Kind of like tightrope walking without a net, only I don’t get paid for that. Plus, I just feel kind of unsafe having all my pictures in someone else’s cloud.

I have nearly 10TB of photos so storing those in the Cloud is an expensive option. That’s ok but it’s amazing how quickly those originals can take up space. But even though the originals have been transferred over to my Mac at home, those same originals are also stored in the Cloud. When LR iPad sends my camera’s photos to the Cloud, Lightroom usually keeps those as Smart Previews on my iPad, in order to save space. Now that I have all my originals managed by my Desktop computer back at home, let’s get them cleared out of the Cloud. LrC will tell you that the folder no longer exists, and will prompt you to find that folder. Then from within Lightroom Classic, open the ‘old’ folder. After checking, change the name of the original folder - or drop it in your trash.

After copying the files, you can then do a checksum using an app like ChronoSync to compare and make sure nothing got lost in translation. If instead you move files from one Volume to another using Apple’s Finder, it actually copies those rather than moves them. *My cousin George, who used to work over at Lightroom, explains that it is safer to move your files using Finder, not Lightroom - because Lightroom can sometimes have errors during the ‘move’ process. The portable drive resides in a separate location apart from my home, so that if my house were to catch fire or get bombed, I would still have my backups. I then back up the raid drive to a single, portable 10 TB drive once a month. I move the photos from my computer onto the Raid drive from within Lightroom by simply dragging the file folders from one volume to the next (*see note below). I use Raid 5 because that provides an extra layer of safety against lost data: if one of the drives suddenly takes a nose dive, I don’t lose any data. Raid drives provide much faster read/write speeds than a single drive can. To avoid bloating the hard drive, I regularly move those photos to my external raid drive. My originals are stored on my laptop’s hard drive by default.

Using lightroom on ipad