Improving library management needs to be a priority. I've used the camera for just a couple of days and Lytro.lytrolib is already over 5GB and will need to be moved elsewhere within a month. I assume I can manually rename and move the library (creating a new one for current photos), but it would be far better if there was a way to create multiple libraries within the app. 

Files add up fast. It should be a simple change in the code to give the user an option to direct the app to look in another directory for the library. 

In the long run, I agree that multiple library support would be best.

There should also be a way to move a subset of the Lytro images to an external drive or DVD and also keep track of them on the computer drive with a thumbnail. The images are quite big.

My laptop has an SSD, so space is precious. I had a spare small external drive with some space and decided to move the Lytro.lytrolib folder (which I found in my pictures folder on my Mac) over to it, copying it. I had a system folder on this external, connected by firewire. And I put the Lytro.lytrolib in the picture folder over there. Then I double clicked on it, which launched the application on my laptop and from there I built the collection. I am guessing that as long as you always have that external mounted when you do stuff, it will continue to point there with the application. Not sure if the designer planned it, but she or he probably did. Cheers. Richard

I too have a Mac Book Air with an SSD. It's very fast but only 256gb. The ability to store on external drives is essential. Perhaps better use of Finder could be incorporated - like many other image processing programs.

I also have very limited space on my laptop and am storing all my traditional photos on an external drive. Addressing that issue wil definitely be a priority for me withing a month or two at the latest.  Will try Richard Lund's suggestion if I get desperate.  Multiple libraries would be a great option!

This is definitely a big limitation for using this camera.  A user should be able to select a location for the library file.  As others have said, these are large files and grow very quickly.  It should be trivial to add a library location setting is a preferences screen.  Doent need a lot of file management in the first rev-multiple libraries could wait.    Watching file space disappear in 5GB chunks on my OS drive will limit the amount I will play with this camera.

If you have an existing Lytro library and want to move it, you can create a symlink to its new location.  For example, if you had the default library in ~/Pictures/Lytro.lytrolib and moved it to /Volumes/some_disk/photos/Lytro.lytrolib, you could run this command in Terminal and the Lytro application would use the moved library without skipping a beat: ln -s /Volumes/some_disk/photos/Lytro.lytrolib ~/Pictures/Lytro.lytrolib . 

Richard's approach also seems great.

it's really hard to believe that Lytro would ship a product with this kind of deficiency. 

Ian, of course my solution isn't officially supported!  That's why I don't have a grey "Lytro Support" label below my name. =)  Anyway, it's dead simple to undo.

I am an amateur photographer.  I shoot everything from landscapes to portraits to friend's weddings.  Over time I have accumulated thousands of images.  It only took one crash to learn about backing up files.  I have many hard drives and multiple back-ups of all of my work.  All of my files are sorted chronologically *and* by topic.  In this manner, I can back up to as many locations as I want. 

I've now had my Lytro for a week and see a lot of potential for it's practical as well as artistic uses.  One of these is to use it as a supplemental tool when shooting a wedding as I will be doing in two weeks.  As I experiment, I hope to find that it may offer me the possibility of taking a group shot at a table and then later, on my laptop, creating jpegs with individuals at different focal points.  In theory, I could go back and do this and other manipulations at sometime in the future.

I now and have discovered what so many others have found.  There is no reliable way to back up and recover photos images taken by the Lytro.  I will try the solution suggested by Richard Lund but as is stated, that is only a work-around and it sounds like there may be pitfalls when Lytro upgrades the software.  I have a Macbook Pro with a good sized hard drive, but it can fill up fairly quickly with these large file size shots and I feel very uncomfortable with the very limited saving options offered by this software.

Until such time as I have the ability to save individual files to multiple specific directories in the Lytro's native format, this camera can only be designated as a toy, not a tool.  Please, please fix this limitation as quickly as possible because I do indeed see a lot of potential here!

Marc

I agree, this is the biggest limitation of this camera/software, and since we have no other way to mange the picture created by the Lytro camera, this is a big big problem.

When a future Lytro Desktop version supports external library folder locations, I plan to move my library to a dedicated external flash drive and save laptop space too.

• "We have a pretty good workaround for storing your Library elsewhere.  It involves using a symbolic link.

  Please see the following KB."

Or my post in this thread from 2 months before the KB was posted that uses the same symlink approach. (-:

The USB/fire-wire connection can get bumped/pulled loose inadvertently and drop the drive offline. This has happened to me a number of times with my Segate drives, which I use for backup and secondary storage.

As such that could corrupt a Lytro library if it was in-use at the time.

the symlink solution is apparently no longer the solution per this link - http://support.lytro.com/entries/21467292-using-lytro-library-in-a-...

however the link on that page to the now "more elegant solution" is broken - any suggestions?

Brent, try this: http://support.lytro.com/entries/22526957-lytro-library-management-... <- hope this will show you what you need.

I do not like using a library on an external drive -  but I have used a library on a NAS device and it worked fine for me.. provided your network is fast and stable ;)))

These photos should be fungible; I should be able to store them where and how I please, no?  I'm sort of stunned that they are not and that people have been raising this issue for 7 months or so.  What's the deal?  Am I mistaken?  ...please let me be mistaken.