CTRL/CMD A:  Selects all the items in a folder or grid.

CTRL/CMD Click: Holding the CTRL/CMD key down while clicking on items selects individual items not together.

Click > Shift Click: Click on the first item in the grid you want to add a keyword to and then click on  the last item (i.e. all the papers) while holding the SHIFT key on your keyboard.

A few more misc. shortcuts you may find helpful while working in the grid:

CTRL/CMD+D: Deselect all items in the grid (this is really helpful after selecting CTRL/CMD + A).

/ : In a group of selected items if you have one item you do not want selected, you can click on it and then click the / key to deselect it.  You could alternatively just CTRL/CMD Click to deselect an item as well.

Hope these few small shortcuts make your work in the grid a lot easier as you work on adding metadata.

 “I have all my digiscrap supplies and photos in separate folders on my EHD (that is backed up on yet another EHD).   The original zipped files, in turn, have been burned onto dvd’s, so they’re not cluttering up my EHD’s.    I’m on a vista PC with 2 local disks, both 75G in size. I only have about 20% free disc space on my drive C, but 87% on my drive D. I was planning to use the D drive for my LR catalog.”

“My 1st question is this: will this 69G space be enough to hold the almost 90G supplies I have in the EHD? Im still culling my supplies as I continue organizing them into designer folders.  I remember you saying in one of the videos that I’d need about 3x the space for the keywords and processing that LR will be doing to the files. Did I get that right?” 

“Like you, I would like to keep track of all the supplies that I have already imported into LR (especially since there are still so many goodies arriving into my download folder each day, lol). Im afraid this is the part I don’t get. From my main supplies (EHD), I need to make another folder separate from it? Do I copy the folders I want to import (from my EHD) into LR through this 2nd folder? or is that where LR dumps the stuff it can’t import? Sorry, the process is hazy for me at this point. where should this folder be at? will it still be in drive D for me?”

 This reader brings up a great question – how can you be sure with so many different drives and photos and digital supplies that you will have enough space?    I then asked the reader how much space she had on her external hard drives.

“My EHD is 250G, and my digiscrap supplies come up to 90G, and my photos and scanned photos comprise another 50G…so I still have a little over 100G free space on it.  The same supplies and photos sit in another EHD as another back-up. ”

Once I knew all the information I actually took out a pen and paper and created the scenario so I could come up with a solution – it reminded me of my days in school – a Lightroom math problem if you will…

Now the crazy thing about Lightroom math is that you really could do this several different ways – there is no set in stone RIGHT answer.  So I will endeavor to share what I would do and invite readers to share their input in the comments.  The first step is taking stock of what you have:

• C Drive on Vista PC with 15GB of space (20% free) - I wouldn’t add anything to this – especially if your computer is running the OS on this drive.
• D Drive on Vista PC with 69 GB of space (87% free) – some room to work there.
• External Hard Drive 100GB space (40% free) – room to work here as well.

Next look at what is going to change when you get to Lightroom and begin converting your files:

• You will have a Lightroom Catalog file folder – your catalog is just the database file that keeps track of all your photos and digital supplies.  In my catalog I have over 60,000 photos and digital scrapbooking supply items – together the items in my catalog (photos and supplies) add up to around 320GB.  Just to give you an idea, the folder that holds my Lightroom catalog and a month of catalog backups is around 41GB – around 22GB of that 41GB are my catalog backups.  So after a month of daily backups of your catalog, I’d plan on around 25-30GB for your catalog.
• Your Photos will stay the same after you go to Lightroom – the only thing that will change is file size as you edit and add metadata.  However, you will need to plan on your photo collection growing over time – so be thinking of that as you look to the future.
• Your Digital Supplies.  In this post you can see an idea of how things change after conversion.  To be on the safe side, I would plan on your supplies doubling in size – they most likely won’t, but giving yourself the room can’t hurt.

Here’s how I would do this if I had this setup:

• Store the Lightroom Catalog on your D Drive where you have 69GB free – this gives you room to grow with your catalog and also leaves you enough free space to process things using both the remaining free space on your C and D disk drives on the Vista PC.

• Leave your supplies and photos on your EHD.  Create a NEW Scrapbooking Supply Folder on the free space of the EHD and just move your files from their current location on the EHD to the new folder location on the same EHD.  This is the only drive that has the room for you to do this and as you move them from one side of the drive to the other, free space won’t be a problem.

Now if this were my setup, I would be a little concerned about the free space left on both my PC and external hard drive.  I would seriously consider investing in a new 1TB internal hard drive or another external hard drive  (LACIE is an awesome and rugged brand) to give myself the room to grow.

Just to give you an idea – if you added a new 500GB external USB drive to the mix, you could store your Lightroom Catalog, photos and supplies all in one place.  I would buy a portable hard drive rather than a desktop external hard drive because they are more resilient.

Last but not least, you would want to make sure that you have both an EHD backup of everything (which you already do but would need to be bigger with a larger EHD) AND offsite backup – another hard drive, online backup service, etc.

I really hope this helps some of you who are planning and getting ready to convert and move files.  Have a wonderful weekend!

The first is Hello by Anita and Ange Designs:

Quite honestly the size difference in this kit was a pleasant surprise – Before conversion it was 135.4 MB and after 176.9 – an increase in file size of around 31%.

Next up is Time Capsule by One Little Bird Designs:

It is interesting to note that this kit ballooned fro 127.6 MB to 211.4 MB – a difference of almost 66%!  I am sure there are technical reasons – different items – larger elements, etc. but this just goes to show you never know what the difference in size will really be!

For inquiring minds that have emailed me and wanted to know – there you have it!  For those of you converting, are you keeping track of your file size of your catalog before and after?  If so, we’d love to know 1) the size of your files before and after and 2) what software program you used to convert the files.

Thanks for sharing!

This past weekend I sat down with a few of my most recent images and created three layouts. I documented a few things about that workflow that I wanted to share here.

First things first.  When gathering all your items for a particular layout, add them to the current layout collection or quick collection first.  (See this post for more info).

If you are a using a template, immediately upon opening it in Photoshop, choose CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + S and save as a new name in your DIGITAL LAYOUTS Folder.

The digital layouts folder is jumping ahead into photos.  Basically this is a folder I keep under my photo folder to organize all my digital scrapbooking layouts.

When you are finished creating the layout, save it and then move back to Lightroom and right click on the DIGITAL LAYOUTS folder and choose Synchronize.  (You can see how to Synchronize your folders about 6 minutes into this video).

Once your new layout is in Lightroom, move it into the Quick Collection folder or your 0Current Layout Collection.  Once it is there, you should have all the items you used to create the layout in the collection along with your layout.

Click on your layout and then scroll down on the right to the metadata panel, choosing EXIF and IPTC from the drop down menu.
You can choose your copyright template for the preset if you’d like.  Under Caption, add the products used.  The great things about this is you can move directly back to the collection, click on the item you want to credit, close your keyword list panel, and then look at the keywords to find exactly what kit you used.

At this point, your metadata will look something like the photo to the right.

You will want to look at the capture date of the layout file.  If it is incorrect, you will want to change it so it will show up in the appropriate place in your photo folders (you want it to be in the timeline the day you created it, not the day the template was created)  To change this, choose Metatadata > Edit Capture Time and then change the date to the date/time you created the layout.

You will also want to check the keywords on your layout file.  To do this click on the file and scroll up to the keywords panel just like you did to check credits.  You will want to remove any digital supply catalog keywords left behind.  You can do this by deleting them directly out of the keyword panel.  Just highlight the keywords and delete them.

Now for the fun.  I must confess that I’ve been horrible about posting layouts in galleries the past year or so.  I just don’t know a lot of people in the galleries and I find it tedious to upload each layout, add credits – I’d much rather push one button and have it done.

However, I do realize that many of you LOVE galleries so let me save you a few steps.  When you finish a layout, you can export the layout to your blog folder (check out this video to learn how to setup a custom export scenario so every time you export you just do a few clicks).

When you go to the gallery to upload your layout, keep Lightroom open and select your caption product credits by clicking inside the field, pressing CTRL/CMD+A and then CTRL/CMD+C to copy.  Then in the gallery when they ask for credits, just click and press CTRL/CMD+V.  That’s it – no more typing over and over – do it once and you are done!

Now for my personal plug for Flickr.  If we all just setup group galleries on Flickr, theoretically you could export from Lightroom to Flickr with two clicks and then instead of uploading to five different online galleries, you could just add that photo to the groups you wanted to share in.

Here’s another thing I LOVE about Flickr.  When I do the metadata work in Lightroom and publish to Flickr it automatically pulls my credits from the caption!  Talk about time saving and easy!  You can learn more on publishing to Flickr via Lightroom in this video.

So with that, I’d love to personally invite you to start sharing your layouts in our Digiscrap101 Flickr pool via Lightroom publishing tools.  I’d also love to know if you share your layouts on Flickr already and if so, where?  Link us up to your photostream!

Happy Monday!