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Thread: Workflow with Travel Laptop

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    Default Workflow with Travel Laptop

    I am looking to purchase a laptop to travel with on my Photography trips. The specs for that laptop will be the subject of another post, but any suggestions would be appreciated. My question here relates to workflow.



    Ideally I would like to be able to:
    1. work on images, while traveling, in Lightroom on the new laptop from my entire catalog and then bring back the catalog and images to my main PC at home.
    2. Store traveling images from the shoot onto the laptop and back them up on a portable HD.
    3. I would like to be able to do processing of the travel images, again using Lightroom, and be able to get that work and images on to the main home PC
    4. I suspect any "heavy duty" processing using Photoshop would wait until back home on the main PC..
    Thus my question, how do folks work on their images while traveling and then get home and transfer the images and catalog back to their main machine?

    Thanks
    Ken

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    BPN Member Steve Uffman's Avatar
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    Default Lenovo x220 seems a real good solution

    I went through this drill recently. I bought the new Lenovo x220 and it has proven to be excellent...Robert Otoole also got one....about 3 lbs, long battery life, has an IPS screen which is top shelf for images and was a key driver in the decision making process

    Mine has an I7 processor, 8gb ram. and the 7200rpm drive. It also has a USB 3.0 port. all in all has exceeded my expectations.

    I have the Delkin USB 3.0 card reader but I would look at the Lexar since that covers the card slots when not in use

    I routinely run Lightroom with Nik Software on the files I load. I then do an export as a catalog to my desktop where I then import as catalog...runs real fast.

    Robert Otoole has an SSD instead of the drive I use and I think did a few other things

    Good feedback should come from him soon as he is in the field for month right now

    For backup and additional storage, I use the WDC 1 tb passport

    They do have a tablet model that maybe out by now.

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    Default

    Steve, thanks. This answers the part of the question about dealing with new images from a current trip. I am still thinking about how to work on my full catalog while traveling. Ideas?

    Ken

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    BPN Member Steve Uffman's Avatar
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    Default Export from main Catalog to Laptop

    Understand your goal...some of it IMO depends on the size of the catalog..mine is way too large to do the whole thing.....
    Just last week, I tried to move my catolog to a new drive based on advice from Adobe support and I could never get it to work completely...I would move everything and then all of sudden erase the file from the new target drive...approximately 40K images in my catalog.

    I have however used the export/import process within LR3 to exchange files between my laptop/desktop in both directions...

    there are a lot of folks on BPN that are probably more seasoned with Lightroom than my 2 yrs of work with it that might weigh in differently

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    Default

    I use a cheap light laptop just to look at the images and delete the bad ones.I also bring two external hard drives and copy to both...I only work on images at home.I try and concentrate on just getting the images while traveling. most of my best images are made early in the morning

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    I use a Lenovo netbook (12" screen) ... with a card reader ... it let's me backup images, view / sort images, and do light editing (eg resizing for sharing etc) while travelling. Another external HDD is used to make a backup copy of the images.

    Unless you go for a very high end config, then any serious edits will be super slow on a netbook though ... and if you go for more power then usually you will loose out on portability.

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    BPN Member Steve Uffman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by RohanThakur View Post
    I use a Lenovo netbook (12" screen) ... with a card reader ... it let's me backup images, view / sort images, and do light editing (eg resizing for sharing etc) while travelling. Another external HDD is used to make a backup copy of the images.

    Unless you go for a very high end config, then any serious edits will be super slow on a netbook though ... and if you go for more power then usually you will loose out on portability.
    I have the Lenovo x220 with I7 2.70Ghrz and 8GB Ram....not the strongest machine but certainly not a laggard either

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    I am using something far less spec'ed ... the x220 does look tempting!

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