One catalog for all photos, one catalog per year or catalog per client?

[Amara Photos]

I've read the post on 'stand-alone, run-time catalog for clients'' - I show clients the photos to a gallery.

What I would like is to filter all photos for a keyword like 'texture' 'blue' 'smile' so also including studio/wedding sessions of clients the work is totally wrapped up for. So, for that reason, I tend to go for a set up of just one amara catalog, and my work is in folders based on year/month/date/clientname.

The post of the corrupt catalog is scary so I had a look at my catalog files:

I worked the last months with one catalog and the catalog became huge (?)and I am so scared when it gets corrupt or something....
F.e. My private photos I have a catalog for each year. For the 2010 if I look at the properties it indicates: 2.3 gb in size, 10,2 gb on disk, 39.270 files ( I know, I went overboard and should be tidying up + take less photos e.g. think better before I shoot, but that's besides the point for now).

To me that GB numbers are scary, and yes - I do back up, but still I wonder:

1. What are the limits one catalog can handle?
2. If i chop the images up to different catalogs, (how) can I realize a search for 'smile' or 'Vincent' through all my photos at once?
3. How do other photographers work? Experiences?

thanks Amara

 

[johnbeardy]

Make sure you read this from the starters kit On the many-headed evils of controlling your pictures with more than one catalogue

To answer your questions, I assume you're talking about your ongoing catalogue(s) rather than temporary ones you might make for presenting to a client or for working offline. So putting those other catalogues aside:

1. No known limit. Eventually your computer won't be powerful enough, but there are plenty of catalogues with 250000+ images running fine on good but not special hardware
2. You can't - that's the price of having multiple catalogues
3. Too big a question. Generally it's with one catalogue, or as small a number as possible. Wedding and event photographers often use one catalogue per event - avoids risk of mixing - and of these some will then import the catalogue into a master one when the job is closed. You also get some people separating their catalogues by client.

Unless there's a good reason and you really know what you're doing, why fragment control of your workflow and archive? There's no technical reason to do so.

John

 

[dj_paige]

I agree with everything John has said. In particular, given your description of what you would like to do (search for "blue", search for "texture", search for "smile") this demands a single catalog. You cannot do these searches across multiple catalogs.

Catalogs by year seems to me to be the worst idea I have heard for cataloging, because I don't know anyone who can accurately remember what year things happen in (yes, I can remember most things that happened in 2010, but five years from now, I won't remember what year I went to the beach and what year I attended that party, and you won't be able to search for "beach" or "party" across multiple catalogs).

Regarding corrupt catalogs, this is really a very rare occurrence, I would be willing to be that most people here in this forum have never had this happen. But the protection against corrupt catalogs is to make regular backups to a different physical disk. And that should eliminate the consequences of corrupt catalogs.

 

[johnbeardy]

It does run into problems but the good thing about years, Paige, is that the year a photo was taken is "objective" metadata. Something like client or professional/personal is subjective and prone to inconsistent interpretation over time.

A couple of examples may help. A few months ago I helped someone who wanted to his catalogues by client. He shot a few ranges of products for one particular client which had just sold some of them to another company. They still wanted to use him but he was now moving parts of previous shoots from one client catalogue to another. What a waste of energy. One catalogue, use the job number field? A second example is someone whose personal work started to make money, "forcing" her to move older personal images over to the business catalogue.

So while I agree that we soon forget the exact year we did something, I wouldn't say years are the worst idea I've ever heard....

 

[dj_paige]

John, I agree that people who don't understand Lightroom sometimes do some very pointless things, but I think I'll stick with my phrasing. Objective metadata is only useful if you can remember it and make use of it.

 

[Amara Photos]

So one catalogus it is : )

: ) For your prompt and clear replies on the post!!!

John - firstly apology, I overlooked the article in the starterskit... Oeps.... Thanks for the link and extra explanation. Good to hear catalogs with this number of photos work fine and not too worry too much about corrupted catalogs. I work at a RAID7 network system plus have a total back separate external back up of Zhotos, so that should be fine!D

DJ-Paige - LOL as it made sense what you wrote - it's a strange set up. I am doubling: having my files already in year based folders (old school, will stick to that). So to ALSO have the catalog organised in years - it's just the same. Unless I would see it as a new sort of Memory Game - there's really no point. I even can't seem to remember my wedding date, so better to go for one catalog, be smart (and consistent) to use key words - and actually benefit from the fact you have a dbase to go through your work.

The only worry I have/had is the speed of the catalog. My photos and the catalog files are on the network (I know, officially LR is not for networks, but there is a tweak to have it running on the network anyways). Works fine, bit slow sometimes, but I had most settings on defaults. But, I've been reading more posts yesterday all day, and I changed a lot of settings (more cache at local disk etc), so that should be better now...o

For today - the process to merge all the year catalogs back into... one main catalog. Ha ha - reading your posts earlier could have saved me a good amount of time : ) Lesson learnt - first read, than do!

Thanks & Cheers from Qatar, Amara

 

[MarkNicholas]

If you are concerned about the speed of your large catalogue then I would suggest the following. I have one main catalogue which stores everything and a separate working catalogue. I find that in terms of performance the main problems come when editing photos rather than searching / filtering photos...I have an old system. For new photographs I initially upload to the almost empty working catalogue which has the same presets and keywords and my main catalogue. I do all my edits, ratings and keywording etc. in this working catalogue and when I am done I export to my main catalogue (or vice versa) and then remove from my working catalogue.

 

[smashy25]

I'm interested also..Pls let us know.