birdpix wrote:
If you are importing your photos to your primary drive on your PC then the "Make Second Copy" files should go on your external hard drive. When Lightroom itself asks if you want to do a backup, which it does at least once a week, it is backing up ONLY the catalogue NOT the actual photo files. This is important! The Catalogue only tells lightroom where you have stored your photo files. When I do my weekly backup I backup BOTH the catalogue AND the photofiles. That way if my PC bites the big one, I can get back to work using another computer as soon as I have LR installed. So to answer your question directly, NO lightroom in not backing up your photos to the external storage drive. You must do that yourself.
If you are importing your photos to your primary d... (
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LR has one of the most sophisticated file management systems out there. I am a bird photographer with about 40,000 files in my library. If I want to see every photo I have of American Avocets I can find them in about 2 seconds. This is because I have tagged every photo not only with their species but many other parameters i.e. date location etc. You can import from any source, not just a memory card. So I would encourage you to go ahead and do that.
Go to your Import Dialogue and at the top left hand side you will see "Select a Source". Under that you should see every internal hard drive and any external hard drive or flash dirve that is connected to the computer. Simply open the appropriate drive, select the folder you wish to import and it should show up in grid view, just like it does when you download from a memory card. You do all the same things that you would normally do on the right hand side like name the new file etc. I would encourage you, If you already have them in folders by "date taken" to continue with this in LR. Simply include the Date Taken as part of the file name. I use the format YYYMMDD so they stay in that order.
LR allows you to apply tags as you import photos. This can be a great timesaver if you are importing by date and all the photos for that date will all have a common tag or tags: i.e. "Mary Joes Party". then when you have imported the photos you can go back and tag individual files or sub-groups with their pertinent tags: i.e. "birthday cake", Mom, Becky, etc.
As an aside, when I started taking bird photos, I used Canon's Digital Photo Professional which came with the camera. That has little or no organizing ability. When I went to LR, I imported the DPP files over the course of several weeks, as I had time. I didn't know about tagging on import so I spent a lot of extra time doing something that could have been at least partially automated.
quote=birdpix If you are importing your photos to... (