Post by michelb on Mar 25, 2020 15:19:02 GMT
How about a slimming cure for your Organizer catalog(s) ?
Not a bad idea when you are isolated at home for one month or more.
The purpose of this post is to list a number of good practices to make your catalogs much ‘lighter’ both in megabytes size and in number of managed items. I have more than a dozen ideas on the subject :
- culling
- duplicate removal
- saving files in smaller size and format
- best use of stacks, version sets, albums
- keywords versus captions
- parametric editing (not only raw)
- automatic features, visual similarity, face recognition, geotagging
- slimming the size of the media files library, but also of the catalog folders
- backup strategies
- splitting catalogs
- best use of your hardware
- and more
I realize that everybody has different situations an needs. Before you start with your own project, I have to tell you what I have discovered, which is not good news :
The worst problem with the organizer is that
deleting files from catalogs and/or drive is painfully slow,
and there is not much you can do about it.
You should test if your own hardware lets you delete a big batch of files, 100, 500, 1000… to see how long that takes without aborting. That depends mainly on your RAM size and scratch disks.
Another test : yesterday, I decided to ‘flatten’ 100 stacks/version sets (a full res jpeg from 32 MB raws). Do a similar test, this will show you that some of the above good practices are more efficient than others. You might discover that hunting duplicates is less efficient than flattening layered .psd/tiffs with smart layers or flattening version sets from big raw files.
Even if you don’t really want to do a massive slimming, you may realize that some above solutions can be applied to your future media : for instance culling is best done at the beginning of the process.
I’d like your feedback before discussing some of the above solutions. Thanks in advance.
Not a bad idea when you are isolated at home for one month or more.
The purpose of this post is to list a number of good practices to make your catalogs much ‘lighter’ both in megabytes size and in number of managed items. I have more than a dozen ideas on the subject :
- culling
- duplicate removal
- saving files in smaller size and format
- best use of stacks, version sets, albums
- keywords versus captions
- parametric editing (not only raw)
- automatic features, visual similarity, face recognition, geotagging
- slimming the size of the media files library, but also of the catalog folders
- backup strategies
- splitting catalogs
- best use of your hardware
- and more
I realize that everybody has different situations an needs. Before you start with your own project, I have to tell you what I have discovered, which is not good news :
The worst problem with the organizer is that
deleting files from catalogs and/or drive is painfully slow,
and there is not much you can do about it.
You should test if your own hardware lets you delete a big batch of files, 100, 500, 1000… to see how long that takes without aborting. That depends mainly on your RAM size and scratch disks.
Another test : yesterday, I decided to ‘flatten’ 100 stacks/version sets (a full res jpeg from 32 MB raws). Do a similar test, this will show you that some of the above good practices are more efficient than others. You might discover that hunting duplicates is less efficient than flattening layered .psd/tiffs with smart layers or flattening version sets from big raw files.
Even if you don’t really want to do a massive slimming, you may realize that some above solutions can be applied to your future media : for instance culling is best done at the beginning of the process.
I’d like your feedback before discussing some of the above solutions. Thanks in advance.
