Month: June 2022

Today’s Question: Like you I began my photography career by shooting film of all kinds. In the early days of digital we were scanning our images and working with them in Photoshop. Part of that workflow involved saving copies that had been flattened, sized, and sharpened at either smaller or larger dimensions than the originals. And there was also the master copy with layers of adjustments. Do you have any suggestions for dealing with duplicate files from an old Photoshop workflow?

Tim’s Quick Answer: In general, in the context of images from an older Photoshop-based workflow I recommend only retaining the master layered image, discarding derivative copies unless you have a specific reason to retain some of them. In large part this can be accomplished by filtering based on file type and perhaps considering overall file size.

More Detail: In the context of a workflow that now revolves around Lightroom Classic, a master photo would often be the original raw capture or a derivative Photoshop PSD or TIFF file that was created by sending the raw capture to Lightroom Classic. Beyond that, additional derivative images might be created by exporting additional copies of photos to share in various ways.

In this context, I recommend only retaining the original raw capture and the primary version of a PSD or TIFF file created as part of a workflow for optimizing the photo using Photoshop. Additional derivative copies can generally be discarded.

It can be a little bit labor-intensive to sort through these duplicate images to ensure you’re only deleting copies of photos that you don’t really need. Some of this depends on your overall workflow approach.

For example, in the earlier days of Photoshop it wasn’t possible to save TIFF images with layers and other Photoshop-specific features included. For this reason I was in the habit of only saving my layered master image as a Photoshop PSD file. Derivative photos that had been flattened and resized for sharing would be saved as a TIFF image. Therefore, I knew that TIFF images were derivative copies and the master image was the Photoshop PSD file.

Of course, more recently it became possible to save TIFF images with layers intact, so you may have a mix of both PSD and TIFF files that could very well represent a master image you want to keep. I do think, however, that it makes sense to spend some time sorting through these photos to clear out the clutter of multiple derivative copies of photos. In addition, these PSD and TIFF images are going to be among the largest file sizes in your catalog, and so clearing out unnecessary copies can help free up considerable hard drive space.

Today’s Question: Do you recommend folks with a lot of effort invested in editing their photos in Lightroom Classic export all their raw images as JPEG images to have for family members some day?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, I do think it is a good idea to create an archive of your photos for posterity in a way that is more accessible to family members who may not know the first thing about Lightroom Classic.

More Detail: Managing your photo library with Lightroom Classic involves a bit of a learning curve for photographers, so it is perhaps easy to appreciate that a family member who has never used Lightroom Classic would not be able to access your photos without assistance.

Therefore, it can be a good idea to maintain a more accessible archive of photos in a format that is easier to review.

For many photographers their library of photos includes a large number of proprietary raw captures, which to some extent requires special software to make use of. It can therefore be helpful to maintain an archive in a more widely supported image format, such as JPEG images.

To create this type of archive from Lightroom Classic you can export the source photos as JPEG images. I recommend exporting at full resolution to maintain the option to produce reasonably large prints from the photos.

It is also worth considering that you may not want to export copies of every single photo within your Lightroom Classic catalog. You may want to export only photos above a particular star rating, for example, and even export selectively from only the photos that contain photos of the greatest interest.

Lightroom Classic doesn’t provide an easy way to export JPEG copies of photos while maintaining your existing folder structure, so you may want to work with individual folders at a time, selecting which photos in a particular folder should be exported, and then exporting copies of those images. As part of that process you can customize a folder structure for the exported copies that will be most helpful for others, such as by using date-based folders. You could also add text to the filename of photos upon export, though I recommend retaining the existing filename as part of the new filenames so that, if necessary, the original source photos could be referenced later.