Group,
I tried to seach this on the forum with not much luck, so apologies if it's been covered before. For the last 7 years, I've taken, renamed, catalogued, developed, and edited my work using ACDSee Pro (curent version I use is 3 build 475).
Because I need some more advanced tools for editing, and because I've seen a lot more info/plugins out there using Lightroom, I've decided to make the switch. The problem is that I have so much invested in ACDSee (kinda like the Canon vs Nikon debate!)
I'm wondering if anyone out there has made the switch, and how they went about it. Specifically, my photo collection is organized something like this: C\My Documents\Pictures\Year\MM-DD\What_the_picture_is_about.jpg. I've also got a backup hard drive that mirrors the first.
Over time, I've taken each photo and assigned categories to them. My categories tend to be the people or being in them (as most are of my kids/pets). For example, I have Dog-Buster and Dog-Spot, and Kids-Mike and Kids-Sophia for categories. Many photos have 2 or more categories assigned (for example, a photo of Buster and Sophia has both). When my dog died last year, it was quite easy to bring up the "Best of Buster" by telling ACDSee to find me everything that matched the "Buster" category and the "4" or "5" rating, or any photos of Buster and Sophia.
From what I gather, the way to do this in Lightroom is using Keywords. But to go through the 20K photos I have and assign each the correct keywords, would be a real bear, and I've done that once already by categorizing them in ACDSee. And then there's the fact that many of the photos were Developed and even Edited in ACDSee - I'm not sure how to migrate it to LR and keep my edits as there's a lot of time invested there. So I'm seeking advice on the best way to migrate my collection over. I've thought of a couple ways to do this, but wondering if anyone has any advice on a better (best) way(s):
1.) Make a clean break - Set a date where I simply don't import into ACDsee and I import only into Lightroom. - I can figure this one out without help
2.) A hybrid workflow - use ACDSee to catalogue files, and Lightroom for developing and editing the best of them. (If anyone has a good example of how they do this, I'd appreciate it, as it seems like a good option, since ACDSee seems to excel at organizing and LR seems to excel at editing)
3.) Use ACDSee and collect all the files from a given category, copy them to a single folder (as they reside in a multitude of folders right now), and then doing a Lightroom import with a Keyword preset. This approach won't work well for anything assigned to multiple categories, and at the end of it, Lightroom will have all the photos in a single folder, and not my nice date-wise structure I have now.
4.) Something I haven't thought of (such as a plugin for LR that reads ACDSee database info and puts it into keyword format?) Maybe it's such that you can assign keywords to files in ACDsee and then LR can read those keywords too? (this would work pretty well, if it's possible, but it seems to me that the metadata is not the same for both programs - and I'd obviously lose any develop and edit settings I have - maybe there's a way to keep those (with "commit changes" in ACDSee?))
I realize this is a long post, and appreciate if anyone's actually read this far down and can offer some advice. Thanks for any help in advance!
--
-Kevin
I tried to seach this on the forum with not much luck, so apologies if it's been covered before. For the last 7 years, I've taken, renamed, catalogued, developed, and edited my work using ACDSee Pro (curent version I use is 3 build 475).
Because I need some more advanced tools for editing, and because I've seen a lot more info/plugins out there using Lightroom, I've decided to make the switch. The problem is that I have so much invested in ACDSee (kinda like the Canon vs Nikon debate!)
I'm wondering if anyone out there has made the switch, and how they went about it. Specifically, my photo collection is organized something like this: C\My Documents\Pictures\Year\MM-DD\What_the_picture_is_about.jpg. I've also got a backup hard drive that mirrors the first.
Over time, I've taken each photo and assigned categories to them. My categories tend to be the people or being in them (as most are of my kids/pets). For example, I have Dog-Buster and Dog-Spot, and Kids-Mike and Kids-Sophia for categories. Many photos have 2 or more categories assigned (for example, a photo of Buster and Sophia has both). When my dog died last year, it was quite easy to bring up the "Best of Buster" by telling ACDSee to find me everything that matched the "Buster" category and the "4" or "5" rating, or any photos of Buster and Sophia.
From what I gather, the way to do this in Lightroom is using Keywords. But to go through the 20K photos I have and assign each the correct keywords, would be a real bear, and I've done that once already by categorizing them in ACDSee. And then there's the fact that many of the photos were Developed and even Edited in ACDSee - I'm not sure how to migrate it to LR and keep my edits as there's a lot of time invested there. So I'm seeking advice on the best way to migrate my collection over. I've thought of a couple ways to do this, but wondering if anyone has any advice on a better (best) way(s):
1.) Make a clean break - Set a date where I simply don't import into ACDsee and I import only into Lightroom. - I can figure this one out without help
2.) A hybrid workflow - use ACDSee to catalogue files, and Lightroom for developing and editing the best of them. (If anyone has a good example of how they do this, I'd appreciate it, as it seems like a good option, since ACDSee seems to excel at organizing and LR seems to excel at editing)
3.) Use ACDSee and collect all the files from a given category, copy them to a single folder (as they reside in a multitude of folders right now), and then doing a Lightroom import with a Keyword preset. This approach won't work well for anything assigned to multiple categories, and at the end of it, Lightroom will have all the photos in a single folder, and not my nice date-wise structure I have now.
4.) Something I haven't thought of (such as a plugin for LR that reads ACDSee database info and puts it into keyword format?) Maybe it's such that you can assign keywords to files in ACDsee and then LR can read those keywords too? (this would work pretty well, if it's possible, but it seems to me that the metadata is not the same for both programs - and I'd obviously lose any develop and edit settings I have - maybe there's a way to keep those (with "commit changes" in ACDSee?))
I realize this is a long post, and appreciate if anyone's actually read this far down and can offer some advice. Thanks for any help in advance!
--
-Kevin
