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merging catalogs

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johnboy

New Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2011
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7
Lightroom Version Number
7.4
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I have two separate catalogs. Each one on a different HD. The first catalog has approx. 75K photos so I started the second catalog on the new hard drive and it has approx. 10K photos.
(was told to do it this way to help with speed when working with photo edits, etc.) Should I instead merge these two catalogs together so I can work and have access to all the photos in one place? The keywords are a bit different for each catalog. How will that be effected if I merge the two.

I am using LR Classic CC on my desktop.
 
I can't tell you what you 'should' do, but Lightroom was designed to work with one catalog. 85K images is not much for Lightroom, so there is little reason to keep two separate catalogs for speed reasons. When you merge the catalogs, the keywords will simply be merged too.
 
(was told to do it this way to help with speed when working with photo edits, etc.)
The size of your catalog makes no difference to the speed of editing. - LR's realtime nature means that editing speed depends on memory, the type of CPU and how much free disk space. Even if you store images on different drives one catalog will cope fine with that.

The advantage of one catalog is that you can more easily keyword images (don't have to maintain two keyword lists), include images from either/any drives in Collections/Smart Collections and search though/filter all images.
 
I highly recommend using one catalog for all of your images.

First, decide which catalog you want to keep and which one to trash. This would probably be the one with the most images. Then, in your keeper catalog, do an “Import from another catalog” and use your trash catalog as the source catalog. Now, you'll have all of your images in the keeper. You can delete the trash catalog when you're ready.

All of your images will still contain the same keywords as whan you were using two catalogs.

Alan
 
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