DragonCon Photography Team Computer Setup

As a volunteer at DragonCon one of my current responsibilities is getting the computers setup for use by the photographers and the librarians. This year I had to re-learn a lot of what worked so well last year as my notes were not complete, so I decided to write them up more thoroughly this year and post them hear so that I will not loose them.

At the 2014 DragonCon we used a total of 5 computers, 3 for the photographers to drop off photographs at and 2 for the librarians to use for key wording. The computers were running Windows 7 and required a lot of Windows updates and video driver updates before they were ready to use, luckily the internet connection at the show was fairly fast on Thursday afternoon when I was setting them up.

We call the 2 librarian computers A and B; each computer has 2 external hard drives which we call the Piles, a primary drive and a backup drive. The primary drive on each library computer is shared on the network as Pile A and Pile B.

I don’t know a lot about Windows networking, so I winged it and believe I set up a Windows home network with file sharing turned on. I wasted a lot of time before I figured out that all 5 computers had the same network name so they could not share files, giving each computer a unique name fixed all of the sharing issues I was having.

On the desktop of each computer I made a shortcut to the shared Pile A and Pile B folders so that the photographers could easily find the correct place to copy their pictures to. At this point I was done with the 3 photographers computers, by the end of the show photographers had installed Infranview and other tools to help them edit and cull their photos.

On the librarian computer we install the latest version of Adobe Lightroom and use it in the 30-day trial mode. Next up is importing the keyword list provided by the show into Lightroom, this gives us a controlled vocabulary for keywording making pictures easy to find later on.

Then in Lightroom install the latest version of Jeffrey Friedl’s Folder Watch Plugin, this is the tool that automatically imports any new pictures found in watched folders into Lightroom, it is really amazing how quickly and reliably this works.

Then we use the Windows Sync Toy and Windows Task Manager to keep the primary and secondary drives in sync so that at the end of the show we can turn over the primary A and B drives to the show and keep the backup A and B drives for the photography team’s use.

Here is my updated checklist:

1. Verify that each computer has a unique network name/id
2. Run Windows Update and install all updates
3. Update video card drivers if they are separate from Windows Update
4. Verify that all computers are using the same type of networking so they can see each other, in Windows 7 a homegroup network is easiest http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/start-here-to-set-up-a-home-network-in-windows-7
5. External Drives
   1. Attach the primary and backup drives to the librarian computers
   2. Format and name the external drives and name them
      1. Pile A
      2. Pile A Back
      3. iPile B
      4. iv. Pile B Back
   3. On the Pile A drive make new directories named Pile A and Lightroom A
   4. On the Pile B drive make new directories named Pile B and Lightroom B
6. Sync’ing
   1. Here is a great article that walks through setting up sync’ing
      http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-consultant/configure-automated-backups-using-synctoy-and-windows-7s-scheduled-task/
   2. Install the latest version of Sync Toy
      1. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155
   3. Set up a New Folder Pair in Sync Toy to keep the primary and backup drives in sync, use Echo so that changes to the primary drive are copied to the backup drive but not from the backup to primary
   4. Use Windows Task Manager to run Sync Toy every 10 minutes
   5. Verify at least once a day that the sync’ing is occurring successfully, but the primary and backup drive should have the same number of files in the Pile directories
7. Lightroom
   1. Install the latest version of Lightroom and choose the 30-day version when launching it
   2. Preferences – “Lightroom > Preferences”
      1. General
         1. Uncheck “Automatically check for updates”
         2. Unchesk “Show splash screen during startup”
         3. Choose the correct DragonCon default library
         4. Uncheck the “Select the “Current/Previous Import””
         5. Turn off all completion sounds
   3. Remove all of the modules except for Library and Develop. Right-click the top toolbar and uncheck the unneeded modules.
   4. Then import keywords, “Metadata > Import Keywords”. Verify that the full keyword list is available in the “Keyword List” panel. More information about keywording in Lightroom is available at http://adobe.ly/148Icbo
   5. Setup Jeffrey Friedl’s Folder Watch Plugin
      1. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/folder-watch
      2. Lightroom “File > Plug-in Manager”
         1. Choose “jf Folder Watch”
         2. Choose the parent folder on the Pile
            1. Defaults are good with the following exceptions (If desired “Apply meta data preset, covered elsewhere)
      3. Choose “Watch”
      4. Choose “Restart on Launch”
      5. Choose “Show Splash on Launch”
   6. f. Then create a new library named “dragoncon-2014-pile-a” or “dragoncon-2014-pile-b” and save it into the “lightroom a” or “lightroom b” folder on the attached primary external drive
8. Testing
   1. Use a non-librarian computer to drop a couple of pictures into Pile A and Pile B
      1. Verify these pictures appear in Lightroom on the expected librarian computer
      2. After a period of time verify that the pictures and updated Lightroom library appear on the backup drives
   2. At least once a day check the primary and secondary drives to verify that they are in sync

We are always looking for better ways to handle the 30,000 plus pictures we collect at DragonCon, if you have any big ideas please let me know.