LR Catalog Question

du8die

I just got my hands on Lightroom, and it's improved my efficiency tremendously already. I have a quick question for all the seasoned vets out there.

Do you use one massive catalog and organize your folders into events, or do you use one catalog per event? Not sure which way to go on this one, and looking for some insight.

Thanks
d8

pyry

One catalog. You can sort everything via keywords, folders and collections.

jfriend

du8die wrote:

I just got my hands on Lightroom, and it's improved my efficiency tremendously already. I have a quick question for all the seasoned vets out there.

Do you use one massive catalog and organize your folders into events, or do you use one catalog per event? Not sure which way to go on this one, and looking for some insight.

Thanks
d8

I use one catalog for everything and will continue to do so until I find out that performance is hurting because of the size. I currently have 85,000 photos in my catalog.

If you use multiple catalogs, then you can't do searches, collections, keywording, browsing, etc... across catalogs. You'd have to find the right catalog first, open it, then do your operation in that catalog. Multiple catalogs also creates the need to regularly run a backup operation for each catalog.

colourbox

The only reason I can think of to have multiple permanent catalogs is if you're the type who shoots an event and once the event processing and sales are done, you never have to go back to it and never have to look up those photos again. In that case, having one big catalog would carry around a lot of clutter.

But I keep one big catalog because I want to use previously shot images in future projects. So I want to find and collect any previously shot image in a couple of clicks.

I do occasionally make another catalog when I want to do a lot of experimenting and I don't want to endanger the main catalog. But if the experiments are a success I'll sync them back into the main catalog.

Jzazzi

I second the thoughts about carrying baggage from older shoots. Catalogs take up disc space, especially thumbnails. I don't have this problem with 5,000 photos, but I imagine a wedding photographer might have issues with hundreds of thousands. One way to limit thumbnail disc-suck is to toss previews after 30 days by selecting this option in the preferences.

One large catalog has some advantages though. If you move photos onto external storage for archival and cannot remember which hard discs have what photos, the catalog will remember for you. Plus being able to search, use collections, and the other tricks mentioned above.

I think if a catalog is bogging down from becoming too large then you must have too many photos for one hard disc anyways, and you'll be putting them onto external storage. Maybe one catalog per storage device. My co-worker likes to divide all his photos by year, so maybe one catalog per year might work for some.

Oh! One last thing. You cannot have simultanious operations (export, move, rename, etc) in two different catalogs. So multitasking is very limited if you need to work from two different catalogs. To get around this you could use two computers, though not everyone has that option.

-Justin

Pittspilot

du8die wrote:

I just got my hands on Lightroom, and it's improved my efficiency tremendously already. I have a quick question for all the seasoned vets out there.

Do you use one massive catalog and organize your folders into events, or do you use one catalog per event? Not sure which way to go on this one, and looking for some insight.

Thanks
d8

Another vote for a single catalog. The only way to go in my view....