Diving deeper on Lightroom + setting up LrC to reside inside Dropbox

In Don’t be the turkey // a “belt and suspenders” approach to Personal Digital Asset Management, I presented my Personal(💜🌈) Digital Asset Management (“PDAM”) workflow using Lightroom Classic + Dropbox + periodic external backups, along with the “Cheesy Rainbow Rave” framework to achieve a “belt and suspenders” approach to risk management. Here below we will dive deeper into Lightroom as a tool, and how to set up Lightroom Classic to reside within Dropbox.

💜🌈 // It is appropriate to include the modifier “personal” to distinguish the tools we are discussing here, since the term Digital Asset Management (“DAM”) typically refers to enterprise-level solutions that catalog large volumes of photography assets, as well as managing permissions/access across a large set of users.

Figure 1 // the “Cheesy Rainbow Rave” framework >> Don’t be the turkey // a “belt and suspenders” approach to Personal Digital Asset Management

Photo “Editing” // context + disambiguation

Before we describe the Lightroom tool and its functionalities, I think it makes sense to establish context by clarifying that the verb “edit” has 2 main meanings in the context of working with photos, videos, and other media assets:

1. Editing to “manipulate” >> changing/altering an image’s appearance
2. Editing to “select” >> curating, ranking, rejecting and organizing images

1/ Manipulation >> changing/altering an image’s appearance

This meaning of “editing photos” refers to changing or enhancing the visual elements of an image. The goal is to improve or modify the photo by adjusting parameters including the following:

• Color correction >> Adjusting white balance, saturation, hue, etc.
• Exposure adjustments >> Changing brightness, contrast, shadows, highlights.
• Retouching >> Removing blemishes, smoothing skin, or applying other changes like cropping, adding filters, or applying effects.
• Compositing >> Combining elements from multiple images to create a new, unified visual.
• Example >> You edit a portrait photo to enhance the colors, remove blemishes, and brighten the overall exposure.

2/ Selection >> curating, ranking, rejecting and organizing images

This meaning of “editing photos” pertains to organizing, selecting, and categorizing images, often in large batches. The goal is to review a set of images and choose the ones that best meet the criteria for a particular project. In this context, “edit” means:

• Selecting >> Picking the best images from a shoot or collection.
• Rating/ranking >> Assigning stars, flags, or labels to “good” images.
• Discarding/rejecting >> Removing or marking bad or unwanted photos.
• Organizing >> Creating folders or collections based on your selection.
• Example >> After a photo shoot, you edit the batch of 500 photos, selecting the best 20 for final use while rejecting the others.

The idea of “selection” is fundamental to the process of photography. As explained by John Szarkowski (💜🔲) in his book The Photographer’s Eye (1966), “The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process — a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one.” Where the painter makes an image from scratch on a blank canvas by way of an additive process, the photographer makes an image by selecting it from among an infinite number of potential images that could fill his viewfinder. So the process of selection is fundamental to the process of photography, and selecting/curating from among a set of photographs could therefore be thought of as “meta-photography”. But I digress…

💜🔲 // Director of MoMA’s Department of Photography from 1962–1991, Szarkowski was instrumental to photography’s recognition as an art form, as opposed to merely a technical process.

Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is the tool at the center of my PDAM workflow. It’s an incredible and powerful photography software tool — no other photo tool even comes close.

Functionality

Lightroom delivers 2 main pillars of functionality:

• asset management // photos + videos
  - storing
  - organizing, selecting, curating
• asset manipulation // photos only

I use LrC to manage not only photography (stills+video), but also other raster assets that I produce on my desktop system, including:

1. outputs from p5.js scripting
2. outputs from Adobe Illustrator
3. scans of my son LeoV’s drawings (eg. studioLeoVdrawings https://adobe.ly/3LE2XDM)

Lightroom does not ingest/manage vector files (but I store these latter assets within the same folder structure on my system alongside my raster files).

Lightroom’s asset manipulation capabilities are limited to still images, NOT video.

Tools/interfaces

Lightroom involves 3 separate tools/interfaces:

1. desktop // figure 2
2. mobile // figure 3
3. web // figure 4

Figure 2 // LrC-desktop

Figure 3 // Lr-mobile

Figure 4 // Lr-web

These 3 tools/interfaces remain synced together via a cloud-based asset library (“Lr-cloud”).

The difference between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Classic is as follows (figure 5):

• Lightroom (“Lr”) // formerly “Lightroom CC” >> desktop client relies on the cloud-based library Lr-cloud to store the assets
• Lightroom Classic (“LrC”) >> desktop client maintains its own asset library/catalog on the desktop system drive

Lightroom isn’t really just one product but rather several tools and products, and it can get somewhat confusing as Adobe keeps changing the branding — the fully cloud-based product is now just “Lightroom” instead of “Lightroom CC”. The mobile and web clients (“Lr-mobile” and “Lr-web”) are common to both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, the difference resides in the desktop client. I use Lightroom Classic in my PDAM setup because I prefer the added redundancy and security of having my valuable assets stored on my desktop system (“LrC-desktop”), as opposed to relying entirely on Lr-cloud.

Figure 5 // differences between LIghtroom vs. Lightroom Classic // source Adobe

Additional Resources to Learn Lightroom

This post is not intended to be a comprehensive presentation of how to use Lightroom in full detail, but rather to provide a general presentation about the product and its main functionalities, as well as how I use it in my own personal PDAM workflow in the context of the CRR framework.

Adobe offers a comprehensive library of tutorials on how to use Lightroom >>

• Lightroom // formerly “Lightroom CC”
• Lightroom Classic

Lightroom Costs

Lightroom is available on a subscription basis as part of various bundles. As with any other SaaS product, the pricing is ever so slightly confusing, ie. (intentionally?) lacking transparency — packages are presented differently on multiple different pages within the Adobe ecosystem (figures 6+7+8). Packages and pricing are in continual flux and may not remain accurate after the time of this writing.

• Lightroom (1 TB) >> Lr + 1 TB cloud storage $10/month
• Photography (20 GB) >> Lr + LrC + Photoshop + 20 GB cloud storage $10/month
• Photography (1 TB) >> Lr + LrC + Photoshop + 1 TB cloud storage $20/month

Figure 6 // https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom-classic.html

Figure 7 // https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

Figure 8 // https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html

Photo editing in Lightroom // selection >> curating, ranking, rejecting and organizing images

Lightroom is an extremely powerful and efficient tool for “editing” photos within the meaning of “selection”. Once assets are loaded into Lightroom, they can be edited with extreme efficiency:

• Lr-mobile >> photos can be ranked (0–5 stars) by swiping up/down on the left side of the screen (figure 9); they can be flagged pick/reject by swiping up/down on the right side of the screen (figure 9)
• LrC-desktop >> photos can be ranked (0–5 stars) simply by pressing the numeric keypad when an asset is selected in LrC-dekstop; they can be flagged as pick by pressing the “P” key, as reject simply by pressing the “X” key when an asset is selected.

Once assets have been ranked or flagged, with a single click LrC-desktop can be toggled to filter these within the domain of the selected folder and its subfolders. Rejected assets can then be deleted from the disk by pressing “⌘+delete” and selecting “Delete from Disk” (figure 10).

Any other photo software includes multiple dialogs and clicks to delete assets. Might not sound like much, but if you’re doing a lot of editing, the clicks that you save add up quickly.

Figure 9 // ranking and rejecting assets in Lr-mobile

Figure 10 // clearing assets for deletion in LrC-desktop

Photo editing in Lightroom // manipulation >> changing/altering an image’s appearance

As you probably know, Adobe Photoshop has long been (and remains) the gold standard for photo manipulation — it’s the tool used by all professional retouchers. Lightroom is complementary to and works in concert with Photoshop, with 2 extremely powerful distinguishing features:

• nondestructive edits
• batch editing

Let’s unpack these…

Nondestructive edits

In Lightroom, all image manipulations/alterations, including not only general adjustments such as color and exposure etc., but also local adjustments such as spot removal brushes and masked adjustments (including AI-powered generative features) are stored as metadata in a sidecar file without affecting the original image file.

In Photoshop, on the other hand, edits are technically baked into the file, although professional retouchers mitigate this by operating their changes in new layers, including adjustment layers, that leave the original image untouched in the background layer at the bottom of the layer stack. So effectively any changes can be reversed, but this results in huge file sizes.

The advantages of Lightroom’s approach are threefold: 1/ much smaller file sizes as compared to Photoshop, 2/ changes can be reversed in a history, and 3/ all or select changes can be copy/pasted from one asset to another.

Lightroom’s nondestructive approach stands in sharp contrast to tools like Apple in their camera roll, where edits are basically baked into the image file (at least as soon as it is removed from the Apple Photo ecosystem).

Batch editing

As mentioned, one of the key benefits of Lightroom’s metadata-based approach to image manipulation/alteration is that all or some of the edits can be copy/pasted from one asset to a whole batch of assets. Edits can be performed on a whole batch of assets at the same time, or they can be copy/pasted (all or selectively) from one asset over to a batch of others.

As Lightroom’s image manipulation tools continue to improve, including new generative-AI fill and other adjustment features, I rarely if ever use Photoshop to manipulate images. At this point, one of the only situations where I would employ Photoshop would be to composite/assemble multiple image files together.

Lightroom Classic // desktop application

With LrC-desktop, still and video assets are imported into a “catalog” file representing the entire “library” database of assets. The catalog also contains previews; LrC then displays previews of the assets within the tool, instead of loading full resolution files each time, which greatly speeds up review. However the “original” assets remain stored as files within folders transparently on the system drive of the desktop computer (as opposed to other cloud-based tools where the assets are not transparently available on the desktop system, or hidden inaccessibly within packages). The latter fact constitutes a keystone of my PDAM workflow, since it allows for the redundancy that I consider crucial, further to my “belt and suspenders” approach and the “Consolidated Redundant Routine” framework (aka. “Cheesy Rainbow Rave”).

Once imported into Lightroom, the assets can be organized into different “collections” (ie, “albums”) for different projects, trips, themes or any other grouping as desired, without affecting or moving the files on the desktop system drive.

While convenient, using collections to organize assets is not fully robust, as it depends on the integrity of the catalog (ie. such information would be lost if ever the catalog needed to be “wiped”). A more robust approach is to use Keyword tagging and metadata — to the extent metadata is stored at the file level, it is not dependent on the integrity of the LrC-desktop catalog. I could wipe my LrC-desktop catalog at any time and rebuild it afresh by simply reimporting all my asset folders into a new catalog, without losing any of the organization information embedded in keywords. I often use collections as an intermediate step for the sake of efficiency, dragging assets to collections as I edit and then periodically blanket-adding keywords to all the assets within a certain collection.

It doesn’t matter what sort of folder structure one may use to organize the asset files on the desktop drive. However, it is important to keep the number of files in each folder under 1,500 or so, otherwise LrC starts to slow down because it has to load too many files into active RAM. This problem may hopefully be mitigated with future Lightroom updates. Per the screenshot following below (figure 11), I have top-level folders to separate personal, art, commercial, and video assets, and then within these I tend to subdivide by year, and then by month or project. Since video assets are so much heavier, I prefer to control Dropbox selective sync for these separately from stills (more on Dropbox follows below), so I keep my video assets in a separate top-level folder structure to facilitate this management.

One can organize and reorganize the folder structure at any time — any moving and shuffling of assets between folders as well as renaming files is done directly within LrC instead of Finder. For any file changes done outside of LrC, the assets would have to be relinked, which can be accomplished a few ways: either a/ re-importing the folder, or b/ right clicking on assets with a broken link in LrC and remapping them to the correct file.

Figure 11 // screenshot of LrC Folders and Collections panels

Lightroom // mobile app

The next part of the Lightroom system is Lr-mobile, ie. the Lightroom app on your iPhone or other mobile device. While I create many different types of digital assets, these days most of the photo and video assets are captured directly on my iPhone. Over the years, I have previously used digital SLR cameras and obviously for professional uses, they still exist for a reason. But, after being exposed to photography across many domains from fine art to fashion, my personal takeaway is that the best images are about the creative eye and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” rather than the lens used to capture. This is especially true as the quality of iPhone captures has greatly improved in recent years. I must also recognize a personal preference for abstract photography as well as manipulated imagery, further lessening the importance to me of capture quality. This is of course a subjective opinion, but to me it matters less what I use to capture an image weighed against the convenience of the iPhone, which is the camera I always have with me.

Following is an outline of my asset ingestion process via Lr-mobile:

1. The Lr-mobile app on my iPhone automatically imports photos and videos(💜🍭) captured on my iPhone
2. From Lr-mobile, new assets are synced up to Lr-cloud
3. From Lr-cloud, new assets are synced down to my “INbox” folder in LrC-desktop, thereby being automatically added to >> a/ the LrC-desktop catalog and b/ the file and folder structure on my desktop computer
4. The final step is to move new assets out of my “INbox” folder and distribute them into other folders in my file system(💜🔳) — as the name “INbox” would suggest, this is a temporary holding folder

💜🍭 // Actually, for videos I have Lr-mobile set to manual import instead of auto-import, because videos are a/ heavier to upload and b/ less suitable to being edited in Lr. I therefore prefer to review the videos I take on my iPhone and then manually import (in batches, eg. at the end of each day), instead of continual auto-import.

💜🔳 // As mentioned previously, files are moved around on the local drive simply by dragging them to new folders via the LrC interface.

Lightroom sync

With Lightroom Classic, it is important to understand that between the 3 tools/interfaces described above (LrC-desktop + Lr-mobile+ Lr-web), there are really 2 independent systems here (not 3):

• LrC-desktop
• Lr-cloud

Let’s back up for a moment. Assets ingested into Lr-mobile are automatically synced up to Lr-cloud and then automatically synced down to LrC-desktop, but the reverse is not automatic: you can import new folders of assets on your local desktop drive (as well as external drives) into the LrC-desktop library — I do this regularly with p5.js outputs and scans of my son’s drawings — but this does not automatically sync them up into Lr-cloud. Importing assets into LrC-desktop is as simple as dragging files or folders over the LrC-desktop app window (in Library mode, NOT develop mode), which triggers an import window. This process conveniently does not re-import duplicates, so you can simply re-import an entire folder over and over every time you add new assets to it outside of LrC.

Assets can however be induced to sync up from LrC-desktop to Lr-cloud by adding them to a collection that is toggled as “Sync with Lightroom” (indicated by a squiggly arrow to the left of the collection in the Collections panel // figure 12), which means “sync up to Lr-cloud”. Syncing up from LrC-desktop to Lr-cloud may be desired for multiple reasons:

• collections that you may wish to share and/or publish as public Lightroom albums
  - asymptoticSystemKey >> https://adobe.ly/4fU1ciJ
  - studioLeoVprintingHouse >> https://adobe.ly/46n9QTw
• asset manipulation on Lr-mobile // photos only
• asset selection on Lr-mobile
• having one more redundant copy of your assets in Lr-cloud?

Figure 12 // collection toggled as “Sync with Lightroom” (which means “sync up to Lr-cloud”)

I therefore have a collection called “syncMobile” where I can drag assets ingested in LrC-desktop that I may wish to edit on mobile (manipulation+selection) — you can save a lot of time by getting some editing done while the kid’s at swimming lessons. But for the most part, I don’t worry too much about keeping everything in Lr-cloud, since I use it mostly as an asset ingestion mechanism, for importing newly created photo+video assets from my iPhone via Lr-mobile.

LrC-desktop and Lr-cloud must therefore be understood as two separate systems, bridged together by a sync mechanism. But this sync mechanism is not completely robust and, over the years, I have experienced many ebbs and flows in its stability and integrity. Several times I have faced accumulating sync errors and other sync-related issues. On the other hand, the separation of these two systems also presents the solution to such problems. Because of the 3P cloud redundancy I have in place with Dropbox (which I am about to describe in the next section), in the event something ever goes wrong with the Lr-cloud library or if the integrity of its sync with LrC-desktop gets corrupted, I simply log into Lr-cloud on the web and delete the Lr-cloud library (“wiping Lr-cloud”), without affecting either the LrC-desktop library or catalog, which remain intact although no longer synced.

Sadly, I have had to resort to “wiping Lr-cloud” multiple times over the years. For this reason, I tremble at the thought of trusting all my eggs in one basket. Some engineer from Adobe will likely chime in that the potential for sync issues is greater with 2 separate systems, whereas there might be less potential for issues with one system that relies entirely on Lr-cloud. Alas, for all its power and efficiency, the main Lightroom product (fully cloud-based, formerly “Lightroom CC”) cannot be considered infallible — like any other software. All it takes is a left-tail incident once in a while, the occasional black swan where things go wrong and you learn that you can’t ever fully trust any one single app or platform.

Dropbox

Here’s where the redundancy part comes in. As explained, Lr-mobile pulls new photo+video assets from my iPhone, syncs them up to the Lr-cloud, then syncs them down to LrC-desktop on my Mac, at which point the assets are stored in folders on my system drive. So there’s redundancy right there, because I don’t rely on Lr-cloud, but have my asset files redundantly on the desktop system.

But that’s not all. To ensure full redundancy (in case I need to wipe Lr-cloud), I store my entire asset library (including not only all my asset files, but also the LrC catalog) in the Dropbox folder on my system drive:

• The top level folders containing my stills+video assets // figure 13
• The LrC catalog // figures 14+15
• The “INbox” folder where new assets are synced down from Lr-cloud // figures 13+16

Figure 13 // top level folders containing my stills+video assets are located inside Dropbox

Figure 14 // LrC catalog is located inside Dropbox

Figure 15 // LrC catalog is located inside Dropbox

Figure 16 // “Lightroom Sync” folder is set to my “INbox folder” inside Dropbox

Storing not only all my assets, but also the LrC-desktop catalog machinery in Dropbox ensures continual background sync to the Dropbox-cloud (figure 17).

Figure 17 // continual background Dropbox sync of LrC-desktop assets + catalog machinery

Because I have such a large volume of assets under management, I am on a Dropbox Advanced plan, which provides 15 TB of storage (figure 18), which is more than I need. And if ever I needed more, you can keep upgrading up to 1,000 TB — for all intents and purposes, infinite storage.

Figure 18 // 15 TB of Dropbox-cloud storage

Dropbox Costs

The cost of a Dropbox subscription would depend on the volume your asset library —from $10/month for 2 TB, up to $72/month for 15 TB, and upwards from there for more users/storage (figure 19). Pricing depends on whether billed monthly or yearly. Business plans are billed at a minimum of 3 users. As with Lightroom and any other SaaS product, the costs of Dropbox are in continual flux and ever so slightly confusing, ie. (intentionally?) lacking transparency. I’m currently on an Advanced plan (cost $864/year for 15 TB), but the packages have since changed and I will be renewing to a Business plan (cost $540/year for 9 TB).

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments >>

atomic space kitten

Figure 19 // https://www.dropbox.com/plans