a happy new year to you all. I didn’t find an answer to my question in the manual and the forum, so i’d like to ask you for your help.
I recently switched to Photolab 8 Elite, because my old Lightroom 6 Installation doesn’t support my new camera and i don’t like to rent software.
Now i wan’t to batch export all my tenthousands of photos of the last three decades into 4Mpix 90% jpegs to upload them as somehow compact emergency backup to an webspace . The photos are a mix of .jpeg, .crw, .cr2, .arw, compact camera, DSLR, Prosumer, mobile phone camera etc. and i wonder how to do that in a most easy way.
At the moment my photos are sorted on a hard drive like this:
Main Folder
2000
Subfolders (for example)
2000-01-01 New Year Party
2000-04-18 Easter
.
.
.
Main Folder
2024
Subfolders (for example)
2024-12-24 Christmas
Is there any way to conveniently select all photos on my harddrive and batch export them all? It was possible in Lightroom but i don’t find a way to do it in Photolab 8 Elite.
Maybe I’m just too blind (or new to PhotoLab), so any hints are highly appreciated.
If one of your goals for PhotoLab is to see the same edits currently applied to your RAW files in Lightroom, that is not possible. Your raw files will be opened in PhotoLab as if they were never edited. You will need to export your RAW files and any edits applied to them into JPEGs or Tiff’s from within Lightroom. There is nothing that needs to be done from within PhotoLab. Just point the file manager from within PhotoLab to the location of your images on your hard drive.
I’m not a native speaker, so I probably didn’t make it very clear what I meant. I use an online translator (deepl.com) now, so i hope you understand me better.
I don’t want to export the photos I edited in Lightroom with the Lightroom edits. I have actually deleted Lightroom completely in the meantime and am starting from scratch with PhotoLab.
I have a hard drive just with photos in both jpg and various RAW formats. The photos are sorted in main folders by year and then divided into subfolders by date. All photos are processed in PhotoLab ready for export.
In Lightroom I was able to select all photos from all years at the same time and also export all photos at the same time.
In PhotoLab, however, I seem to have to select each subfolder individually to export the photos it contains. With about 1,000 subfolders in 24 years this is quite tedious.
So my question is whether it is possible in Photolab to select several or preferably all folders at the same time in order to export the photos they contain in one go or do I really have to export each individual subfolder separately.
Unfortunately that is a limitation. Although you could try adding the contents of each folder to a single project. But, with the numbers you are talking about, that could be just as difficult to manage.
Thanks Joanna,
i feared that answer…but thank you very much for your quick answer again.
I think i order the 7-day-trial of lightroom then, batch export all my fotos with a generic processing recipe, cancel the lightroom plan and after that i process and export new photos in PhotoLab. This seems to be the easiest way.
I am puzzled as to why you think you need to export from Lightroom. If you are happy to revert to the original files, why can you not simply access the original images in their original folders?
I don’t use Lightroom, but, presumably it must only reference the original files as it is non-destructive?
I have to agree with Joanna. If you export your files from Lightroom. It will be done in either Adobe DNG or TIFF. If DxO does not recognise the camera in the Adobe DNG then you will not be able to work on it.
You are much better off working with the original file. i.e. working from scratch as Joanna has said.
Well, you are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. All i want in the end is to have (besides the original files) my photos ALSO in 4 Mpix-jpg files to be small enough to upload them as a completely emergency backup to a webspace in case my house burns down, floods, there is a ransomware attack, act of war or whatever you can imagine. Better a semigood picture of my wedding or my kids than no photo at all. I don’t want to work with them. For this i have a triple backup strategy here in my home with the original files that i can develop in PhotoLab.
And all i’m looking for is a very convenient way to export all my photos regardless of age/quality/RAW or jpeg/DSLR, Compact camera or mobile phone to this said format. Quality is secondary. Even extracting the embedded jpgs in the RAW files would be sufficient.
And at the moment it seems to be the easiest way to do that with a batch export in lightroom, because there i can select all photos at once. In PhotoLab i can select only folderwise, which is pretty cumbersome with around 1.000 folders.
Your reasons for wanting backups is sensible, and I expect most who value their image collections back their libraries up redundantly. But I don’t know that it’s any better to back them up to web-based storage, which is susceptible to the same acts of God that can destroy local storage options and requires internet access. You could just as easily acquire solid state storage and copy paste your files all in one go. It will take time, but so will uploading that many files to some cloud storage. Do it twice and keep copies in different locations.
@Joanna With Lightroom the original files are imported to a catalogue. But I think you already know that. I have never tried to export a batch of files, so I do not know whether that will work in Lightroom. Others might be able to enlighten us. I have only ever exported single files with no problem. Being able to export to any required directory.
Only occasionally use Adobe’s software nowadays. I only keep it going as DxO’s pricing is only just cheaper then Adobe’s and I find photoshop usually useful on occasions.
@Chris If you still have Lightroom on your system or able to put it back on your system in the export dialogue that opens, you can send your files directly to DxO as tiffs or JPEG’s. I wonder if that helps.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
13
Isn’t the main problem in Photoware that it lacks a way to see and handle all pictures at the same time in a simple way? Capture One have no problem with that or to see all pictures under a main folder - even the ones in subfolders. I don’t know why they have imposed such a restriction. They have it all in the database but have decided not to use it.
Maybe to avoid slowness problems with old material configurations.
But I agree that DXO should have left the choice with a parameter to be validated or not.
@Stenis In the case of PhotoLab the database is a backend storage receptacle, potentially useful for searching but then only if DxPL manages to maintain it accurately!?
PhotoLab is principally driven by the “here and now”, i.e. by the users exploration of their images on disk and then comparing what it discovers with what, if anything, it already has for that image/directory in the database.
Sadly “Unwanted VCs” and images in the database being “lost” if a user attempts to replace a disk volume with a new one etc. being the potential downsides of the current design from time to time.
The data may be there but it is not the focus of attention for PhotoLab, it is the users browsing of image directories that is!
Hence PhotoLab browses directories but doesn’t allow the user to browse the database, except via searches!
Its approach means that as an image viewer/browser PhotoLab is useless because its speed is slowed down by the automatic image import function which automatically adds every image directory browsed to the database and then renders it for display but that database is not accessible as an entity in its own right.
In some circumstances this a lose lose scenario.
When I thought that there was some chance of DxO listening to suggestions I “designed” an extension to the current GUI which would allow users to browse and import or not and render or not and show when a DOP was present or when a DB entry was present.
However, that was still directory oriented and your requirements are DB oriented, both could be made to work but we can’t even get DxO to provide a mechanism to control the “Unwanted VC” scenario let alone something as ambitious as you or I are suggesting.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
16
No directories can be virtual as they are in PhotoMechanic and even Capture One.
When I index I am allowed to index not just on directory at the time but alla of if underneath my topdirectory but Photolab unlike PM Plus or C1 cannot display even the pictures in subdirectories and that is the main problem.
That said I like that Photolab has live connection to the folders because unlike both Lightroom and Capture One it references the files in the OS-directories and not just the database and linked previews. Just of that reason both PM Plus and iMatch can integrate so good with Photolab when opening a selection in PM Plus directly in Photolab. Yes that fact makes Photolab not so fast at scrolling but that is not a problem for me or others working like me since PM Plus solves that so much better than anything else.
SQL Lite doesn´t seem to have any built in controls for preserving the data integrity which from time to time creates a lot of orphanss in various tables (yes I tried to find that support in the database). If it had supported cascading updates and deletes we should not need to have problems like that.
Hence PhotoLab browses directories but doesn’t allow the user to browse the database, except via searches!
Photolab does only support browsing directories one at the time as I said already. Searches are also too complicated. No help with drop down menues e.t.c. before you actually have used a search word earlier. I like though that PL tells me where it found the search hits.
I just reindexed all my pictures with Photolab
I have made that sort of a routine when I feel it might be out of synch. It is OK as long as I dont have built up a lot of Projects or External Searches because when you delete a database and create a new one all of that disappears.
@Stenis SQLite is the basis of nearly all the photo editors and viewers and DAMs, including IMatch, that use a database at all, only ACDSee is different and that uses a DBase derivative, I believe.
If PhotoLab DB is more unreliable than any other product then that is the fault of DxO, not of SQLite, I am afraid.
You know that I know that, given the number of times I have issued a warning about it.
I am hoping to publish a copy of my Count program soon and I am expecting you to sign up for a copy.
1 Like
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
18
The database management system is one thing and the database design itself another and the application logics is the third and the forth factor is what the users are doing with that.
It is only the first all these factors that all these softwares have in common.
Thanks for the offer
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
19
More than 10 years ago I did almost the same. I did not delete my old Lightroom DB but I never exported the content before refining it with Photolab since I was not satisfied at all then with how Lightroom handled Sony ARW RAW. I started to do it all again with Optics Pro/Photolab - because I knew nothing else to do.
It was a mistake of you to delete the Lightroom database. Why did you do that before you exported that content into JPEG-files - that is if you already had developed them there.
You could both have exported them in 100% JPEG full size and 4K and then polished them with for example Topaz Photo AI that can handle even JPEG-files (unlike Photolab 8 can). I have done so with very good results with old JPEG-master files (not originally RAW). Sorry to say Photolab is almost useless for jobs like that. Jobs that Topaz Photo AI 3 often can make wonders with.
That way you only had needed to batch process it all with Topaz to get on trac again with those files instead of doing it alla again in Photolab.
In fact, I have been batching many thousands of old JPEG-originals the last weeks with Topaz and am surprised how good it looks. I have no intention to do anything at all extra with those files in Photolab anymore and that is a great relief can I tell you. Yes, Topaz is not for free but since I value my time and my peace of mind I think that money was maybe the best I have spent on photo software for a long time.
Photolab is best for RAW I think but it is almost useless for denoising and sharpening all my repro photographed old analog color slides. Topaz is so far the only software I have seen that can do that job Photolab can´t fix with my old analog pictures.
