How to properly archive Lightroom

Question

We've got 4 catalogs running on our production computer (Families, Weddings, Fashion, Personal). All of these catalogs contain images that we want to retain long term.

When our hard drive filled up, I moved all the original "raw" images over to our NAS (network attached storage) in order to free up space.

When we went back into the catalogs, we saw a "ghosted" folder of those pictures, since the raws were missing. Later, we needed to recover on of those images, and since it was on the NAS, all of the LR edits were lost.

I need a way to archive the images to the NAS, delete them from the primary computer, and still retain all of the Lightroom edits in case we need to recover the images.

What is the right way to achieve this?

Answer

The easy way: Use LR to move them.

1. Add the NAS folder to the folder list
2. Open the local folder in the library view
3. drag the images from the local folder to the NAS folder.

Note that this will lose the undo stack!

The better way: move them in the OS, then tell LR where you moved them to.

1. Quit LR
2. Do the move as you did, best to move the entire folder
3. Restart LR
4. in the Folder view you'll see the folder is greyed out with a question mark, right click on that folder and choose "find missing folder"
5. Navigate to the NAS and select the same root folder
6. wait.

Note that this is the way I highly encourage you to do it. And you will not loose your edits this way, or your undo stack. (At least I haven't, and I do that all the time.)

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How do I make sure my RAW files are readable in the future?

Question

I've recently started to use RAW with Lightroom. I'd like opinions on how I should make sure my images are readable (not necessarily editable) a few years hence. Heck, let's say a decade some decades.

Should I keep my archives in Nikon's raw format, in conjunction with the LR database? Should I convert them to TIFF? How about DNG?

Answer

Having finished scanning 40 year old film I can assure you that you need to think longer term than 10 years, in fact at least 40 years.

To know whether there is an answer one must understand the problem. These things can happen:

1. proprietary software makers stop supporting old formats, very possible after 40 years.
2. proprietary operating systems stop supporting old photographic programs, also very possible after 40 years.
3. a copy of the 40 year old proprietary operating system will no longer run on current hardware, highly probable.

So, there is a real possibility that in 40 years time you will no longer be able to read your RAW images, using proprietary software. This is not to criticise proprietary software makers. Their shareholders require them to generate profits and growth which can be incompatible with maintaining decades old software.

Can anything be done?

1. store your images as DNG. Support is coalescing around this format, making it rather more likely to survive over the long term.
2. store a copy as a high res jpeg. This will be readable for a long time.
3. keep a copy of your operating system and programs in a virtual machine. For example, for other reasons, I keep a copy of Windows 98 in a virtual box, allowing me to run it under more recent operating systems, on more recent hardware.

But, because I am involved in the open source world, I am confident there will always be an open source solution. I say this because:

1. it is a requirement of the GPL licence to keep the source code available. This means you can always locate the relevant program and recompile it to run in the current environment (or somebody else will do it).
2. there is an army of open source programmers who delight in supporting even the quaintest and most esoteric things. An example of this is that, right now, Linux supports a wider variety of hardware devices than MS Windows.
3. open source programmers are very active in supporting the various RAW formats.

You may remember the Commodore 64. It was introduced in Jan 1982, 28 years ago, but was quickly obsoleted by the then new IBM PC. But even today you can run programs for that machine thanks to the Commodore 64 emulators developed and maintained by the open source world. This is evidence that we will be able to depend on open source solutions for a long time.

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