The Z8 is much lighter and will fit in most packs a lot better. I bought the Z9 first, like it but it is heavy and big, and then got the Z8...love it! Fits my hand better and it just feels easier to carry. I'm getting really nice shots with it, autofocus is very good. I'll keep the 9 for a bit, most likely, and perhaps get a second 8. I heard that the price of used Z9 cameras was going down due to the Z8, something for you to consider.

Z8 at about 10 feet away.

500, 850 does it all. Love the Z8.

I use Backblaze for my external hard drives, which contain all of my images. BB also backs up the computer, as does Time Machine.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, everyone.

Thanks, everyone.

Merced Wildlife Refuge, Merced, CA. Egret.

Merced Wildlife Refuge, Merced, CA. Male shoveler.

Burrowing Owl, one of a pair in my area that are nesting in a rocky area.

So, I read this, then sat down to update. I clicked on the update icon and within about a minute I lost all power to my home. It was out for more than an hour. I thought, O' no, I wonder what happened. I did have a backup that I did yesterday so I was not really worried, but thought it would be interesting to see what effect the power going out on an update would have. Just opened my catalog and all was fine, update went through very fast I guess. It was a small update so that might have saved the day! No problem at all.

Have you considered using an external drive to store images? Many, if not most, photographers who shoot a lot of images use external hard drives to store their images. I have several hard drives and never keep my photographs on the computer.

Ansel Adams DID shoot with a Polaroid and was a consultant for the company. He was very good friends with the owner and offered up many suggestions to make the images better.

There are many people who run photo contests that have no clue about sizing, pixels, resolution, etc. Much about the subjects mentioned in this thread remain a mystery to many, including the people who run photo competitions.

It helps, when using LrC, if you understand what happens within the application. Any edits you make to an image are automatically saved and simply stack one upon the other. So if you did not set the original image back to its original unaltered state, any new processing would show up in the history on top of the old processing. You can actually delete all of the processing history if this bothers you, but the image always shows the latest processing. If you were now to erase only the bottom edits that would affect the top edits as they were made over the original edits. Just leave it all in place, metadata does not take up a lot of file space. You, as someone else has said, most likely accidentally selected all images and then processed one, which then processed all of them. Reading up on how the application works overall might help you in the future.