Please don't laugh. This is a legitimate question.

I do all of my organizing and some quick/basic PP in Lightroom v4.1 on a Macbook Pro, and I shoot RAW+S2 JPEG from my 5D3 (trying to get an Eye-fi card working so I can send JPEGs to my iPhone immediately) and highest JPEG settings on all of my point and shoots. I don't let my wife use my Macbook Pro.

My wife does all her Facebooking and emailing and everything else with pictures in iPhoto '11 v9.3 on our Mac Pro. This also serves as one of my Lightroom catalog and image file backup locations. I also do have Lightroom installed on the Mac Pro. My wife refuses to learn Lightroom and prefers all the integration of iPhoto with the Mac OS. Fine, some battles aren't worth fighting.

To date, I've simply been importing only JPEGs into iPhoto from my Lightroom backup location on my Mac Pro for my wife to do her thing with. My understanding is that any changes I make in Lightroom to these pictures are not reflected in these JPEGs until I export them as JPEGs from Lightroom because (1) I am either actually editing the RAW file in Lightroom or (2) I am editing a JPEG from a point and shoot and the changes are stored in the catalog until I actually export that particular image.

So, my question(s) is (are), for iPhoto usage, primarily for web posting and up to 5x7 (with a rare 8x10), what JPEG export settings should I use in Lightroom v4.1? What quality setting? Should I limit the file size, and if so to what size? Should I re-size, and if so to what size? What resolution should I set them at in pixels per inch? This way any editing I do in Lightroom is reflected in iPhoto for my wife, once my export and import process is complete.

I have done some research on the web, for best JPEG settings for up to 8x10 prints, but I'd like your thoughts and opinions please, especially if you have a similar process.

Thanks in advance!!!

Are you and your wife both storing your image files on your MacPro's bot drive? Or do you have an external drive attached that you use for data storage?

This is an important question, and fundamental. If you start storing large volumes of images on your boot drive, bad things will come your way, sooner or later.


What I think of as minimal for a high quality 8x 10 image would 2400 x 30000 pixels or roughly 7 Mpxls.

On my Macbook pro pics are on a separate partition than my boot partition but on the same physical drive. These are regularly backed up via Time Machines to a USB drive and also regularly synchronized with a 2nd USB hard drive. So, I have 3 copies of the pictures there.

On my Mac Pro my Lightroom backup pics are stored on a separate physical drive than by boot drive. Our iPhoto pics are on yet another physical drive. There are 4 physical drives in my Mac Pro. Again here, regular Time Machine backups via a USB drive and I also regularly synchronize my pics and other data to yet another USB drive. So here I have 3 copies of the iPhoto pics and another 3 copies of my Lightroom pics for my Mac Pro.

So total of 6 copies of my Lightroom pics across 6 separate drives, and our iPhoto pics are across 3 separate drives, with no pictures on a boot partition, anywhere. I'm an IT Infrastructure Manager for a large healthcare company, trust me when I say I know a thing or two about storing large amounts of data, across multiple platforms.

Thank you for the 2400x3000 input!

I did not mean to sound critical, but I have seen so many folks with all of their Lightroom catalogs and image files loading onto their boot drives, that I always ask. I know you understand why I ask now.

The usual answer for file size - 300 pixels per linear inch of image length - is how I came up with 2400 x 3000. You can go as low as 180-200 ppi and still have a fine image ( 1600 x 2000 pixels, just not quite as fine as 300ppi ). Each image pixel will be represented by 4-10 dots of ink on paper from an ink jet printer.

You have multiple choices when exporting your pictures from Lightroom. The great thing about Lightroom is you can try multiple options in order to find the one that works best for you.

One option I use quite often is to set the JPEG quality to 85 or 90 and then reduce the file size to 8 inches along the longest edge of the photo. This creates a file size around 2 MB from the Canon 5D raw image.

If your wife is only posting images to Facebook and e-mailing them then you may want to consider something that creates an even smaller file size for ease of upload.

In this case you can reduce the file size significantly by changing the settings to 1024 pixels along the long edge and reducing the resolution to 72 PPI. This will give you an image that looks good on computer screens But will not be great for printing, or much of anything else.

You will still have your original RAW image in Lightroom if you need to make changes. Once you get a format that works for you and your wife, make sure you create a custom export preset in Lightroom to help you automate the process.

Check here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality for some interesting empirical studies regarding Lightroom export quality settings. The results are eye-opening, and suggest that at higher settings, all you are getting his bigger files, but not necessarily better ones.

Originally Posted by pathfinder Are you and your wife both storing your image files on your MacPro's bot drive? Or do you have an external drive attached that you use for data storage? ...If you start storing large volumes of images on your boot drive, bad things will come your way, sooner or later.

This is simply not true in the general case. If you have enough disk space, it's not a problem. Any voodoo about Photoshop scratch disks does not apply to Lightroom, and in general there's way too much superstition for this to be reasonable.

If you fill any drive it will get slow. But there's no reason to partition the boot drive on a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro or employ any other kinds of rules around what can be stored where, so long as you don't let the drive fill up (> 75% full starts to slow on a spinning disk, but SSDs you can fill a bit more).

Originally Posted by MarkR Check here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality for some interesting empirical studies regarding Lightroom export quality settings. The results are eye-opening, and suggest that at higher settings, all you are getting his bigger files, but not necessarily better ones.

Mark, this was a very interesting article - Thanks for sharing!

Originally Posted by CatOne This is simply not true in the general case. If you have enough disk space, it's not a problem. Any voodoo about Photoshop scratch disks does not apply to Lightroom, and in general there's way too much superstition for this to be reasonable. If you fill any drive it will get slow. But there's no reason to partition the boot drive on a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro or employ any other kinds of rules around what can be stored where, so long as you don't let the drive fill up (> 75% full starts to slow on a spinning disk, but SSDs you can fill a bit more).

Cat I beg to disagree, respectfully.


Drive space is the issue though isn't it? If one starts with a 256 Gb SSD boot drive ( which is how all my Macs are configured these days) , it does not take very much in the way of catalogs and preview files to fill your SSD to the brim.....

My point was that image files and catalog and image previews do not belong on your boot drive, but on spinning external drives in the best of all possible worlds. I was not suggesting anything about multiple partitions.

Thank you all for your help!