Question on Lightroom/Aperture libraries

[ANTONkoolaid]

I just purchased myself a new micro four thirds set up and such have gotten Lightroom and Aperture to try out for developing my RAWs.

I'm set to get a 2.3/16/256 rMBP next week and am going to be traveling a lot. Question is there any easy way to import and develop/edit photos on your internal hard drive when traveling, then switch them over to external HD when at home? Or when you set up libraries (if I want it on my external HD) do I need to import there every time I add photos, thus making it a necessity to always have my external HD plugged in while importing to Lightroom/Aperture?

I'd rather not have to rely on plugging in my external HD every time I want to mess around with a few photos here or there on the road.



If anyone is interested in critiquing a few test shots here is a link to some photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/82485072@N05/

Be easy on me though, first camera I've owned that hasn't been a point and shoot!

Thanks for the help.

 

[emorydunn]

The answer is it depends. With Aperture you can set up a managed library, in which case it's very simple. Just store the library file on your internal drive whilst travelling and then move it where ever you want later.

This is what I do, I keep a working library on my internal drive and then have old libraries archived on an external drive.

If you are using Lightroom (or working with a referenced library in Aperture) it's somewhat more difficult. You can move all of the files to an external drive later but you will have to reconnect them to tell Lightroom where they have gone. This works in the same way as reconnecting files in FCP or even in iTunes.

I have had mixed results when I have had to use Lightroom about it reconnecting the files easily. You're supposed to be able to tell it where one file is and it will figure the rest out but this has never quite worked for me.

 

[snberk103]

If I understand your question correctly... I think it can be done easily in Lightroom.

This works because you can have more than one catalogue in Lr, and you can export to another catalogue and import from a catalogue.

Caveat: I haven't actually done this operation, so I can't tell you how well it works... but I have read about it since I thought I might need to do this too, earlier this year. You can use the free trial of Lr to test it though, to see if it works as advertised.

You set up your master catalogue at home on your external. When you go on a trip you start a new catalogue on your MBP. While travelling you do your editing, key wording, etc. When you get home you open Lr using your master catalogue on the ext HDD and import the entire the catalogue from the MBP, edits, key words and all. This should effectively merge the MBP catalogue into the master catalogue. You can either then delete the catalogue on the MBP, or add to it on the next trip. On the next "import from catalogue" make sure you tell Lr to not import the suspected duplicates.

Hope this answers your question.