Some images taken during a late Fall walk in the Natural Lands Trust’s Peacedale Preserve in Chester County, PA.
There was a weather front moving through while I was there, which allowed for some very interesting cloud and lighting conditions, and several times, I was able to see some Crepuscular rays.
Weather Clouds 024 – Peacedale Preserve
Weather Clouds 169 – Peacedale Preserve
Weather Clouds hdr 01 – Peacedale Preserve
At one point during my walk, I encountered a real old-timer.
In the middle of the Preserve, there is a huge beech tree, at is 3-4 feet in diameter, and easily several hundreds of years old!
I don’t think I have ever seen a monster like this!
Today, I got out for a GPS drive, to see what had happen after our quick little rain storm that passed through yesterday.
During the height of the storm, the larger than normal black walnuts in our back yard, where falling like small little cluster bombs, hitting the back deck with great thuds, while colorful leaves swirled in the air.
Road through the Woods – East
Corn field power
Barn view of the hills
Corn, Corn, Corn
A gourd collection
Barn in the Corn fields
Road through the Woods – West
Wild Grass in the Field
I did have concern that I would miss the fall colors because of this storm, but as I drove around, I did find that many areas in northern Chester County still had a fair amount of green leaves, but not for long.
This is my favorite time of the year for colors, and the GPS drives are just starting!
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!
Transferring the Data
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.
On the “C:” drive of Old Machine –
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.
Transfer files across the Network
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
Remove the old hard drive –
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.
Install in new computer –
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…
External case –
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.
Backups
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.
Images –
Do I really need to say more?
Catalogs –
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.
Preferences –
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.
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)
Conclusion
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.
