One catalog or many?

[Bill0987]

I have been creating catalogs for each subject (family, wildlife etc.) as a way of keeping things organized. The more photos I have the harder it is to manage. I'm thinking of making one catalog and using folders and sub-folders to organize my photos, this would allow me to globally search by keyword etc. Any help or opinions would be appreciated, someone must have figured this out by now.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Bill, welcome to the forum!

One catalog is generally the ideal case scenario, for those exact reasons. The only 'against' is that HUGE catalogs can run slower, so that will depend on your system specs.

When you come to merge the catalogs, just start your fresh catalog, and then use Import from Catalog to import each individual catalog into that big one.

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to the forums Bill !

This question has been beaten to death so many times...

You will find it so much easier with only one catalog! There is even no need to separate in different folders. Just keyword the family ones with that word and wildlife ones with "wildlife" and so on. You can then create smart collections looking for those particular keywords and they will automatically update as soon as you keyword the new images coming in.

 

[Richard Earney]

And in fact explore Collections too. With a metadata based application like Lightroom, you are better off organizing photos by date in your folder structure (maybe with a bit of description as well if you really need it) but use Keywords and Collections for your organizational structure.
The system you currently use is more prone to giving you headaches as images can fit into more than one bucket.

 

[dj_paige]

Let me add a third voice in favor of one catalog and organizing via keywords, metadata and collections, instead of folders. Leave the photos in whatever folders they are in now. Put your effort into keywording (and adding other metadata such as captions ...) and making collections, as these are much more powerful in helping you find your photos than folders are.

 

[Gene McCullagh]

Here's another vote for one catalog!

However, there are certain instances where you might want more than one. For testing or presentation purposes its useful to have a second catalog.

Also, if you want to hand off a catalog to a colleague or client who has LR you can export the appropriate images to a catalog then pass those files along.

Generally, though, outside of these limited instances, its best to work with one catalog.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Or when there's no overlap - for example work vs. personal multiple catalogs can work.

 

[Hendrik Fischbach]

There is no "one true" solution to this.

I don't think, I will ever have to search within my wedding pictures and my NFL Europe database at the same time (instance, query, ...).

Thus - in my opinion - it makes perfect sense to separate the very different areas of my work. Even subdivisions may make sense - like keeping the German BBL (Basketball) completely separated from the National Football League.

Using the brain saves resources (computation power in this case). :cheesy:

 

[Mozella]

I have a huge, normally inactive, back-up drive strictly for back-ups. My "current" photos are on my internal hard drive plus two normally active external hard drives for photos with slightly less urgency. I'm trying to keep my internal drive from being overwhelmed by too many images.

I have a catalog for each hard drive; i.e three total. That seems to work OK and, depending on what I'm doing, I sometimes operate with the two external drives turned off. The green "light" on the respective catalogs is off in that case.

Lots' of ways to skin this particular cat, but this system works well for me.