Why is Lightroom doing things in a specific way. Covers LR2 and LR3
In the computer business, everybody is smarter than the average bear, but... Abode tries to be smart and make Lightroom faster, but when it comes down to it, it's all reads and writes. And Lightroom does a lot of disk activities.
- Lightroom reads the whole catalog upon starting. The catalog is itself very small. A 10,000 photos catalog is between 25 Megs to 35 Megs depending on the number of keywords, develop revisions, history... It's very small. The actual catalog is the file that end with the
.LRCAT and the original photos are the only important things.
When exporting JPEGs in Lightroom, you can set the quality of the output. It ranges from 0 to 100.
- From 0? What the hell is a 0 quality? It turns out that Lightroom cheats. The 0 quality of a JPEG in Lightroom is not a 0 quality. It looks very similar to a 40 to 50 in Infranview, a free, as in free beer, Windows image viewer. The file sizes are almost the same size.
- I can't see the difference in photos between a JPEG quality of 100 and a JPEG quality 50 for a small or medium size photos ie: less than 800 pixels wide!
Lightroom: Picks, Selects and Prints Collections
I use the collection sets for almost all of my image collections. The image collections are different from the processing collections. The image collections are collections that I copy photos to, manually. They are not based on a selection criteria, just on my arbitrary, spur of the moment, judgment.
On Saturday, I went to Reifel before the big downpour. During the week a flock of American Sandhill Cranes flew in. They were 18 of them! The invaders! Reifel is in BC, Canada, here on the Google map
Reifel, BC: The American Sandhill Cranes click on image for gallery
One of the most time intensive task in Lightroom is generating and/or dealing with the previews. So how do you speed up the previews generation? I wrote earlier about speeding up your Lightroom by cleaning up your drive and defragmenting it in Lightroom — Speedup Your Computer and in Why Is My Lightroom So Slow?
This is mostly due to what's called file fragmentation, and that's where Windows and OSx part ways.
The RAW file format is the unprocessed data as captured by the camera's image sensor. The only camera controls that affect the quality of the RAW file are:
- ISO speed
- Aperture
- Speed
That's it! No other camera setting will affect the raw capture. The other settings such as white balance, sharpening, contrast and saturation settings are stored in a separate header associated with the RAW data.
Various manufacturers have various format, even different RAW file formats for different models from the same manufacturer.
- Yes, Lightroom 3 supports multiple CPUs.
- No, Lightroom 3 is not a multi-threaded application. This means that Lightroom cannot spread a task between multiple thread or multiple CPUs.
See: What Kind of Computer/CPU to Get for Lightroom 3 by Syv Ritch aka me
I wrote that blog post to which I got:
I'm running dual quad cores (8 processors) and LR3 uses all 8 cores.
I still stand behind my statements.
I got an emergency phone call from Patrick, a photographer friend:
…
Marc — Help! My Lightroom's dead. Everything crawls, it's so slow, it's been an hour in it has only exported a dozen of photos. I need to be finished by tonight, I have to post the photos, tonight.
Me — Are you running anything else?
Marc — No, I made sure of that.
Me — Are you connected to the Internet?
Marc — No, nothing running.
Me — Kill your anti-virus and see what happens.
How boring can it get? Dates? What's wrong with dates. A date's, a date is a date. Actually not, there are 30+ ways of representing date and time. What's 07/08/09? Is it July 8th, 2009? or August 7th, 2009? or August 9th, 2007? Date formats are so complicated and there are so many of them, that "they" created a body to regulate and standardize date formats!
What's that got to do with photography? It's actually very important in the digital world. All digital photos have a date and time in the EXIF and most importantly, I always include the date in the name of the photos.
It's been such a long time since you have done a backup, you decide that tonight's the night. Get the external USB hard drive, check that it will be large enough. Oops! It's not, you will only be able to do the photos. In anyway, that's what the most important. Right?
After 4 hours, you're done. You have your backup. Actually, NO, you still don't have a backup, you only have a copy.
Backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event.
