Michael B. Rasmussen

Move lightroom Previews to faster drive

Building 1:1 previews certanly speeds up your lightroom workflow, it just takes ages and usually if you are like me you can't wait to get into developing those new masterpieces, especially if you have your cards full and have to import a few hundreds or even more.

In my situation this usually took about an hour or two sometimes after sporting events even longer because I mostly work on a laptop with limited harddrive space I work on a external super fast usb 3,0 SSD drive.

This got me thinking if I somehow could move my preview data to a faster internal drive, and maybe even save some space on my external drive?

Adobe dosent allow the user to manually choose location of the previews so instead I decided to give symbolic links a go.

My setup is like this:

C:\ Windows as usual

D:\ All my program installations and sync folders google drive etc etc.

E:\ Cd drive. I have no idea what this is used for annymore, its a good cupholder though :-)

F:\ Holds all all my lightroom catalouges, settings, presets and plugins.

P:\ My scratch disk a 75gb SSD drive, only used for cache and now preview files.

The drives we are F:\ and P:\ drive.

I shoud say that before doing this if you work on more than one computer Laptop and stationary you have to ensure that the drives are setup in the exactly the same structure.

First locate your preview folders it is located in the root of your catalouge folder right next to your catalouge. In my case: F:\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 1 2017 Previews.lrdata

Copy that entire folder to your faster harddrive or secondary location and just as a precaution rename the old folder to F:\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 1 2017 Previews.lrdata.bak to make sure if anything goes wrong you won't have to recreate all your preview files again.

Now open CMD as administrator. and make a symbolic link to your new location of the previews. In my case: F:\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 1 2017 Previews.lrdata

The command should look like this execpt for the folder paths taht should match your setup.

mklink /D "F:\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 2017\Lightroom Catalouge 1 2017 Previews.lrdata" "P:\Adobe Cache filer\Lightroom Previews\2017\Lightroom Catalouge 1 2017 Previews.lrdata"

Do this for all your preview folder and start up lightroom and enjoy a smoother and faster preview generation and less stress on your catalouge drive. :-)

If you are working on several computers make sure you have the exact same folder structure and sync he preview data between the 2 computers for a worry free workflow.

Enjoy.

Structured data for google Search

After a few days of developing, and weeks of testing and waiting for google to crawl my site, I finally have Version 1.0.1 of "Rich snippets and Structured Data for Google Search" ready to download.

Version 1.0.1 includes the following Structured data sets.

Person (Social Profile Links):

Use markup on your official website to add your social profile information to a Google Knowledge panel. Knowledge panels prominently display your social profile information in some Google Search results.

Read more on Google here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/social-profile-links

Organisation (Corporate Contacts):

Use corporate contact markup on your official website to add your company's contact information to the Google Knowledge panel in some searches, for example when a user enters your company’s name into the Search bar.

Read more on Google here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/corporate-contacts

Products:

If you're a merchant, you can give Google detailed product information that we can use to display rich results (for example, price, availability, and review ratings) right on Search results pages. Using markup to enable rich product results lets you attract potential buyers while they are searching for items to buy on Google. You can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the relevant, current items they're looking for.

Installation:

Download the plugin here. and extract into your Koken installation /koken/storage/plugins/.

In your web browser login to your Koken admin panel and go to Settings->Plugins and locate the plugin.

It requires additional setup, so click setup and fill in the fields Your Name is very important, and needs to be filled otherwise you will get errors in your cards.

After filling in all your data you need to test if all data are entered correctly, head over to Googles testing tool at https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool and enter your website address.

If everything is entered correctly you should have a error free report.

That's it now all you have to do is wait for Google to visit and crawl your page again. Keep an eye on Search Console and see your data being structured on Google.

Hope someone finds it use full.

Michael 

Installing Lightroom Presets

The Lightroom preset folder is by default located in C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets.

So unless you have followed my guide on how to move your preset folder you should just download the desired preset and extract it to that location. 

Start up Lightroom and go to develop module and use your desired preset. If you have moved your preset folder just copy the preset to the new location on the external harddrive. 

In my case this would be F:\Lightroom_presetfolder\Develop Presets.

Now if you got a huge amount of presets you should consider sorting them into sub folders to easier locate them inside Lightroom.

Just right click your mouse and click new folder then call it what ever you desire. There is lots of cool and free presets on the internet. I also have a few free presets here on my blog.

Moving Lightroom preset folder to external harddrive

As a followup on my guide on how to move Lightroom to another drive I came across a obstacle I hadn't seen coming. How to handle your preset folder especially if you work on a external hard drive. Lets face it its really great to be able to work on multiple computers but not so much if your favorite preset is sitting on your laptop.

After googling around for a bit I found that the simplest solution would be to make a symlink (symbolic link). Pointing from C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom to your preferred location. I am now storing it on my external drive along side with my Lightroom catalog and raw files F:\Lightroom_presetfolder.

Before we make the symlink you have to make a backup of your Lightroom preset folder and make a copy on your preferred location. Navigate to your folder C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe right click the Lightroom folder and copy it to your preferred location, I wanted it to be on my external had drive so I just copied it to my F drive and named it Lightroom_presetfolder to be able to find it easier when needed.

After copying the folder I renamed the original Lightroom folder to Lightroom.bak, just as a precaution if a file got corrupted during the move.

Now it is time to create the symlink witch i super easy on a windows computer, open a comand promt by typing cmd in search right click cmd.exe and press run as administrator, copy the following to notepad and make sure you alter the red highlighted to your preferences.

mklink /D "C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom" "F:\Lightroom_presetfolder"

You should now in your C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\ have have a symbolic link looking loke a shortcut and a folder called Lightroom.bak.

Tadaa that's it launch Lightroom and verify your presets are working and they are all there. if you ever want to roll back or regret all you have to do is delete the symlink and rename the Lightroom.bak to Lightroom.

Moving Lightroom to another drive in 5 easy steps!

Ok lets face it I love Lightroom and use it all the time, when I develop my shots, been using it for about a year now. My problem was that way back when I first bought and installed it I did it on my laptop trough a issci drive on my nas, not the brightest idea in the world but it's been working, My problem was that I have a really good desktop pc with a huge 23" monitor which would be awesome to work on at times.

So after searching the net for a while I found that the easiest solution would be to invest in a external hard drive, so I did and it arrived at my house yesterday, and I was ready to get into business, and moving the catalogue, files and folders to the new drive.

Ok so here is the challenge how do you move 1 TB from a network attached drive to a external hard drive without risking any data loss?

I was thinking a log time about letting Lightroom handle the file transfer, but if i did it that way and something went wrong I wouldn't have any backup.

Here is how I managed to handle the move:

1. If you are working on your laptop and like I did had your photos on a external nas, do yourself a favor and connect a network cable to speed the transfer up.

2. Prepare your new external drive, most are formatted and are just plug and play. Test your drive on both computers you want to work with Lightroom on, and make sure when attached they have the same drive letter. (If the drive letter does not match fix it inside computer administration).

3. Copy all you image files and folders to the new external hard drive. It is important you copy the files and don't cut them, just in case that something goes wrong.

4. Copy your Lightroom catalogue .lrcat, Lightroom-2 Previews.lrdata folder & Lightroom-2 Smart Previews.lrdata folder to the new drive. Here it is also important you copy the files and don't cut them, just in case that something goes wrong.

5. When all the file transfers are done open your external drive and locate your catalogue. Now DON'T PANIC when you look at your folders inside Lightroom you will get a question mark saying that Lightroom cant locate your images. Now you just right click the top folder and press "locate missing folder" and navigate to you image folder on your new external drive.

That's it now when you need to edit your photos on either your laptop or desktop you just attach your external drive and navigate to the Lightroom catalogue on the drive and double click it from there,

Remember to read how to move your Lightroom preset folder, othervise your lightroom settings wont be transfered between computers. Read here