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Lightroom import question
Jun 11, 2021 12:05:36   #
Gordon44 Loc: Pottstown, Pa.
 
I import photos via a direct cable connection from my Sony A7R2 (42 meg sensor) but when checking "Properties" on any uploaded photo in Explorer the pixel number is almost double, ie 82 megs when the camera is in full-frame mode, and 35 megs in APS-C mode. It's most likely a setting somewhere in the camera or in Lightroom, but my research hasn't produced any results. Any ideas?
Thanks much.

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Jun 11, 2021 13:10:40   #
CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City
 
Don't confuse pixels for bytes. Your camera sensor is 42MP as in 7952×5304 pixels. Pixels speak to the image resolution, the color data captured that is the image. Bytes speak to the file storage where this data is stored as a self-contained file. The two technical attributes are not directly related, although more total pixels will typically mean larger files.

The Canon and Nikon brands give a chart of the expected file sizes for the various RAW and JPEG settings. I can't find the same table in the ILCE-7RM2 user manual. If storage is an issue for your 42MP camera, seriously, you may have considered the wrong camera as large files are the very nature of this camera's game. You might also consider the Sony compressed RAW format. I have not had any issues with this setting. All the online analysis I did prior to setting to compressed show the potential differences were immaterial.

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Jun 11, 2021 13:14:26   #
R.G. Loc: Scotland
 
Are you confusing mega pixels (MP) and megabytes (MB)? The value that you're seeing in Explorer will be the file size in megabytes. The only way to find out the number of pixels is to multiply the horizontal and vertical pixel values. For example 6,000 x 4,000 = 24,000,000 pixels (24 MP). If you didn't do that sort of calculation then the value you refer to is the file size in megabytes.

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Jun 11, 2021 18:31:57   #
Gordon44 Loc: Pottstown, Pa.
 
Thanks guys! For making my eyes finally see what they were looking at. You made my day. All I saw were the digits, not the MB and MP after them. I will consider the compressed RAW format. Now I can devote more time to combining Lightroom catalogs that I've mistakenly created, and eliminating unwanted photos. Are there any Lightroom gurus there who make house calls?

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Jun 11, 2021 18:41:49   #
CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City
 
Gordon44 wrote:
Thanks guys! For making my eyes finally see what they were looking at. You made my day. All I saw were the digits, not the MB and MP after them. I will consider the compressed RAW format. Now I can devote more time to combining Lightroom catalogs that I've mistakenly created, and eliminating unwanted photos. Are there any Lightroom gurus there who make house calls?


You might create a new thread explaining the specifics of your situation regarding multiple LRCAT files.

Personally, I'd identify the file I want to be the master / merged and ongoing LRCAT file. You might even create a new one with an explicit and clear name, like LR-merged-June2021. Then, create a worklist of all the files to be merged. You can then start from the new catalog inside LR and import from each LRCAT on your worklist using the File / Import from another catalog.

I believe you can instruct LR to treat duplicates as virtual copies and / or stacks. I've tested in the past but forget the specifics. There's a attribute filter for virtual copies that might be useful later to identify and purge duplicates. But, as VCs, they're just LR database entries, not actual physical files on disk.

What to do next after merging the files may be more obvious once you see the results.

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Jun 11, 2021 18:58:27   #
DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
 
If you're doing a LR deep cleaning, consider splitting up the task into manageable chunks.

I started using LR without a good plan, and eventually I had 65,000 entries in the catalog. There were a lot of duplicates and different edit versions. Eventually I decided I needed to clean it up.

The first thing I did was to generate a set of smart collections based on year of capture. I then exported each as a catalog for each year. That broke the task up into about 15 catalogs, some large, some small, but all a much more reasonable size than 65K images.

Then I went to work. I looked at each image, tried to do some triage to delete the junk (I have a hard time throwing things away). I got a duplicate finder to try to locate duplicates and deleted the extraneous ones (see https://www.lightroom-plugins.com/DupesIndex.php). After paring down the number of catalog entries, I went through and added appropriate keywords where needed.

The process was fairly quick for the early years. I could go through a years worth of images in one free-time period (usually an evening). Later years, when I took more photos, took several sessions. LR provides a number in the Library Grid View so I would just write the number where I stopped on a sticky note and stuck it on the monitor. Going through the photopile took me a couple months of free time, but I got the pile down to about 15,000 images.

When I encountered an image that was scanned in, I placed that in a separate collection. When I got through all the years I took the first year, exported that catalog as "Temporary Catalog 2011" (I think that was the year I did this). I then imported the next year's catalog, then the next, etc. so I eventually had all the important images (actually the images I wanted to keep, not all of which were important) in one catalog. I then took the "scanned Images" collection and exported it to another temporary catalog and deleted those images from the temporary catalog (they were all still in the yearly catalogs so this was a nondestructive delete). I then went through the scanned images and tried to change the metadata to reflect the actual capture date (or best estimate thereof), and took the result and re-imported it into the temporary catalog, which was then re-named "Master Catalog 2011".

For the most part, when deleting junk, I deleted it from the disk. There were occasions where I thought the junk might have some redeeming value so I left it on the disk but deleted it from the catalog.

When I got through this process, I backed up the resulting files and catalogs (including the temporary and yearly catalogs) thoroughly (3 copies in different locations plus the cloud).

PS: I now export the master catalog at the beginning of each year, with a new year in the file name. Part of my CDO (similar to OCD but the letters are in alphabetical order, as they should be).

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Jun 11, 2021 19:00:04   #
Gordon44 Loc: Pottstown, Pa.
 
CHG_CANON wrote:
You might create a new thread explaining the specifics of your situation regarding multiple LRCAT files.

Personally, I'd identify the file I want to be the master / merged and ongoing LRCAT file. You might even create a new one with an explicit and clear name, like LR-merged-June2021. Then, create a worklist of all the files to be merged. You can then start from the new catalog inside LR and import from each LRCAT on your worklist using the File / Import from another catalog.

I believe you can instruct LR to treat duplicates as virtual copies and / or stacks. I've tested in the past but forget the specifics. There's a attribute filter for virtual copies that might be useful later to identify and purge duplicates. But, as VCs, they're just LR database entries, not actual physical files on disk.

What to do next after merging the files may be more obvious once you see the results.
You might create a new thread explaining the speci... (show quote)


Thanks for the info. I'll try to figure out how the additional catalogs were created and start a thread. I do have a Master catalog and have been following the few steps necessary to combine catalogs but now have many "missing files" which I most likely deleted outside of Lightroom and will remove. I like your worklist suggestion. And I'll look for that filter to purge duplicates, of which I have many.

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Jun 11, 2021 19:10:55   #
CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City
 
DirtFarmer gives the idea of using smart collections based on year. That's one method to filter / organize the images in a permanent method rather than re-filtering on metadata over and over each time you decide to work on the clean-up. However, all LR experts consistently preach the benefits of a single consolidated catalog. The underlying database management technology of LR is not impacted in responsiveness nor stability by the total number of images, whether real or virtual. The total number of images only exhibits a slowness when closing the LR software and being prompted for the maintenance function. If you run this maintenance just once a week and say at the end of a work-day, you're not impacted by the 20- to 40-minutes duration the catalog re-org and backup takes to complete. This is maintenance is what 'grows in duration' with the total count of images. The maintenance assures the access / search remains as a consistently instantaneous fast whether the catalog has 1 or 100,000 images.

Duplicates should be easy-ish to find when sorted by the digital clock of the image date. If you need help, there's a method to 'stack' all the images with the exact same timestamp, but that stacking function is based on the images being in the same folder, but can be different file types and / or file names. Otherwise, you can eyeball the images via sort order grouping. You can also multi-select groups of images and drop the whole group into a 'to do' collection to revisit when interested now that you've done a preliminary identification of the duplicates.

Missing files might be easily fixed or simply removed from the catalog to correspond to the removal of the files from disk. I find usually when one file is missing, the entire folder is 'missing' too. Resolving 1 image in this folder tends to resolve all the images in the same folder.

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Jun 11, 2021 19:24:48   #
DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
 
CHG_CANON wrote:
DirtFarmer gives the idea of using smart collections based on year. That's one method to filter / organize the images in a permanent method rather than re-filtering on metadata over and over each time you decide to work on the clean-up. However, all LR experts consistently preach the benefits of a single consolidated catalog...


I am not necessarily a LR expert, but I will also preach the benefits of a single consolidated catalog.

My suggestion was purely for the purpose of breaking the task into small manageable chunks. The single-year catalogs were temporary holders of the images and (for me, anyway) made it easier to keep track of how far I had proceeded through the project. When the organization of a single year catalog is complete, it can be moved to a subfolder, so that the catalogs remaining to be processed are grouped together.

I recognize that not everyone organizes things temporally, and dividing by year may not be the approach needed for everyone.

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