An old school friend of mine, recently updated his Facebook profile picture, and me being the OCD possessed person that I am, asked if he had the original scan of the image, so that I might be able to clean it up a little.
Unfortunately, the file was not available, and I was left with just a jpeg file that he had posted.
So, what do you think of our young man now?
If you have images that you need to be touched-up or restored, please contact me for a free estimate!
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It is always a pain to move to a new computer because there are so many files and settings that need to be redone for the user to really get productive again.
With this idea in mind I offer the following tips and advice in regards to moving an Adobe Lightroom User from one machine to another.
This guide is geared towards people who are technically proficient on the Windows operating system, but should be able to serve as a guide to those working in a Macintosh environment.
If you have any other ideas or tips please feel free to send them my way!
As any User of Lightroom knows, the Catalog and Image files are the heart of your work and business, and if you are moving to a new machine, you need to consider what to do with them as you move forward.
There are several of options available to you, if your original catalogs and Images are still on the main “c:\” hard drive of your old machine.
If both machines are still attached to a network, you can easily transfer the catalogs across, but that is going to take time, and chew up various network resources.
Remember, depending on the number of Images you have, your catalog directory could easily reach several gigabytes worth of data,in my case: Catalog: 12.7 GBs & Images: 261 GBs
If you remove the hard drive, you have two basic options, but before you begin, backup your files on the old machine in your normal manner.
By simply taking the hard drive out of the old machine, and installing it into your new machine, is most certainly the easiest of the options, and also gives you a second HD spindle when dealing with I/O operations in Lightroom.
But before you remove the hard drive, be sure to check the compatibility of data interfaces on your new machine – Can the new machine deal with the older IDE interface?
An example I can give, is my new machines, that is based on the Asus Z87-Pro motherboard, which does not have any IDE connections.
Also keep in mind, that if you connect the old “C:” drive, and it wants to reinitialize for whatever reason, and you have not backed up your data…
This is another good alternative, and does give you the flexibility to move to different environments with little issue, and also gives you the additional spindle speed during I/O, but is subject to the port speed when you plug-in, assuming that the chipset on the external drive is the faster of the two.
There are three critical areas that need to be transferred to your new machine for it to work in a fashion that you are used to: Images, Catalogs and Preferences.
Do I really need to say more?
As mentioned earlier, catalogs can easily reach several gigabytes worth of data, but does all that data need to be transferred to the new computer?
Again Users of Lightroom know, and unless they have change the default settings, the program will prompt you to do backups, which are located in a sub-directory of the main catalog directory.
c:\My.Adobe.Lightroom.Catalog\Backups\
By simply looking into the backup directory, one could easily save time and the amount of data that needs to be transferred, by simply cleaning out old unnecessary files, but this is completely user based.
Just check to see which “Date – Time” named directories really need to be moved.
Since this is most likely a new software install, none of your preferences will be in place, so where are those files located?
Like all other User preferences, they are stored in the operating system’s Users profile directory, that is hidden through the normal interface, that can be easily accessed with a little forethought.
C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom
Once you are inside Adobe Lightroom directory, it should be very easy to recognize which directories are most important to you.
In my case I transferred files from these directories onto my new machine:
Adobe\Lightroom\Export Presets Adobe\Lightroom\Filename Templates Adobe\Lightroom\Import Presets Adobe\Lightroom\Keyword Sets Adobe\Lightroom\Locations Adobe\Lightroom\Metadata Presets Adobe\Lightroom\Smart Collection Templates Adobe\Lightroom\Watermarks
Once installed in the new directories, Lightroom should have no issue accessing the “.lrtemplate” files. (BTW – If you really want to be geeky, you can open up these files in a text editor and play with them to your heart’s content)
When I moved to my new machine, I used a combination of techniques described above.
On my old machine, the Lightroom catalogs and images were already located on an internal secondary SATA hard drive, so I just removed the old hard drive, and installed it into the new machine.
From there, I copied the images and catalogs (approx 275 GBs) to the root directory of my new machine, creating a new backup of the files.
Even across the SATA III bus, this still took several hours, and I could smell hard drive smoke. (just kidding!)
When I got to my preferences, I connected to my old machine across the network and simply copied the files into the associated directories.
From there, I reconnected the Lightroom catalogs to the local main image directory, now located on the root of my main “c:\” drive.
Finally, I rewrote my old robocopy script to include the additional external hard drive, that I added for redundancy in my backup solution.
Some may argue, that having all my data on the “c:\” will produce bottlenecks, while I would agree in theory, I also have to wonder with my usage of Intel’s RST technology, reduces this as an issue.
I have also, set the cache files of both Lightroom and Photoshop, to the extra space left over on my Solid State drive, as mentioned in another post.
If you have any thoughts or ideas I’d be very interested in hearing from you.
Good luck!
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Here is a little something for this weeks “Manipulation Monday”, which is a combination of (3) images taken here in Downingtown earlier in the summer.
On a technical side, the (3) 16-bit RAW images where combined in Photoshop CS6, on my new computer, which did not even flinch when dealing with the 500MB file!
In monitoring the scratch disk space, it was bizarre for me to see that I still had 10GBs of free space available!
Guess I’m going to have to work on that…
Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the image!
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This is a recent photo restoration I did of the US Air Force Graduating class (Sqdn 3710 – Flt 0011) at Lackland AFB from February 1969.
The original image is 10 x 20 inches, and as you can see, was torn in half, and not stored flat, which lead to a lot of cracks in the emulsion of the paper.
I took me about 30 hours to get the final result that you see, and several good audio books.
If you are interesting in getting your own photos restored, please feel free to contact me for a free consultation and quote.
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On Saturday (7/27), I had a chance to revisit “The Rectory School” in Pomfret CT, for the first time in 18 years, when I had attended the 75th Anniversary ceremonies.
This time, I was there to mourn the death of a beloved teacher, “Swish” White, who helped to shape this young teenager back in the late 1970s.
It was a small sweet ceremony held at Christ Church, located right across the street, where I once sat in the pews, twice a week for three years.
Memories flooded my mind, as I looked around the old church with it’s beautiful stain glass windows and vaulted dark wood beams reaching high into the ceiling. The chosen music echoing in the air.
I sat with my daughter and Peter Rosengarten, listening to the tributes to Ms. White, for all the wonderful things she had done during her lifetime as a Wife, Mother, Teacher, Tutor, Mentor, Musician and Friend.
During one tribute by Mr. Groom, he made reference to the school play “Oliver” directed by Mrs. White, and how she was able to temporarily ‘tame’ the boys, and harness their energy into something wonderful.
Of course, Peter and I had to starting poking and pointing at each other, like the little school boys we had been, bringing a chuckle to those in attendance.
I was also very fortunate to be introduced to Ms. White’s daughter, Jesse, when I was still a student at the school, and the two of us have remained close friends for over 35 years, and becoming an adopted “Aunt” of our two kids.
At the luncheon held after the Service, I was able to chat with some of my teachers that I had not seen since 1995 or before: Mr. Groom, Mr. & Mrs. Seaward, Mr. & Mrs. Washburn and my first tutor Ms. Barker!
How does one cram half a lifetime into 5 minutes of conversation!
Eventually, Peter, Madison and I, found Jesse and told her we were going to walk the campus, and not to leave without saying good bye.
We walked to the colonnade, a common meeting point so many years before, and looked out at all the changes, trying to describe them to Madison.
Peter was far more versed in the changes, since he had just at a son graduate the year before.
For Madison, it was a chance to see where Daddy lived for three years of his life, including two surviving dorm rooms, and enhanced stories from Peter.
After about an hour, we head back to the church, and found Jesse, packing up for a more intimate family reception down the road.
We chatted some more, trying to comfort Jesse as much as we could, and updating our information so that if there were a need, we could easily communicate with each other.
Finally, it was time to depart.
We hugged and kissed and went our separate ways – Peter to a local comic book store, and my long drive home with Madison.
To Mrs. White – Thank you so much for those various seeds you planted so long ago! They have taken root, and continue to grow because of you. You will be greatly missed!
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