Multiple Catalogs and People Recognition

[les_stockton]

I currently use just one catalog in Lightroom, and it has photos from several years of work. For performance, I thought maybe it would be good to start a new catalog each year or two, but I'm afraid if I do that, I would lose the benefit of the people recognition feature, that I've managed to build up quite a bit with current photos in the current catalog. Switching to a new catalog would mean starting entirely over with the new catalog, right?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Lightroom can handle very large catalogs without a problem. Mine contains 160,000 images. What performance problems/improvements do you expect from using multiple catalogs?

 

[tspear]

Yes, you start the training/learning process over with each new catalog.
As Johan asked, why do you create a new catalog?

 

[les_stockton]

Mine is just slow when first starting up. But I really was relying on the advice of others. My preference would be to continue with a single catalog. I hear that's bad; bad for performance.

 

[Gnits]

You need to have overwhelming reasons to consider more than one catalog.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Mine is just slow when first starting up. But I really was relying on the advice of others. My preference would be to continue with a single catalog. I hear that's bad; bad for performance.

It's not.

 

[clee01l]

Mine is just slow when first starting up. But I really was relying on the advice of others. My preference would be to continue with a single catalog. I hear that's bad; bad for performance.

You did not hear that from anyone knowledgable that uses LR. It certainly did not original at this forum or from Adobe. The only legitimate reason to use multiple catalogs is when Business rules prohibit mixing client data. And this has nothing to do with performance.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The only performance hit is when Lightroom makes a catalog backup with verification and optimising. For a small travel catalog this takes one or two minutes, for my master catalog it takes 10 to 15 minutes. Apart from that, I do not see a performance hit in my day to day work with my master catalog.