Author: Tim Grey

Today’s Question: My Lightroom Classic catalog does not show two folders that exist on my external hard drive. When I try to import those folders, they do show in the folder structure for importing but the photos are greyed out and can’t be imported. Normally when this type of problem occurs, I remove the folders/files from the catalog (without deleting the originals) and re-import. Since the folders of interest don’t show in the catalog view, I can’t do this. How do I proceed?

Tim’s Quick Answer: In this case the photos can’t be imported because Lightroom Classic has determined that the same photos are already in the catalog, just not in the same folder location. You can still import these duplicate photos if you turn off the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox in the Import dialog, but you’ll also want to address the actual duplication and make sure you’re not losing metadata updates in the process.

More Detail: In general, I recommend keeping the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox turned on in the Import dialog of Lightroom Classic. This helps ensure you don’t accidentally import the same photos more than once.

However, if the apparent duplication is the result of there being more than one copy of the same photos on your hard drive, then it can be helpful to import the duplicates into your Lightroom Classic catalog and then manage the duplication (and the metadata for the photos) from within the catalog.

If you turn off the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox when attempting to import the “missing” folders into your catalog, you’ll be able to import the photos normally. In this context where the photos are already located in the intended storage location, I recommend using the “Add” option at the top-center of the Import dialog to simply add the photos from their current location.

You can then locate the “other” copies of the photos in question, and compare the metadata to determine how to proceed. You could likely search by filename, for example, or sort the image by capture time to find the duplicates alongside each other while browsing the “All Photographs” collection from the Catalog section at the top of the left panel in the Library module.

The key is to determine whether both copies of the photos have been updated with metadata or adjustments, for example. If one folder represents the photos that have been updated and the other represents the photos that have not been updated, you can simply discard the copies that haven’t been updated and refine the folder structure as needed.

If both copies of the photos have been updated, you’ll have a bit more work on your hands, such as by copying updates for individual photos. The goal would be to have one copy that includes all desired metadata updates, and another copy that can be discarded.

Note, by the way, that I strongly recommend that you not remove photos from Lightroom Classic and then re-import them, because doing so can cause you to lose metadata updates that had been applied within Lightroom Classic.

To learn more about cleaning up (or avoiding) a mess in Lightroom Classic, check out my “Cleaning Up Your Mess in Lightroom Classic” course on the GreyLearning Website here:

https://www.greylearning.com/courses/lightroom-mess

Today’s Question: Thank you for your video on black and white conversions using Lightroom Classic (https://youtu.be/mLTl1VlRoqc). When you have finished your black and white adjustments, do you have a test to determine the distribution of tones across the image?

Tim’s Quick Answer: The primary approach I take to evaluating the tonal distribution in a black and white image is to first evaluate the clipping preview display and then simply view the overall image on a calibrated display. However, you could also measure tonal values throughout the image and review the histogram for the finished image as well.

More Detail: Many photographers are likely familiar with the “Zone System”, where a full range of tonal values from black to white is divided into eleven zones. It is somewhat common for photographers who create black & white images to try to ensure that all eleven zones are reflected in the final image.

Some software actually presents information about the tonal values in an image using the Zone System. For example, Silver Efex Pro, which is part of the Nik Collection by DxO, includes the Zone System as part of the histogram display. You can hover over a button for each zone to see an overlay on the image showing which areas represent that zone.

Lightroom Classic does not include such a feature, however. You can still use some techniques for evaluating the tonal values within the image.

To begin with, while adjusting the overall tone for a black and white photo in Lightroom Classic I recommend using the clipping preview display, which is accessed by holding the Alt/Option key while adjusting most of the tonal value sliders. This enables you to see exactly where in the image detail is being lost due to clipping.

You can also simply evaluate the image on the screen, provided you’re using a calibrated display. If you’re not already calibrating your monitor display, I highly recommend doing so with a package that includes a colorimeter device, such as the Calibrite ColorChecker Display (https://timgrey.me/calibrite).

The histogram can also be used to get a reasonable sense of the overall distribution of tonal values within an image. This isn’t an especially precise approach, but it does provide some sense of the tonal values represented within the image.

Taking the histogram a step further, you can actually evaluate the tonal value for individual pixel areas within the image by using the histogram display in the Develop module within Lightroom Classic. Simply hover your mouse over the image and below the histogram display at the top of the right panel in the Develop module you will see the values for red, green, and blue presented as percentages.

For a black and white image all three values will be the same, so you can simply focus on one of the three. With this display a value of 0% represents pure black, 100% represents pure white, and of course the values in between represent shades of gray.

You can view a recording of my webinar presentation on “Black & White with Lightroom Classic” on my YouTube channel here:

https://youtu.be/mLTl1VlRoqc

Today’s Question: I keep all my photos on a portable external hard drive, but I have outgrown the capacity of the drive. In one of your webinars, you mentioned that this happened to you, but you did not explain how you worked this out with splitting your photos onto two external hard drives. How did you approach that? What happens when I do a search and only one portable hard drive is connected to the computer?

Tim’s Quick Answer: When I got to the point that I was running out of storage space on the hard drive I use for storing my photos (https://timgrey.me/rugged5t), I moved what I considered my “lower priority” images to the secondary hard drive, keeping my “higher priority” photos on the primary drive.

More Detail: When your photo storage starts to reach the capacity limit of the hard drive, you’re using to store your photos, there are three possible solutions. You can get a hard drive with a higher capacity, you can delete outtake photos to reduce your storage needs, or you can divide your photos across more than one hard drive, hopefully with some organizational structure that will prevent confusion about which photos are on which drive.

I felt that the process of reviewing my large library of photos and deleting outtakes would involve a significant time investment. Eventually I will undertake that project, but I needed a faster solution in the short term.

I would have been happy to buy a hard drive with a higher capacity, but there isn’t a good solution here for my needs. I store my photos on LaCie Rugged portable hard drives (https://timgrey.me/rugged5t) because I typically travel somewhat extensively and want to have my photos available during my travels. The model that I use has a maximum capacity of five terabytes. There is a model with an eight-terabyte capacity (https://timgrey.me/rugged8tb), but the form factor makes this drive less convenient in my view.

So, for me, at least for now, the solution was to divide my photos across two hard drives. That meant I had to decide how to choose which photos would remain on the primary hard drive, and which would be moved to a secondary hard drive. For me the easiest approach was to move folders containing photos that I was less likely to use to the secondary hard drive, keeping the photos I was most likely to use on the primary hard drive.

What that amounted to for me was moving folders representing trips where I didn’t feel I had captured my best photos to the secondary hard drive. That would include trips that weren’t completely focused on photography, trips to locations that I didn’t find especially photogenic, or trips where the weather didn’t cooperate. You could also obviously divide photos based on age, with the older photos going to the secondary hard drive and the newer photos remaining on the primary hard drive.

The folders containing photos from my favorite trips remained on the primary hard drive, and I made a point of leaving plenty of free space on this hard drive so I wouldn’t need to move additional photos to the secondary drive for a while.

Hopefully a new portable hard drive with much higher capacity will be available soon. If not, I’ll need to make a point of undertaking a project soon to delete outtake photos in order to reduce the amount of storage capacity required for my photos.

Today’s Question: Is it okay to store external hard drives in plastic boxes for safekeeping once used and replaced? If not, what do you recommend for long term storage?

Tim’s Quick Answer: My general recommendation for storing any type of hard drive is to avoid extreme conditions. In the case of “traditional” hard drives (rather than solid state drives), I also recommend using the drive about every six months or so to help avoid having the drive components seize up.

More Detail: Computer storage devices are reasonable durable, especially in the context of general storage. As long as you keep the device safe from relatively extreme temperature and humidity, there shouldn’t be any problems with the device.

For traditional hard drives with moving components, there is the additional risk of the internal components seizing up if the drive is not powered up periodically. I don’t consider this an especially high likelihood, but it is enough of a concern that I recommend testing the drive every six months or so.

This approach of testing the drive can also help ensure you are aware of any impending failures. For example, if you test copying files to or from the drive, if there is a problem with the drive there’s a good chance there will be an error with this operation. If there are any such problems, I recommend replacing the drive with a new backup.

For solid state drives (SSD’s) this periodic testing is less of an issue, at least in terms of there not being any moving parts that might seize up. I still recommend checking the drive periodically, so you’ll know if the device has failed.

Because there is always the potential for a storage device to fail unexpectedly, even if a drive is intended for long-term archival storage, I recommend maintaining one or two backups, and ideally an offsite backup (such as an online backup) as well.

Today’s Question: I am moving my photos from one external hard drive to another with a slight change to the folder structure in the process. Is it recommended to just create a new catalog for the new folder structure by just importing with the “Add” option? If I do that, will I lose track of all the modifications that I’ve made in the past within Lightroom Classic?

Tim’s Quick Answer: No, I do not recommend re-importing photos to account for a modified folder structure. Rather, you should modify the folder structure from directly within Lightroom Classic.

More Detail: There are two potential problems created by making changes to your overall folder or storage structure outside of Lightroom Classic.

First, if you make changes to the folder structure outside of Lightroom Classic then the connections to your photos will be lost. You would then need to reconnect the missing folders and photos, which could be an arduous task if the changes to the folder structure were significant.

If you try to overcome this issue by importing the photos from their modified folder structure into a new catalog using the “Add” option, then you will lose at least some of the information about your photos. If you had enabled the option to automatically save metadata updates to XMP sidecar files in the Catalog Settings dialog, then most standard metadata would be preserved.

However, with this approach of importing photos from a new location you would lose Lightroom-specific features such as collections, virtual copies, and the history within the Develop module, among other information.

Therefore, I strongly recommend making any desired changes to your folder or storage structure from within Lightroom Classic. That includes the ability to rename folders, create new folders, move folders or photos to a different location, and more. The key is to perform all of that work within Lightroom Classic to avoid disconnected photos or missing metadata.

Note that these issues (and much more) are covered in my comprehensive video course “Cleaning Up Your Mess in Lightroom Classic”, which you can learn more about here:

https://www.greylearning.com/courses/lightroom-mess

Today’s Question: With recent backup options you mentioned, do these also backup movies and mp4 files? I have used Carbonite, but they do not backup movies and videos.

Tim’s Quick Answer: Both tools I use to back up my photos and other important data include video files as part of that backup. That includes GoodSync (http://timgrey.me/greybackup) for my local backup and Backblaze (https://timgrey.me/onlinebackup) for my remote online backup.

More Detail: Some online backup services may exclude video files from the backup, which obviously can be a concern for photographers. For example, Carbonite requires that you upgrade to a “Plus” or “Prime” plan for videos to be included in your online backup.

The Backblaze online backup service I use (https://timgrey.me/onlinebackup) does not have this limitation. With a standard Backblaze plan you can include videos as part of your online backup, with unlimited file sizes and unlimited total capacity.

In addition, the GoodSync software I use for local backups (from one hard drive to another) will backup all files on the source drive you have designated.

Needless to say, it is important to make sure that your backup solution is indeed backing up all of the files you think it is. For example, you’ll want to ensure external hard drives are included as part of your backup, not just the internal hard drives on your computer.

Today’s Question: Can Lightroom Classic show me only photos captured with the selfie lens (or the main lens) the way I can in the Apple Photos application?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can filter images in Lightroom Classic based on which lens was used, which in the case of a smartphone means you can filter based on images captured with the “front” camera (such as for selfies) or the “rear” camera (for “normal” captures).

More Detail: Lightroom Classic includes a wide variety of options for filtering your photos, which can be tremendously helpful for locating a specific image. As I often say, with the various metadata filtering options there’s a good chance you can locate a photo based on whatever details you can actually remember about the image.

This filtering includes the option for showing only photos captured with a specific lens. For smartphones that generally include both a front and a rear lens, you can filter images based on which of those lenses were used to capture photos. That means you can effectively filter based on photos captured with the “selfie” lens versus the normal lens.

Not all capture attributes are included in the filtering options in Lightroom Classic, which does create some limits for smartphone captures. For example, you can’t filter images captured as a Live Photo or in Portrait mode for iPhone captures, nor can you easily filter images captured as panoramas.

However, despite the limitations, the filtering options within Lightroom Classic do provide very effective options for locating specific photos.

Today’s Question: Since any image has at least SOME discernible noise, and if the intent is to print large whether on paper or some other medium, why not use noise reduction software all the time?

Tim’s Quick Answer: As long as the noise reduction settings are relatively modest, it is absolutely not a problem to apply noise reduction to all photos. In fact, many software tools for processing raw captures (including those from Adobe) will apply a small amount of noise reduction by default.

More Detail: Every digital photo will exhibit at least a small amount of noise, and so it is reasonable to apply some degree of noise reduction to all images. The key is to make sure the noise reduction settings applied by default aren’t too strong.

I recommend being especially conservative when it comes to luminance noise reduction. For color noise reduction you don’t need to be quite as careful, because it takes rather strong settings for color noise reduction to have a negative impact on a photo.

For example, by default Lightroom Classic applies a small degree of color noise reduction but does not apply luminance noise reduction. I consider this the safest approach in terms of applying noise reduction to all photos.

If settings for luminance noise reduction are too strong, overall texture and detail in the photo can be degraded, sometimes significantly. That is because noise reduction operates in part by averaging out pixel values, and when that relates to tonal values the edge contrast is reduced, leading to a softer appearance for the photo.

With color noise reduction it takes a much more aggressive application before obvious color issues are created. With very strong settings for color noise reduction, for example, you will see a loss of overall saturation and a blending of colors along contrast edges.

But again, as long as your settings for noise reduction are relatively modest (or extremely modest when it comes to luminance noise) I do consider it safe to apply noise reduction to all photos.

Today’s Question: I use Lightroom Mobile to make raw captures on my iPhone, and I sync the captures via Adobe Creative Cloud, from which they are automatically downloaded to my Lightroom Classic catalog on my computer. After this download, I move the images within Lightroom Classic from the Pictures folder on the Mac to an external hard drive, where I keep all of my photos. Can I then delete the photos from my iPhone, or will that cause the photos to be deleted from my external hard drive as well?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Once you have moved photos within Lightroom Classic from the synchronized folder to another storage location (such as an external hard drive) you can safely delete the cloud-based copy of the photos from the Lightroom mobile app without losing the photos on your external hard drive.

More Detail: The Lightroom mobile app includes an option to capture photos in a raw capture format, producing an Adobe DNG (digital negative) file. Those photos are then synchronized to the Adobe Creative Cloud, so they are available through your Creative Cloud account elsewhere, including within Lightroom Classic if you have synchronization enabled.

This provides a convenient way to get the photos captured with the Lightroom mobile app into your normal workflow that revolves around local storage (on an external hard drive in this example).

Once those raw captures have been synchronized to your computer, they will appear in the location designated in Preferences on the Lightroom Sync tab. By default this is within a “Lightroom” folder in the Pictures folder for your operating system. You can drag-and-drop those photos to a different storage location, which will move the source images to the destination location you specify.

However, the photos will remain in your Creative Cloud storage, creating redundancy that can be confusing. Therefore, when you have finished moving the synchronized folders to your preferred local storage location, you can delete the original captures through the Lightroom app on your mobile device. The local copy of those photos managed by Lightroom Classic will not be affected.

Today’s Question: I work exclusively in Lightroom Classic and work on an external drive with nothing on my computer. Backups are critical but when I drag and drop the folder [containing the catalog] to the backup it does not give the option to replace but copies it. The result is the latest folder is inside the prior folder and the process takes 2-3 hours. What am I doing wrong and how do I do it correctly to replace?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I recommend using Lightroom Classic to back up the catalog, I strongly recommend using a synchronization-based backup solution rather than copying files through the operating system, and I recommend discarding older backup copies of the catalog.

More Detail: The built-in catalog backup feature in Lightroom Classic includes options for checking the catalog for errors and optimizing the catalog, which is why I recommend using this backup option even if you are already backing up the catalog with other software.

Rather than depending on an approach that involves using the operating system to manually copy files you want to make an additional backup copy of, I recommend using software that can streamline this workflow. I use GoodSync software (http://timgrey.me/greybackup), for example, to back up my photos and other important files. With this approach only new or updated files are backed up, which can save considerable time. In addition, with this type of approach the backup is an exact match of the original, which is particularly helpful if you ever need to recover from a backup.

Finally, I recommend deleting older copies of your Lightroom Classic catalog backups rather than retaining the clutter and additional storage requirements of numerous backups. When deleting old catalog backups I typically keep the most recent few backups, a backup from several months ago, and perhaps one backup from about six months ago. Keeping older backup copies provides a potential solution in the event that a backup represents a catalog that had already become corrupted, though this is not a very likely scenario.