I am using DT to organize my family history notes and documents. Many of these are jpg images of documents; pictures I have taken with my digital camera at NARA and other archives. As jpgs, they are rather large.
I am reading Joe Kissell’s “Getting Started w DT2” and note that he does not recommend using DT as a photo organizer. I use Adobe Lightroom for my images, adding metadata, etc., but I do want access to these jpgs in DT so that I can transcribe them and note the pertinent genealogical information. Will this cause enormous bloat? Should I consider keeping my entire DT database on an external drive? I use a desktop iMac with 520GB hard drive.
P.S. - Although I am new to DT, I am enjoying it’s potential to help bring order to my chaos!
You’re using Lightroom for part of the task, and so the jpgs are in one or more folders accessible in Finder already. You can index those folders in DT, too. That will take care of the “bloat” - which is really just avoiding having two copies of the same image on your disk. You’ll be able to view single instances of the same images in both Lightroom and DT, depending on the task you’re doing (tending to your metadata, in Lightroom, or tending to your annotations and notes, in DT).
What an obvious (and elegant) solution! I keep my LR photos and catalog on an external drive, and have DT on the hard drive… so the only problem might be if the hard drive is not online. DT probably doesn’t keep a “preview” or anything does it?
Lightroom keeps previews of a larger size in its database. When the file is offline, the preview is persistent. The icons in DT much smaller (dependent on the original file pixel dimensions) and not persistent for indexed folders. If the indexed folder is offline, synchronization applied to that folder will disappear the folder and its icons. DT’s icon previews are a weak analogy to Lightroom’s previews.
I read Joe’s book too. I think his point was that you shouldn’t try to use DT as a general purpose photo organizer because there are much better tools for the job. It’s perfectly okay to store some of your photos in DT when it makes sense to keep them related to a specific project.