Ducky, Blue & yellow #2
I predicted that the Lightroom project would devolve into a horrendous sequence of upgrade mission-creep, and I was right. It's not Adobe's fault, by any means, but the getting ready to start has been incredibly time-consuming:
- Order the new LaCie Double Triple 1TB storage.
- Consolidate my camera downloads onto the 1TB from the various places I had stowed them while deciding what to buy.
- Discover the 1TB unit will not communicate through its 800 FW port. Ask LaCie to ship replacement first, they ignore/decline, but send SRO promptly.
- Tediously back up the 1TB to some LaCie bricks - 400 FW to USB is very slow.
- Make some DVDs for extra insurance.
- Send 1TB to LaCie.
- Take G5 in for runaway fan, instability, random instances of powering down during processor-heavy activity (read: open ACR file in DNGConverter and Photoshop). Diagnosis is not the fan; the G5 needs a new motherboard and/or logic board. Verify and accelerate daily back-ups while limping along temporarily.
- Copy all the files back to the replacement 1TB from the bricks. More tedium.
- Install LR 1.4.1 upgrade, which has been issued, retracted, reissued during this timeframe. Upgrade went smoothly.
- Create new catalog. Trivial.
- Import my starting list of keywords from Excel-generated tab-delimited list. I listed about 400 keywords before I decided that I had a workable structure. At this point, I think it will be easier to add new ones in Lightroom. Uploading keywords was straightforward.*
- Relabel the top-level keyword hierarchy words to begin with special characters for forced sorting.
So there it sits. Between now and Thursday, I probably won't actually do much importing of folders and keywording. Anyway, it might be a good idea to let some early adopters work through any potential kinks in 1.4.1.
In the meantime, as I was doing all the copying between drives and hunting stuff down for the Moab Photo Symposium, I found today's picture.
*For what it might be worth, here is my starting list of keywords in an Excel file. The logic is strictly matched to my own typical mental search pattern. Feedback always welcome, especially in the next few days, before I get fully committed to this list.
Links to previous posts on cataloing my archive with Lightroom: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Comments (2)
Hi Ann,
The part I'm not getting about your keyword hierarchy are your locations. The metadata already has fields that can store the location, and you can find them through the metadata browser.
Posted by Lianna | May 4, 2008 3:43 AM
Posted on May 4, 2008 03:43
I am very new to Lightroom, and I want to start Keywording correctly and easily. Your depicted and easily understood method of using EXCELL to import them works beautifully. But how do I get them to "work" or create Keyword Tags after they are imported. In other words the Keywords probably should also appear in the "RIGHT" hand module of Library's Keyword Tags? They "ARE" in the "LEFT" module but I can't use them to tag photos.
Posted by Stan-d | May 5, 2008 6:06 PM
Posted on May 5, 2008 18:06