You have photos AND Lightroom library on same external disk b) You edit photos and tags or whatever metadata you edit directly on that external disk? If so, when you plug your library + photos SSD to your main computer, does it automatically take backup of photos and library in case your SSD fails in the middle of year or your Lightroom library gets corrupted?

[@ABarrera]

A. Yes! B. Yes! When my SSDs are plugged in to my Mac Studio they backup constantly to Backblaze and an external HDD. If I were to lose one on the field I would still have the entire back up on a HDD and Backblaze.

[@FinnishSuperSomebody]

@@ABarrera Awesome, thank you! I think I might also go with similar strategy since it would be simplest solution. I normally do catalog for every two years or so, but those photos are on different hard disks and only available at home computer. If I just get 1 TB external disk I can fit my year photos to that and library as well, I think. And if not, I can later upgrade to 2 TB disk in the middle of the year if necessary. Since I got new camera couple of days ago (Canon R50) I have also moved smaller photos directly to iPhone and those goes to iCloud, around 1 MB/photo. It has been good, then I can easily see photos on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, MacBook Air and on web browser. Those are good enough for easily carry mini version of my photo shooting library on the go. Still the RAW + full sized JPGs are another story and there comes this workflow to test. Let's see how it will go! Digital photography world have been terrible in many ways when the volumes of the images have grown in numbers and in space. Multiple photo libraries there and there and some photos are on another disk because of disk space and other horror stories :D

[@charruaporelmundo]

People do this because apple SSD is expensive and you buy laptops with very small SSD's, 256 for example?, Coming from windows I kind of do not like that, I'm planning to jump mac but will buy an M4 with 4tbSSD, maybe is because I'm use to big storage.....Catalogue inside my laptop and raw on an external. Am I wrong?

[@mauricerijnders3507]

Very informative. What we have learned today is that Alex uses ssd's. 😅😂

[@ABarrera]

How many times did I say SSD? 🤣

[@mauricerijnders3507]

@@ABarrera 😂👍🏼✨

[@addieleman]

I am of the opinion that it's a very bad idea to use more than 1 main catalog; a second catalog on the go might be an idea, but reconcile that catalog with the main catalog as soon as you can, e.g. when you come home. At present Lightroom Classic performs well enough with really large catalogs (in terms of file count).

[@ABarrera]

What is wrong with 1 catalog a year?

[@FinnishSuperSomebody]

That is what I hear also many times, but I have found that it is much easier to have catalog per year or catalog per every two years. People say that Lightroom perform well, but it has not been performing well on my machine, UI is just sluggish. Of course things might have changed and it could be much better nowadays. Big drawback with one huge catalog is that the amount of data what even previews and thumbnails take. If I store those on my local SSD it suck tens of gigabytes of space. Of course I can create auto clean ups, but then the whole point of having one catalog for faster viewing gets lost because it will need to regenerate thumbnails if I have automatical rule to clean older non used thumbnails to save space. Maybe those are now better as well, hard to say, but still if I have one huge catalog my photos are anyway on multiple disks since those take huge amount of disk space. If I split those to yearly catalogs then Lightroom files and photos what belongs to them can hang around on same place, then there is no need to have multiple different disks to have photos from different years on different disks. But surely, whatever the method works then it is best way to use that what works :)

[@gosman949]

@@ABarrera how do you find things that go back for years?

[@MegaWeitzel]

I'm always amazed at photographers reinventing the wheel when it comes to storage. Totally unnecessary. There is a reason NAS Systems are used basically everywhere (besides photographers for some weird reason). Network access to all your files all the time, from all the machines (no moving, syncing, etc... if you edit on multiple machines). Regular Snapshots, drive failure protection, easy backups etc... That SSD System seems terribly wasteful. Especially since SSDs are not good long-term storage devices anyway. If they are not regularly connected to power they lose all their data over time. Besides the wasted empty space on each drive ... Why, just why?

[@ABarrera]

NAS is significantly more costly and requires an internet connection. Considering all my SSD drives are practically full by the end of the year, I dont see any wasted space.

[@MegaWeitzel]

​@@ABarrera A NAS wouldn't be more expensive, as there would be no need to keep anything except the recent catalogue on an SSD. Also, you don't need an active internet connection if you set it up right. You can for example set the most recent catalogue/ folder up as an active sync. (Each machine has a local copy that is synced between them automatically), so you are able to work offline and/or outside. And then older years go into "archive" mode/ are only held on the NAS share. (So they require a connection to the NAS, but don't need additional space on each device)

[@gosman949]

You lost me (on purpose) when you said you have a catalog for each year! No! One catalog forever! How do you ever search for anything in years past? I want every sunset ever shot? Boom! They come up in a second in one catalog. I have multiple drives in one desktop computer. A very large one. You should never put your LR catalog on the same file as your picture files.

[@RomualdRestout]

Agree @gosman949. So what is your setup in terms of storage and backup?

[@gosman949]

@@RomualdRestout I have 2 external 3 TB spinning drives mounted in a Xcellon device with USB input. I use windows backup ever few weeks to backup all my drives on my desktop.

[@nunomiguel0]

⁠@@gosman949the fact that you have less than 6TB of photos explains why you only have one catalogue