Needed this, THANK YOU! Been waiting for this well-rounded, yet succinct video to appear for years! I'm a catalog-per-client, full-time studio that has gone berserk adapting to a single catalog for my fine art photography. This was helpful to hear the tail end about using a location catalog to merge with my non-traveling catalog files. Now to merge 17 years of numerous catalogs... Distraction-free weekend project for a campsite...
I used to use a single catalog, but my lightroom got slower and slower. Once I changed to using multiple catalogs my lightroom became much faster. Now I make a folder for each year and each time I go on a photo shoot the pictures and its lightroom catalog all go in a sub folder. For example folder named 2023Pictures, then below it might be, 1-GrandCanyon, 2-Yellowstone, 3-Arboretum, 4-BisonRange... So now it's easy to find what I want, I can easily back it all up, and when I want a picture then the lightroom catalog used to edit the picture is right there with the pictures.
Hmm! Gonna have to give this a try because mine is pretty slow. Still using LR6 Standalone version with about 1.5 tb of photos. Probably could delete half of them. Probably help if I started using keywords (some photos are using keywords) & collections also. This year I started a new folder for 2023 with all photos in there in folders by date- & some hint names structure. Star ratings, ah! Either good enough to keep or not is the way I see it. A lot of photos I kept when first started shooting I would delete now. Same with over editing at first. But hey, I'm getting off subject.
I am using separate catalogs for each of my cameras, which have either different usage or may have become redundant. So this doesn't mix up all the numbering, whereas I have never had any problems in remembering which camera I have used for a photo shoot or outing.
My 3 Sony cameras have unique names - RX, A1 and S1- which means that each image has the camera name as the prefix and the number follows. This means that I do not have same named images and therefore have all my images from a trip in the same folder and working under the same catalogue. In fact, I have been working with the same LRCat for the last 4 years and never had a problem with multiple images with the same ID. (my LRCat is backed up as usual as well as backed in real time on my Google cloud drive).
Great video! Thank you. Short, sweet and yet detailed! I was wondering what I should do in a particular scenario. I’m setting up a NAS for all our photos to be stored on and work directly to/from. My wife and I both work in Lightroom. Is it possible to share a LR catalog? Or should we each have our own? Thank you!
Julieanne, thanks for this. I want to keep my work in one catalog to access it easily. But I started getting a pop up recently "Catalog size is more than 4 GB. Your catalog size is larger than 4GB. Please use a 3rd party utility such as 7-zip or StuffItExpander to extract your catalog backup." I am unsure how to proceed. Does it mean that my entire catalog is still being backed up or do I need to now work from multiple catalogs? Thanks!
Julieanne, thank for refreshing our memories about this pretty basic but important topic. At some point in time nearly everyone will face this question. Speaking of it, one question comes to my mind. Is it possible to transfer part of one catalogue into a new one? Like a catalogue 1 contains the edits from the shooting A, B and C and C gets transferred to a new catalogue? Thank you, cheers …
thanks for the clear explanation! I'm a happy LR user since waaaay before it was "Classic" and I have a related question: I've recently moved from using a "yearly" catalog, close to a diary, for my personal/everyday/non-project-related photography to a cumulative one obtained by merging all the preexisting ones. Since the huge size of the catalog (several hundreds of thousands of photos) makes working with it kinda sluggish, is there a way to create a 'smart subcatalog', made by e.g. only those photos with any star rating, that can be easily updated when new photos are added and rated on the "global" catalog? I am aware that I can export selected photos as a new catalog, but my problem is the update part: once I have more rated photos on global, I don't want to re-export the older ones which might have already been edited differently on the subcatalog... Thank you in advance!
Thanks Julieanne. On your last example regarding creating a catalog for a trip and then merging it with your master catalog. What is the advantage of doing this rather than just using the master catalog? Is it because your master catalog is not stored on your laptop?
Thanks. I now have a clearer understanding of the functions of a LR catalog. Does the catalog also retain all of the editing info done on the images or is it retained by the images themselves.
Edits made in the Develop module are also stored in the catalog. You can also save the metadata to the files using Catalog Settings > Metadata > Automatically write changes to XMP. If the original file is a proprietary raw file (.crw, .nef etc), then you will see a second .xmp file in the operating system with the same name as the photo that holds the information. If you are working with DNG/tiff/JPEG files the information will be saved within the file.
I respectfully disagree. The only reason I use several catalogs now is because performance was significantly impacted. But as you said, it's not ideal not to have one's pictures at the same place.
