From 10MP to 21MP!

[Darras]

I have just got a 5DmkII...I need to change my workflow, though I have some difficulties to see clear in all that! The files are so heavy now!!
When I upload in Lightroom 3 and want to edit them or preview...it can get so long sometimes!! Please, help me! What do you suggest?
What is your way to organize your pictures...from the moment that you put your memory card in the card reader, till the moment you rename your files and burn a DVD in back up. I have an external hard drive and a iMac. I would love to be well organized...it's a new start for me! Please, help me!! What is your workflow with Lightroom and back ups?

[rcooper102]

The best thing to speed up your workflow is to simply invest in more powerful hardware. however, I imagine that is not always an option as powerful hardware isn't cheap but more ram and processing power goes a long way.

if you want to preview your shots before editing them don't bother looking at them in a tool like bridge or lightroom. Open up the folder in the finder, switch to cover flow, drag the middle line down so the images are as big as possible and navigate with your arrow keys. The finder will be way way faster than any application. It does lack certain features tho like zooming into a certain region for example.

Reading files will be faster if they are connected to your processor by SATA rather than USB. (internal drives use SATA and you can buy SATA external drives if you have an external SATA port on your machine. I don't think iMacs do though). SATA is about 10x faster than USB 2.0. My suggestion is to drop the files on your computer's hard drive to preview and process and then move them to your external drive later.

Another option to speed things up if you have some coin to burn is to invest in a solid state drive. They are still very expensive and don't have huge capacity but are much more resilient, reliable and speedy than traditional spinning drives. To give you an idea a 256gb solid state drive on Amazon ranges from $400 to $700 where as you can get a 1TB spinning drive for under $100.

Just be glad that you are only working with 20 megapixel images. I sometimes start pulling my hair out when I am playing around with a 200 megapixel photostitch on my macbook. A single Crop can take as long as 30min and a Noise Removal stretches into hours.

As for backups, just buy another external hard drive and use time machine to back the first one up to the second one. Right now my personal computer rig looks like this:

Internal Drive (250gb)
External Drive, RAW Files (320gb)
External Drive, Photoshop Files (320 gb)
Backup Drive (1Tb)

good luck and NEVER EVER trust an external drive. Their failure rate is awful. I have owned dozens of the things and never had one last more than a year or so. Sometimes they fail in a few months. Always have them backed up or you are just asking to lose your files.

[bbtom10]

In terms of workflow, I started a similar thread on this here...

Workflow - what do you do?

[retronesphoto]

I shoot, save all my raw images into a folder in my hard drive, open bridge, take the shots I like, open in camera raw, edit, photoshop or use lightroom whichever is necessary, then export to TIFF or JPG, whichever is necessary... However, I do like using PSD as a format when I save my images, since Bridge can handle PSD files just fine. It may be taking so long because your computer cannot handle it. I'm running a SSD with Bridge/PS CS5 and everything saved on my secondary drive which my cache is located.

After i'm done exporting, I print, or upload them. If I print, I print from Photoshop, if I export, I export as TIFF, unless I need a JPG, I export it as a JPG.

Voila.