Photographer Problems with Lightroom and a Slow PC
MY BACKUP PLAN FOR ALL OF MY PHOTOS
To date my biggest photographer problems have been finding pretty light and getting dogs to pose.
In October, I had a bigger problem develop.
As a photographer I use Lightroom and Photoshop in my editing process on all of my photos. I’ve used them both since I started in photography back in 2016.
As soon as I am home after a client photo session, I upload the photos from the memory card onto an external hard drive. That hard drive is continually backed up to an online backup service called BackBlaze.
Once I have delivered the client’s photos to them, I cull the session and delete any unused photos. I then copy all of the photos to another external hard drive. Only then will I delete the photos from the memory card and I have a lot of memory cards so I don’t even do this right away.
In 2024, Adobe made using AI and option for editing photos in Lightroom and Photoshop. This had a lot of impact in the photography world and one of them was slowing down older computers.
Computers need a pretty robust graphics card to use AI or else your computer will slow down.
My PC was purchased in 2020. When Adobe created their DeNoise option in Lightroom, I never used it because my computer was so slow if I tried to run it. I would use Topaz Lab’s DeNoise software because it was so much faster.
THOUSANDS OF PERSONAL PHOTOS
By October of this year, I’d taken a boatload of personal photos. I’d attended a brown bear workshop in Alaska where I took 9,000 photos. Three weeks later I spent 10 days in Hilton Head and took over 3,000 photos of my own dogs.
You know that backup practice I mentioned above that I have with all of my client sessions? Going forward I will make sure I do this with my own sessions. I didn’t do it religiously and I paid the price.
MY COMPUTER WAS CRASHING WHEN I USED LIGHTROOM
In October my laptop started to have issues when I was using Lightroom. I contacted Adobe, Microsoft and the company that made the graphics card. I got opinions from other photographers in an online photography group I’m in.
The consensus was that my laptop needed to be updated which meant I needed a new one so I started doing research. Which PCs were best for photographers who use Lightroom and Photoshop a lot?
I bought an Asus PX13. I loved the small size which would be awesome for traveling and the screen was really nice which would make editing on the road better. But it was loud at times. Scary, loud, Don even commented on it.
In the online photography group, most of them suggested that I switch from using a PC to a Mac.
When I was still having problems with the new laptop, I decided to make the change. One of the photographers in the online group volunteered to help me. He is a retired IT professional and is familiar with both PCs and Macs.
He has been a lifesaver.
I ordered a Mac and after he helped me set it up, I shipped the Asus back.
However in this process what I learned was I did have a slow laptop but my bigger problem was a failing hard drive. The hard drive that held all of my 2022, 2023 and 2024 photos.
I didn’t realize this soon enough.
THE PROCESS TO CHANGE FROM A PC TO A MAC
In the process of changing from a PC to a Mac, I was working on organizing all of my old photos. In the last 2 years, I’ve been really good about deleting old/bad/out of focus photos. Ones that I’ll never edit or use.
I wasn’t as good at this process for years though so I spent hours going through 8 years worth of photos and “cleaning them up.” My 2022 photos and older were the ones that really needed culling.
I even went through my recently taken 12,000 photos from Alaska and Hilton Head and deleted 80% of them. What I didn’t realize is that I was doing this on a hard drive that was failing.
The process of switching from a PC to a Mac made me nervous because all of external hard drives were formatted for use with a PC not a Mac. The hard drives I’d been using were also slower ones and my new IT friend recommended Samsung Shield T7s. So I bought 6 of them and once I had all of the photos culled and organized, I then copied them to the new hard drives.Then I copied them once more so I had clean backups.
(This process wasn’t as clear cut as I’m making it sound because one of my older external hard drives was 5TB and the Samsungs are only 4TB. I ended up having to move the photos around even more and as my photographer friends know, Lightroom doesn’t like it when you move photos.)
HARD DRIVE FAILURE
What I figured out much too late was that the current hard drive I was using that housed all of my 2022, 2023 and 2024 photos on it was failing. I thought it was my PC. My PC was slow but that really wasn’t the problem, it was the hard drive.
The backup copies on all of the Samsungs that I made weren’t totally clean copies. Especially 2022. For some reason, 2022 had all kinds of issues.
So then I went back to my other older hard drives, the 2nd copies of all of the sessions that I’d made years before and I basically had to compare these sets of photos for EACH client to the new Samsungs to make sure everything was there. Sometimes there were issues and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason.
I know most of these clients will probably never come back to me to want these photos but I felt a responsibility to make sure I had them.
That’s when I realized I didn’t have a backup of 2022. I couldn’t believe I didn’t have one but the backup hard drives labeled 2022 didn’t have them on it.
BACKBLAZE PHOTOGRAPHY BACKUPS
When I first got into photography, BackBlaze was recommended to me as an online backup service to use if you ever have a hard drive crash. I got online and ordered a backup hard drive. Guess what? What I got was a copy of the hard drive that had already crashed. It was a mess and not helpful. I got back in touch with BackBlaze and they told me that I couldn’t retrieve anything before November 8 which was around the time I switched from the PC to the Mac.
It thought I’d lost all of my files from 2022. (As a caveat, I did have all of the photos I’d sent to my clients. I had all of the edited photos saved in the email I’d sent to my clients and in Dropbox.) But I lost all of the 2022 RAW files and as I dug deeper into this, I realized I was randomly missing certain RAW files from 2023 and 2024.
A few of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken were from 2022. The last photos of Moose were taken in 2022. There are a ton of photos from 2022 that mean a lot to me.
I was devastated over losing these.
ORGANIZATION IS KEY!
I am pretty organized. This is a huge benefit as a photographer storing years worth of photos. After lamenting for a week about losing my 2022 photos, guess what? I found them!! They were on an old external hard drive labeled 2021 BACKUP photos. I never changed the label to include 2022 after I added them to the hard drive. Boooo but YAY!!
While I was so relieved to have found these photos, because I use Lightroom and it matters where Lightroom thinks the photos are, this caused problems. I won’t go into these details because I’m not sure I could clearly explain it but just know that my Lightroom was a mess.
HELP FROM OTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS
Fast forward another 2 weeks and I’m talking with the head of my local photography group and he mentioned that he uses BackBlaze and he has the plan that backs his photos up for a year. I looked at my BackBlaze plan and guess what?? I have the FOREVER plan.
I reached out to them and this time, the person who helped me showed me how to find my backed up photos.
I FOUND 2022!
I was able to get a copy of my 2022, 2023 and 2024 photos dated for mid-October before I started having all of the problems.
I was elated!!
Here is my 2022 Year in Review Blog. I thought i’d lost all of these original photos. I am sooo grateful that I found them.
View my 2022 favorite photos here
This might be too soon for me to have just looked at these. The pit in my stomach is back knowing that I spent 2 weeks thinking I’d lost these.
SO MUCH LOST TIME
But I lost hours of work. You know all of the time I spent from mid-October when I started culling and deleting all of my old and current photos including ALL of those photos from Alaska and Hilton Head? I lost all of that time and essentially had to do it ALL OVER AGAIN.
After all of the stress and anguish of thinking I’d lost photos then realizing I had to redo so much work, I was struggling.
But I always try to find the positives: I had all of the photos. I found all of the photos I thought I’d lost.
PHOTOGRAPHER PROBLEMS SOLVED:
The moral of the story: make sure you are backing up your photos consistently. Make sure you have mentors and others you can ask for help when you need it. I am so fortunate for this ending and I’m happy to report that all of my external hard drives are up to date, they’re backed up automatically here at my house, and they’re backed up to BackBlaze.