How should I set up Lightroom 5 with two external drives, an SD card, and a small MacBook Air SSD?

Question

I’m trying to organize my photo workflow in Lightroom 5 on a MacBook Air with only 128GB of internal storage. I currently have photos spread across two external drives, and I also have new shoots on an SD card to import.

My goals are:
- keep my original image files on external storage
- have some redundancy/backups
- use Lightroom to manage everything in one catalog
- be able to edit while away from the external drives if possible

Should I import photos from both external drives into one Lightroom catalog, or make both drives contain the same image library first and then import from one of them? For new shoots, what is the best workflow from SD card to Lightroom?

Also, do both external drives need to be connected all the time, and can I still work on images from my laptop when the drives are disconnected?

user4892 · Accepted Answer

It is unclear if your external hard drives have the same sets of data, or different. I am assuming different data in my answer. If they are the same you can exclude steps 7-10.

Workflow Steps:

Download the images from the SD memory card to your laptop.
Move the newly downloaded images to one of the external hard drives.
Connect the first external hard drive to your laptop, and turn on Lightroom.
Build a new catalog in Lightroom with all of the images from the first hard drive using the import functionality of Lightroom. I would pay close attention to what size previews are being generated as a default, and instead use the next step for this.
Create Smart Previews of images on the first external hard drive as deemed necessary.
Disconnect the first external hard drive.
Connect the second external hard drive to your laptop, and turn on Lightroom.
Import the images from the second external hard drive to the same catalog created above. I would pay close attention to what size previews are being generated as a default, and instead use the next step for this.
Create Smart Previews of images on the second external hard drive as deemed necessary.
Disconnect the second external hard drive.
When you have new images to import, connect whichever external hard drive you wish and download the images to them. You can optionally import to lightroom simultaneously or as a separate step. Same as for Smart Previews.

Notes:

You do not need both external hard drives attached at the same time unless you want to be looking at the originals of files that are located on each one, at the same time essentially.
When considering backup, having only a single copy of each picture on one external hard drive is certainly NOT a backup. That is a single point of failure and you almost certainly will incur that at some point. I would suggest off site backup using cloud storage or at a very minimum a second hard drive that is used to store a second copy(not just the original). A backup strategy also must consider accidental deletion or corruption of files, which I don't see as part of a single external hard drive strategy.
Your system has no redundancy unless you do in fact have two copies of each image on separate external hard drives.
Smart Previews in LightRoom 5 were essentially developed exactly for your use case, or a very similar one where a professional photographer is on the road and making edits - but syncs back to a home server or similar once done traveling. I would advise you strongly to utilize this very powerful tool.