Should I make ONE MASSIVE Lightroom Catalog or Many? Photography Question 

How do you set up your Lightroom Catalog? Is it one MASSIVE one with all your photos or do you have multiple?

Could you please make an Updated version of this? Please!

Print everything

I think i've changed my mind and decided to go with one MASSIVE catalog that has all my files in one place. But unlike my old catalog at home, this one will be broken down into folders that are more organized than before.

One giant catalog because I like it simple and lazy .

Jared, while I realize it's more than 2 years since you made this vid, it's completely relevant for me as I'm literally just starting with Lightroom to edit and manage photos. My current process is storage by year, then the month, then by client/project. It has worked for me for many years but I want to make sure that this is the best way to proceed and make use of tools available in LR. Hate to see you go through this much agony but it absolutely helps the rest of us as well as the great advice your subscribers have provided in the comments. Thanks as always! Any updates on this will be appreciated.

I have been using LIghtroom from about the it was first released, and my file structure is, I have a different catalog for each year. In each catalog I break it up by month. Within each month I have directories for each shoot for that month by the name of what/who I shot. I have three network connected multi drive units; one HP MediaSmart Server and two Drobo storage units. I back up to each of these units. I have never had a problem with this system.

Each project gets its own catalogue within the photo folder, that way i can access just the photos i need without having to filter through all the other ones, and bring it with me on my portable hdd. when the project is complete I copy the LRCAT folder to my backup drives. not sure if this is best practice, but so far has been working for me

I am an IT guy and I find the best way is by year then with a subfolder with month and day and a short description. You can make another folder for month, but I do not have that many photos. Then I use metadata to organize my photos. I have over 36,000 photos. One of my Metadata’s top levels is events. One event is Birthdays then I have a list that whose birthday and date it was. I find I can find photos faster this way. Since I am around 36,000 photos a I have an internal 1TB drive which is plenty big enough. This drive is set as my OneDrive folder and as soon as I add or change a file it's uploaded to the cloud. I have found that OneDrive is cheapest way to go. You can buy it around Christmas for around $90 for the year. You get 5 accounts each with 1TB of cloud space and 5 installs of Office Pro for each account. So that’s a total of 5TB and 25 Office installs (for both Windows and IOS). I also back my internal drive to a 1TB external drive. I only had Lightroom for about 3 years. So, I am still catching up on the Metadata of my older photos, which go back to 1998. The old photos where shot with a Kodak DC40 digital camera.

I have one giant catalog over about seven years--hundreds of thousands of photos. I think I am going to start a new catalog for each year. Maybe. I think. Maybe.

I'm a software developer, so I know a little bit about this. It doesn't really slow it down because it's a database. It does help to have sub-folders such as years or topics, don't just put everything in one folder. Databases work by using tables, which can be thought of like chapters in a book. When something is needed, it can jump right to that chapter instead of looking at each page for the item.

I like this little look into how Jared thinks these things through. I'm only using Lightroom CC right now, so everything is online in one big folder. I'm going to suffer down the road aren't I...

Have you considered getting a 10tb Lightroom CC subscription? I’m a big fan of Lightroom CC. My whole library is small enough for the 1tb plan, and it works so well. I can find any photo from Lightroom CC on my phone extremely fast. Especially with how quickly you can scroll through them on the phone or iPad. So much faster than looking for a folder, as all the images are cached for fast scrolling. And the search is amazing. It’s like searching for photos on Google, except all the search results are my own photos. I don’t even have Lightroom Classic installed anymore. To me it’s already history.

I used to create a new catalog every month. I'm now planning to move all of that into one catalog. Not exactly sure how I'm going to do that yet. That's why I'm watching videos like this one and many others.

It's 2022 and I'm pondering this question. I used Bridge for my organization but now that I have nearly twenty years of folders, multiple external hard drives, one rescued hard drive that's totally messed up, old film scan files, and oh yeah - those boxes of CDs from old client work, I've FINALLY decided to work with LightRoom. A fresh start lol. I think I'm gonna leave all that old stuff where it is, and create a catalog going forward. As I go through my old system I can add stuff I think is relevant. Everything else can stay where it is.

Jared, First off, I would like to say I am a huge fan and have been watching your videos for years! Thank you for all that you do for the photography community! Now, I know this is 4 years old, but I'm currently going through this dilemma myself and after a lot of thinking, reading, watching, and learning, I have come up with the following solution. My workflow is going to be as follows: 1. Shoot 2. Copy raw files from SD or XQD over to my SSD working drive & my Data drive (8tb HDD) 3. Do my edits on my working SSD drive with its own catalog 4. Export files for client and place on the cloud 5. At the end of a year or maybe 6 months post shoot, move my working files (inside of lightroom) to my HDD which should bring over the edits as well. 6. My data drive will be backed up via the cloud automatically live or via a schedule. My end result would be 2 total catalogs (older photos and edits from older shoots that I am less likely to reference) and my working catalog that should stay somewhat small and uncluttered... Does that sound like it makes sense or do you see any flaws in that workflow?

Put it in one and then selected and export it to new catalogs as the need proves itself. Use tagging and collections for your organizing w/in LR, regardless how you structure your folders by year etc.

Think of Lightroom as a database program with Adobe Camera Raw built in. The physical folder structure of the files is transparent. You can organise within Lightroom using Collections. The beauty of this is that you can have different collections, i.e. private and professional, which may sometimes have the same photo but there is only ever one copy physically stored. Typically for me, the same photo would be in a "competition" collection, a "travel" collection, a "magazine" collection. My photo collection of c.80k is simply organised by date - 2018/08/10. It takes up about 3.5TB.

I don't appreciate having my time being spent watching someone bumble around their thoughts and words on camera. The creator edits the video before coming out, but leaves in all the nonsense that could have been chopped to make this a simple and cohesive video. I couldn't get through this one, but thanks for the effort.

It's as if you are inside my head. So glad I found this video.

Personal projects: 1 catalog per year. Clients get their own catalog and if they become long-term customers then I divide the catalog for each year. Photos and Videos are stored in a similar manner, but drilled down further with sub folders titled by Year-Month-Day-Project-Name and sub folders for Raw Photos, Original Videos and Live Work.

I used to have a giant catalog, then realised that they run faster when creating a new catalog for a new project or shoot. Also works well for redundancy and backing up in case it goes corrupt.

One massive db...separated into sub folders for years which have further broken down into subfolders for months...I learnt the hard way...when things go pear shaped it is much easier repairing one database than many. Dont forget to Keep backup copies of the original photos...just in case the hard drive borks.

One catalog and then I tag the images during import. The filter part of Lightroom is great in respect to tags and I haven't noticed a slow down at all due to catalog size.

I use two different catalogs in Lightroom. One for all digital photos I made with a digital camera (started in 2000) and another catalog for all scans from older photos (1987-2000). The digital photo catalog has almost 60.000 photos and I had never any problems with speed. The photos are sorted by year folder. So the first is 2000, the last 2018. Then, in each year-folder, I use the code year-month-day followed with a very short description of the subject of the shoot. This system works very good and I love it. The real sorting comes in Lightroom in the collections and collection-sets. There I can sort the photos by subject, location or whatever. Lightroom has many tricks for sorting and finding photos (colors, stars, metadata, etc). So, the best for me is working with one big catalog with all my digital photos. The catalog for my scanned photos is much smaller. Maybe I will merge my two catalogs together in the future, but for now, I am very happy with my two separate catalogs.

I make a catalog for each year. And one for business and one for personal. I don't want to have to copy one huge massive catalog when backing up. I can just backup the most recent year's catalog and previews each week. My older stuff from 2000-2010 is all in one catalog since I was using 20D and 30D and those old Raws are tiny. But since 2011 I have to separate.

You have collection for that! I use one Catalog and use folders like 2017; 2018, inside a new folder for every day! And I have two big folders for work and personal!

This man is literally in my brain on this: I keep to-ing and Fro-ing (get it?) on how to organise this!!

I just started with LR a couple of days ago. CC immediately filled up all 20 gig by pulling in my iCloud photos. Deleted that and started over...created two local directories on my MBP internal 1TB SSHD storage - I have an SSD for Catalina...the folders I made are named LR CC and LR Classic, and Classic has 2 sub-folders Personal and Work. I set up with 2 catalogues in Classic, one in CC - in there I only keep my very best work. Everything is backed up to iCloud and Google Photos, and a 3TB external drive. So, pretty much the same logic you used...your vlog popped up just now because of the few videos I watched yesterday. Cheers 🥃

I have one large catalog for each year for my personal shooting and small jobs then I create a new catalog for each significant job I do (Multi-day events, Conferences, Weddings, etc). I also make sure I turn on write changes to sidecar files (XMP) so wherever I back my RAWs to (small HDDs, home NAS, offsite backup drives) I have all the edits with the photos and not only in the LR catalog. This also helps as I ingest and rate my photos in Photo Mechanic before importing and editing only the photos I want to edit into Lightroom. Also hierarchy wise I have 2 photo stores, one for my personal business (solo jobs, weddings, personal shooting) and I have another for my event media business which are where I tend to have multiple shooters or are just really big events and want to be seen as an organisation rather than an individual. Within those two stores I have a folder for each year then a folder for each job in "YYYYMMDD - Job" format so it's always in date order. If its a multi-day job i'll name the folder "YYYYMM00 - Event" then inside have a folder for each day "0 - Thu", "1 - Fri", "2 - Sat". If it's an event where I also have other photographers shooting for me I will also have them use the same structure as well as customise their filenames to them plus camera number (i.e. DP1_, DP2_, JL1_, MK1_) to aid identifying who shot what. I will also make sure their camera clocks are in sync with mine if multiple togs shoot the same thing from different angles). And depending how i'm delivering final files sometimes I'll have the JPG's renamed to have "HHMMSS_" infront of the filename so in any file explorer the photos from multiple photographers and camera bodies will be in correct time order as not all things will sort by photo taken exif data.

I typically do separate catalogs, however where you’re at it would be a pain. I would absolutely do the organized folder idea you have, however if not, you could always spotlight search on your Mac (or on the lacie drive) and search by dates, year, or name of project as well. Hope that helps!

My entire photographic life (about 100,000 images) is in one Lightroom catalog (and Lightroom 6 at that) on a computer with 48GB RAM and I have never noticed any slowing down of the program. Separate catalogs for different projects might make sense for those who work intensely on a project in such a way that they would rarely need to look at photographs from another project at the same time. For most of us though, a single catalog with projects separated into different folders is probably sufficient. I backup my catalog onto two external hard drives in the event of a problem or crash on my main hard drive and having multiple catalogs would only create more backup work.

Basic=you cannot search separate catalogs. I use a separate catalog for personal and a separate one for 'professional, i.e. Miller Photography'. You can set up your major pro groups, wedding, portrait, sports (or karate, judo, football), etc. as albums (forgot the term-switched to ON1 a few years ago) I have 230,000+ total images (File Explorer Search across multiple drives *.NEF, *.ORF, *.JPG, *.TIF)

I think I gonna try doing the premiere workflow on my Lightroom as well. meaning each project will have its own catalog saved together in my hard drives along with its files. I don't really ever "go back" that often to other projects. plus doing this will help going from my MacBook on the go, and then open those catalogs on my desktop as well.

Organise the catalogs in a rough way that feels fine for u. If you want to separate images generally you can do that there. Then add relevant keywords to the photos. When you done that you use collections within lightroom to make your final Sorting by for instace Photoshoot, type of job, images types etc... so one big catalog organized roughly in folders. With relevant key words and detail organisation with collections. My catalogue filename strugture is for landscapes as this. "YYYYMM-CountryCode - Area - Sceene name". Within that catalogues i put subfolders like this: 01 - Original RAW - (Camera used), 02 - Photoshop edits, 03 - Final edits TIFF, and an Exports folder.

Wowzers... but that was a very well explained way of constructively organising the same chaos i have been scratching my head over for a few weeks now! Nice one JP and thank that incredible Fro for all its help too! 👍🏽 Nice one all the way from England 🇬🇧

I got everything in one catalogue. I use year-folders. I have photos I took on that year in that folder devided into date folders. I might start putting them in month-subfolders some day but for now thats where they live . All the rest I do in collections and subcollectiosn. I also use that same year-system in the collections. Thats my routine anyway. All the best!

All in one catalog!!!!

I've maintained a single catalog since I started using Lightroom. I do use an external USB BluRay burner to create archive media backups, just to be safe (in addition to an Aegis external USB HDD, cryptographically secured for my master images as a secondary backup). I have two other external USB HDD's that I take when I travel.

I'm currently organize my photos right now from my old files and files i had to restore from drives that died (I think I've lost some photos unfortunately). but I've decided on a massive catalog and use collections to organize my photos into "folders" in lightroom. My photos on the drive are organized by year and month folders. but my collections helps me keep organized within lightroom because I'm not going to search for photos directly from the drive itself so the naming/folder organization on the drive doesn't matter to me. but i can see where the problem for someone like you that needs to be able to share all these photos with more than one person... not sure if there is a easy way to do that

Jared, I do much the same as you with the exception to where my catalogs are stored. I have recently reorganized my folders into collections and collection sets and store the entire catalog in Dropbox. I do this so that I can access these and make edits where ever I am in the world and on any device I use. I do carry with me while traveling a 5TB external drive and it's simply a temporary storage. All of my photos are uploaded to my server at the same time that I load to the external drive. I can do edits to the photos on the external and post them while traveling and then when home, delete them from the external drive and when Lightroom is opened redirect the target for the missing photos to the server. The catalog keeps the edit and meta data information and I lose nothing. Has worked impecably for me so far with no lag or slowing down of lightroom.

I'm just entering the professional world. The thing I found is that for some photos (mainly artistic, and things I edit on Lightroom in my phone) I want to use the Adobe cloud sync features, but for others like surf, athletic events, wen I don't even shoot raw, I don't want those phots being sync and consuming storage. So I'm testing having different catalogs, one for the synced photos and at least, one for the sport photos, maybe one for surf and another for other sports.

This is exactly an issue you experience in Systems Engineering: bucket/shard/object sizing for performance. You truly have a great organization method in your file system and I would recommend one large catalog (or as few as possible) because Adobe does a good job caching only the parts that you are using at the moment (at least from what I experience in LR6). I truly wish there was synergy with file system organization and applications: if only there was someway for applications to notice the way files and folders were organized and created database-like relationships with that. Source: am currently a systems/software engineer focusing on storage (used to be an SSD firmware engineer).

Love you redundancy plan!

Capture One sessions are fantastic. Each is independent, tidy, move-able, great for archiving. Every project has its own session.

Thank you for the lesson in folder Hierarchy. You are absolutely right. Massive, and time consuming, but beneficial... Thanks for the time...

I have all in 1 big catalog for now( "big", i have 6000 photos, started photography 1year ago). Then the windows hierarchy is organized by PLACE OF THE SHOOT\SHOOT NAME(if needed)\DATE(YYYYMMDD). Then in Lightroom i have created many collections to divide photos in categories like street, portrait, landscape ecc.... And i Keep all the photos, 1 star means that has to be merged in hdr or panorama, 3 stars are the portraits, 5 stars are the shots that i really like in terms of composition and i'm gonna edit. then after all i target as red the ones that i wanna publish online, and with green the ones that I've already published. And that's it! I'll see how this system keeps up in the next years

I know it's an old vid, but thought I'd share my hard learned 'basics of cataloging' rule. When you use catalog software the underlying folder structure is just a storage facility. Retrieval is handed over to the catalog. As long as the underlying folder structure is logical and consistent that's all that matters. Once the content is in the catalog you can retrieve photos in all kinds of ways and change how you do that as often as you like, never touching the underlying folder structure. Building the catalog doesn't end with the import, that's where it begins. The joy of cataloging is letting go of the folder structure as a retrieval system. The horror of cataloging is the gradual realisation that it never ends...and yes, one enormous catalog is the ideal starting point.

All that data is evidence of hard work Fro!

I learned by force with lightrrom when one of my external discs failed I lost all the material in my catalog for 2 years, so I decided for each session that I created an independent catalog, so I do not consume so much lightrrom resource open all sessions in a single catalog and also do not run risk if I happen to lose everything.

One catalog to rule them all! Well, one 'Working' catalog for recent work that I merge into the 'Main' catalog once a month. I use separate folders for each client that I work with and, for personal travel projects, one folder for each city. Within those folders are sub-folders for each 'event'.

I was taught in my digital asset management course to stop using folders because it gets way too messy and confusing. If you have a travel folder and a family folder and an animal folder where do you put the photo of you riding a camel in Egypt on a family vacation? I literally just keyword everything on import so if I need to find a photo taken in Egypt with my sister I just type the keywords in to search it. As for as catalogs currently I just have a jobs catalog, a personal catalog, and a video catalog. My question is should you have a separate catalog for your video content? I have some jobs where I do photos and videos for the client and it might be a pain to have to bounce back and forth between separate catalogs to retrieve them but I also don't know if I should mix photos and videos

This is a great idea for a video. I have struggled with this issue as well.

Hey Jared. I really enjoy watching your videos. I regularly will not ever comment on a RU-vid video but this is a topic I discuss myself all the time. The setup I currently use is a 500GB SSD Drive that’s connected via Thunderbolt to my 2015 iMac. That SSD drive is specifically for Lightroom catalogs and also set up as the main Scratch Disk for Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. Right now I run two businesses, one being Wedding Photography and another one for Corporate (Events, Product, Commercials shootings). I use one catalog for each business as they are two completely different things to look at at once. Each catalog will not occupy more than 10-15 gigabytes of space, keeping in mind that each have about 100k to 150k images. I only generate Embedded and Sidecar and all editing to XMP as the picture is modified. I also have another one where I will just keep pictures of me, my wife, leisure and personal projects. So I don’t have to worry if anything happens to my catalogs (Although they are backed up to the cloud via Dropbox.) The good deal here is, I have never experienced slowing down on my catalogs. As I have to deal with many shootings on a regular basis, I need to comfortably move back and forth in my Lightroom Catalog, and if I ever need to look for something, i can just head over to library, and look for what I need, as the tagging and searching features on Lightroom are amazingly stunning. The time you take on the editing and archiving process DOES influence a lot in your overall productivity. I have before worked with other photographers as a second shooter, and if they use the multiple catalogs option, i can just right-click and export a single folder or set of images in a new catalog. If that’s ever necessary. Adobe has made a very good job through time and I hope they keep that up. Good luck on finishing that setup!

Keep one catalog, uses Files and sub files to organize images, use collections to further refine images with ratings and color folders. Adding key words works great but takes a little thought and time investment. I have 1.6 million images in one catalog and organize by commercial work (weddings, real estate, architecture, product sub categories) fine art, personal projects (overlaps all categories) and family. Add smart previews and keep your metadata with you images so you can sort by date, camera, lens and lots of other criteria that is valuable, particularly for you because you perform product reviews.

Organize them by date, and then on an exel spreadsheet write when you shoot and a key group

I have one massive catalog for my personal and professional photos. All my personal photos get saved onto one NAS and the professional photos save to another NAS. My file structure is similar to what you are using. When I am out shooting and importing my photos on my laptop in the field, I can move the folder within Lightroom to my NAS whenever I get back home and everything works out great. Folder are our friends.

I set mine for film to set between formats- film type- roll type. And for digital I do it by location. And for finalized photos I have a smart catalog set it by cropped size. All my photos are colored aswell (blue=digital, red= film). Seems like a lot but works well. I do this on google drive, Lightroom, and my hardrive for cohesiveness.

I usually use only one catalog but now I'm thinking about using one catalogue per project and then import it in my main catalog. I don't know if it could really speed up my computer. It may be a waste of time and ressources !

I do all my color and tone editing in Capture One and retouch in Photoshop and export the finished tiff from C1 (that sharpening is perfect), and then import that tiff into LR and drop the raw file next to it. In Lightroom I have 3 main folders; Work, School, and Personal. I don't do much work that needs to be put in Lightroom so it's pretty empty. For School I have a subfolder for each class (when I used to edit in LR I'd make subfolders for project). And Personal is just random day's I've shot something and misc. The big thing is collections and tags. Basically just hashtag your images and you can create smart collections for them, or even just regular collections. I have some for general genres and for Insta. But like I said my work barely ever touches LR and it's basically just for archiving personal work.

I store the RAW files in monthly folders (just for convenience) on external hard drives, that are backed up on a NAS. The I focus heavily on good keywording right at the moment of importing the RAW's. So you could define different categories of pics and you can filter on them later on. A normal search goes as follows: select 'all photographs' in the LR library and use a library filter on keyword/attribute/metadata etc. This way I can find all marriage pics and drill down on date or the client's name.

another little tip .. i always leave my raw in my camera until done completely editing even though i put a copy of them on my hd as you never know !....

One catalog, one main folder with sub folders. This makes backing up or transferring to a new computer a breeze. One main folder......Jared’s Photos........Sub folders > Travel, Sports, Music, 5 Min Portraits, etc........Sub-sub Folders > Maria. Jared’s Photos > 5 Min. Portraits > Maria. Also, when naming files, put the SUBJECT first then the DATE...............Maria_5 Min Port_01052018. The date isn’t what is important, the subject is. The dates you were in Paris are only important because you were in Paris. Put the most important information first. Unless you have some weird mathematical mind, most people don’t remember dates. If someone asked where you were on May 18th it might be hard to recall, but if someone asked when you were in Paris you would probably know the month and year off the top of your head.b Most human memory is event based recollection. Check out Tim Grey’s videos on You Tube on how to fix and organized your Lightroom catalog. It would be great for you and Tim to do an episode together. It would help out a lot of viewers

i'm only a minute in and I love you already. I am facing that exact problem only without actually understanding how the duck the catalogue system works. I've just been uploading pics ad hoc and now have a lovely big fat mess that's a pain in the arse to work with so trying to learn how to actually make this whole experience less painful. I have to add I am not a logic brain kind of person so this is really challenging for me.

Man I came for guidance now I'm more confused lol

One catalog per year per camera body, filenames start with the date. For work in Capture One, I use sessions for individual shoots, and catalogs for organizations with repeat shoots. Working folder is Dropbox, time machine auto backup. Joel Sartore who I learned from includes a tag after the date like "s" for stock photos or "e" for events.

I keep on catalog per "creator" (one for me, one for my daughter, etc) plus I keep my timelapse photos in their own catalog because they take up so much space. I organize by date, and have subfolders for year, month, day. Basically I follow Peter Krogh's Dam Book "bucket" scheme. I keep the main "digital negatives" on my DeskTop RAID, and the laptop just has smart previews. That way I can remote mount the RAID on my laptop and edit a single photo, but when travelling I have web size copies of every photo I've taken since 1974. I'm up to 400k photos right now.

I run a 2 TB catalog and it runs fine. Makes searching for people is very fast in latest versions. Yes, it was slower earlier but it runs great now.

I don't know I'm just getting overwhelmed with family pics.. that's why I'm here..lol..

I have the same way of organising. On my external harddrive I have folders by year. When I started with lightroom, I created catalogs by year. That works quite well.

Providing the images are key worded efficiently....one catalogue is all that is needed.

Loved this content!!

I'm a real estate photographer. Me personally, I create a different catalog for each shoot. They're arranged by year, month then name. Then it's easy to for me to locate and access the catalog for a particular shoot. I also create a 'quick collection' for each shoot within Lightroom, enabling me to rearrange the final order of the images for that shoot ready for export, something which is easier when it's a single 'quick collection' in a single catalog. I can see having one big catalog as risky (should the catalog become corrupt) and also cumbersome to have thousands of folders bundled together in a single catalog.

If you are running all those hard drives in a RAID array you better have one as a parity bit so you won't lose everything if one drive crashes. I think that is RAID 5. Or you could have half the storage and set them up as a mirror set.

I use a personal catalog for stuff that I shoot like family and random things. Anything that is shot for a client goes into a catalog with my company name so if I have to recall the images based on my contract, I know where I need to go. I only have 2 catalogs and I don't think I will ever do anything else. But if I didn't get paid, it would be one catalog to rule them all, and I would just filter stuff that I don't need.

Maybe collections of topics and keep the date structure?

One catalog. Folder structure as you stated. Year, months (2018-08), date per major folders. Tagged.

Well, this depends on what your doing with your photos, but typically year > month > project is the most clear and simple way. If you are doing a project a month then you could just go year > project but if your doing 10 projects a month you should break it into year > month > project.

I have a separate catalog for each project. This way I can back up the catalog with the images and I can back that up on two different hard drives. I do this for two reasons. One if the catalog fails and it has happened to me twice I only risk losing one small set of edits. Since i have the catalog backed up with the images i simply go to the back up and i am all set again. Two, i have a large amount of data over many hard drive not all of which are connected to the computer at the same time. So with many catalogs there is no issue with lost images in a catalog. I treat the catalogs as files and open the one i want to work on.

I am looking to get a usb hub/dock. Which are you using in this video? Thanks in advance Jared. Love the videos.

I split mine by year. Folder naming is similar to your original YYYYMMDD-Shoot. Works well for me except for over the new year changeover when I have to jump back and forth a bit to edit pics for clients.

I have been doing a separate catalog per Client/Work. (More often than not I do repeat shoots with the clients). But I am changing (actually now, that is why I am watching this video) for Catalogs per type of photography. My folder organizations is "YYYY-MM-DD Type/Client" in Lightroom I usually have a Catalog named "2019" where I organized all the photos I take that are not client work, and I organize them into Collections Sets: "Family>BBQ in...>Trip to...", "City>Night Long Exposures>Day People...", etc.. And instead of Catalogs per Work (eg. "2019 Nick+Jessica" or "2019 Alisha B"), I going to have a Catalog for "Weddings", "Business Portraits", "Models", etc.. Btw my catalogs have always been per YEAR. If I photograph a Model in 2018 and then in 2019, she would have 2 catalogs. I am stopping with those. I will be merging all Models shoots, into a giant one, and create Collections Sets and Collections. Thanks for the video.

YOUR FRUSTRATION ABOUT WHAT TO IN THIS SITUATION IS SIMILAR TO MINE EXCEPT I DIDNT SET LIGHTROOM AND MY PHOTOS CORRECTLY INITIALLY SO NOW TRYING TO IMPROVE EVERYTHING. THIS HAS HELPED A LOT.

I had seperate catalog in past but after jumping among them for getting a photo I decided to go one catalog even it is slower but no close and open LR or just searching I have hierarchical folders for each year with 12 folders inside for months then the Jobs inside even if it goes slow it worth it

For me, store all of my photos since 2008 like what you did "Date_project-name". for lightroom catalog, i use separate lightroom catalog for each project, since i usually work based on project. (lightroom catalog is still at a mess btw). For my categorized work, i have a separate folder like "Wedding, Prewedding, Portrait, commercial, etc" the content of the folder is just a finish project on full resolution. For other purpose, i create a proxy (resize) for that folder (my portfolio folder), that goes into my other gadget like like my phone or my ipad. This enables me to bring all of my work on that device, since at my country, its hard to get a stable and fast internet connection, so i need offline files that work with me all the time. For backup, i use google business since it provide me with unlimited storage. and to share my data with the clients.

I do have one personal catalog and a work catalog for all other. It's easier than a thousand catalogs all over. That way if I just want to see my top photos I can just filter all the history.

I'd keep everything somewhat as you have, but create folders for each year and then create a collection for 6 degrees etc... Then split your catalogs into in 2 - archival stuff say 2000 to 2010 or whatever and then a current catalog 2011 to current. Then as content by year in your current catalog gets old export that year as a catalog then import that year's catalog into the archival catalog. I hope that all makes sense to you! LOL ...its similar to what I do. :)

I just use one catalog but use collections to find the images I want, Then I don't need to worry where they are or what folders I just need to select the collection from the left panel where I have my titles such as Wildlife, Weddings. portraits but of course you can use any title. I also set my system so that they automatically go to dropbox and Flickr .... people slate Flicker but it's full size JPG for completed work images. I don't use it for anything except a backup of completed work.

If one were to use individual catalogs for shoots, what would happen to your Smugmug galleries if you use that service via the plugin?

I’m a pro photographer with two different businesses. I have two catalogues across three HDs. One is for my archives and is on a large slow HD as I don’t need to access it regularly. The other two drives are for my live jobs and my large portfolio. My live jobs are on a 1tb SSD drive for speed and my portfolio is on a 3tb HD that is reasonably fast as I need to access it quite regularly. It might be better to have those two split into two catalogue but I frequently need to drag photos from a finished shoot into my portfolio so I want them in the same catalogue to make that easy. Also I organise all my jobs by job number. Not sure it’s the best way but I can’t figure out a smoother one yet.

Dude I know the feeling. I have been doing photo & video for about a decade and have roughly 27 TB of files I need to sort, trash, and compile....I get a headache just thinking about it LOL. Best of luck with the new setup!

My system consists of me importing the original photo, into a annual folder, then into a monthly folder. Said photos are stored in a folder titled 'ORIGINAL' and then I generate a LRCAT and import. Exported photos go into the same area as the original, but are placed in their own folder titled 'EDITED/EXPORTED. I can also get more specific in my folders inside the month [folder] by giving titles of the folders - like a wedding, sunset or birds. Basically, subjects of that month. X:/Pictures/2018/ABCwedding/Original, ABCweddingEDITED, ABCweddingLRCAT.

Congrats on almost 1M!!!

Do you (or anyone reading this) keep video files in Lightroom? not for editing but for organization ex. key wording, rating? or do you use something else? Thanks

So the thing that really sucks about Lightroom catalogs is the fact they have to be stored locally on a computer. It is impossible to store it on a network drive which is absolutely ridiculous. I ended up transitioning over to Capture One for my workflow for three main reasons 1) IMO it handles RAW files better 2) I shoot tethered when Im in studio (yes I know Lightroom supports tether shooting) but that goes along with 3) Capture One supports network catalogs. I can have my laptop set up in studio, open up the Capture One catalog off the network drive, shoot everything tethered into Capture one. Once Im done shooting I can shut down the laptop, go to my office and open up the same Capture One catalog thats stored on my network drive on my office computer and do all my editing. If I have a half decent internet connection I can open my Capture One catalog (thats stored on my network drive) anywhere in the world. I mainly use Lightroom now for organization and I have all my photos from the last 14 years loaded into one massive catalog. All the photos are stored on network drives in folders by year. Under each year I have major categories (modeling, sports, music, etc). Under the major categories I have folders for each event/client. These event/client folders are labeled "yymmdd event/client." Inside that folder are all the RAW photos and another folder with the edited photos. I also rename all the files so they start with yymmdd. That yymmdd will match the folder they are in so no matter what I can easily find out what event/client a particular photo belongs to. Having everything in one massive collection also makes it much easier to locate older photos. I do a lot of journalism and sports photography and it is common for me to get messages from outlets looking for photos from a particular game or event that could have taken place years ago. For example several years ago I got an email from a media outlet looking for photos of a particular football player from when he was in high school. It took me less than 10 minutes to locate the photos they were looking for. As far as speed and stability goes with one massive catalog with 386,000 photos. It does take Lightroom a few minutes to load all the photos but after that I have absolutely no problems with speed or stability. I can switch between folders and files in the catalog with no problems at all. TLDR: I have a video on how I organize my entire Lightroom catalog ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ONOp8LmGlkc.html

I have about 400k RAW keepers in my current catalog... and it freaks me out. I tried separate catalogs but kept finding I needed to reference something and got tired of switching. So far so good.

Working catalog on your SSD with current work you’re editing. Archived catalogs saved and backed to your raid. Technically if you finish a project then you finish the catalog so you can reload the catalog from your archive raid

Start a new Catalog each year. For the old stuff, beyond a year yet to be determined, leave it in archive, load into LR if you need it. For your current work, you were on the right track with one catalog with top level folder for FroKnows, Photo Stories, Six Degrees, Your Personal Projects, Misc (we all need a miscellaneous folder), Etc. Nested folders within the top levels for each sub project. That's what I do.

I finally decided to go PER CATALOG. My ONE MASSIVE CATALOG got corrupted. Creating per catalog on an external drive is convenient as you can give it to your friends to edit some of the stuff for you.

i have just one big Catalog with about 82k imges inside. FIle Structure : Year / Month / project works so far.