Lightroom users, catalogues question

treeman

treeman

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In the few years I've been using LR, I create a new catalogue per year, and currently my fourth catalogue for 2012, but I read somewhere it's better to create more, but smaller catalogues, as this will help performance speed.
So what do you do?
 
I currently have almost 100,000 images in my catalogue. I moved it on to my SSD and it's stll VERY quick - However I do think I should have created smaller annual ones.

Might actually still look at that. Certainly saves time when backing up! I don't think you need to go any smaller.

Regards
Jim
 
Apart from the obvious reasons such as private work vs. commercial work, I thought the consensus was to have just a single catalogue? To maintain an annual grouping of images, a smart collection based on the year would gather together those images automatically. Likewise any other groupings, such as family, landscape, holidays, etc. can be achieved with smart collections based on keywords.

Multiple catalogues would not lead to faster performance, just a slowdown in workflow during day-to-day usage.

Anthony.
 
Last edited:
treeman said:
In the few years I've been using LR, I create a new catalogue per year, and currently my fourth catalogue for 2012, but I read somewhere it's better to create more, but smaller catalogues, as this will help performance speed.
So what do you do?
Click to expand...

That's what I used to do with my old computer and it definitely ran much faster.

The problem comes when you are searching for images and have forgotten which year you took them.:'(

I resolved this by building a fast computer and putting the entire catalogue (115,000 photos) on the main SSD.
 
I might leave mine as it is then :) Certainly very fast on the SSD - Backups do take some time though as the file is about 20Gb!
 
I've Just left mine as it is...
Running window's 7 it seems quick enough for fast editing and exporting.
I also back up my Older folders to an external drive to save space
 
jaketrask12 said:
I've Just left mine as it is...
Running window's 7 it seems quick enough for fast editing and exporting.
I also back up my Older folders to an external drive to save space
Click to expand...

Not sure I understand why "backing up" would save space?

Backups take up additional space on your drives by having spare copies.

If you move to one external drive(which was how I read your post) that is not a backup - your data is at serious risk of loss if sorry WHEN that drive develops a fault. You should have the data on 2 drives as an absolute minimum.

Do you also backup the Lr catalogue too?
 
I used to have multiple catalogues, however I am in the process of merging them together as its easier to manage publish collections/portfolios etc when all the images are in one catalogue.

With regards to back ups, I keep a copy of all images I import to Lightroom on 2 backup drives, and anything that I haven't used or sold after a year gets removed from the catalogue, on the basis that if I haven't used it, I'm not going to go back to it (but if I need to I can).
 
I'm lazy so I just went with one catalogue and I've made do.

I have all my images on linked external drives and then those drives are duplicated as spares. I see it as storage costs knack-all and if I write a book about being an elite fishing photographer (:lol:) then I have some material ;)
 
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