Single vs Multiple catalogs

Status
Not open for further replies.
Destonian

Destonian

Member
Joined
Sep 29, 2008
Messages
27
A recent reply to another post of mine brought an old question back to mind. I currently work creating a new catalog for each shoot I do. I know I am probably part of the 5% of people that just cant let go of the bridge way of workflow.

My main problem seems to lie in the archiving of "inactive" shoots. I prefer to as soon as I am done processing a shoot, be that handing over a wedding album, upload to stock agencies, or sending images to your editor, to remove those images from my HDD and archive them offline. I do this, becuase I find it pointless to keep on my machine, as I seldom, if ever work with those images again.

Although I feel like the only tog that works like that, I refuse to believe that everyone else keeps all their work (Active and inactive) online. I dont want to end up with endless lists of shoots, all with broken links to images that I have burned onto DVD for storage.

Are there any good ways of handling this? At the moment I create a new catalog for each shoot, and once done with the shoot, I burn the images, together with the LR catalog file. This works fine, but is a nuisance when it comes to identity plates, smart collections and all the other catalog specific LR features.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
i will be making a new catalogue each year as its just too many photos to keep in one place.
you could make a smart collection of your work and call one shoot
'8-1'-14 Wedding Island ACTIVE

and then another
'8-1'-14 Wedding Island INACTIVE

and place corresponding photos into each, that way you never have to sift through ALL your photos to find the active ones.

just an idea.

another idea is WHY BOTHER WITH YOUR INACTIVE photos? you seem to have already gone through and processed the keepers and like you said, you seldom, if ever, work with those images again.
just delete them and be done with it.

ps, i read a lot about people burning dvd's of their stuff and i must ask, WHY???? portable HDD's are so cheap these days. i haven't burned a dvd or cd in 2 years. i'm actually wondering why they even include dvd burners in computers anymore, everything can go onto USB or portable HDD and soon on SSD. but thats off topic, sorry.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I dont want to delete them, as it does (seldom, but sometimes) happen that I do need to refer back to them. An example would be a couple wanting extra prints of their wedding photos 2 years after the wedding. I also sometimes submit to some design companies on an adhoc stock basis, so its nice when an image is required that I have shot before, to still have it backed up somewhere. The medium to me does not really matter, be that DVD, portable HDD or even some online service provider.

The problem I am having is that as soon as I move those files to a DVD/ offline HDD, the images have been moved outside of LR, and it seems that LR does not handle this very well.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I'm largely staying out of this thread as I rant too often about not breaking up control of your pictures any more than necessary. However....

"it's just too many photos to keep in one place."
- many are we talking? My test catalogue has around 8'k of images, and a friend's is well into 6 figures. If you've that many images, you need to control them in one place.

"The medium to me does not really matter"
To some extent the medium does matter, in that with an offline hard drive is shown just once in the folders list. I've not looked at discs for a while, but aren't they listed individually (if so, set up a collection set of offline discs and make each disc a sub-collection)

And how does it not handle them offline media well in your opinion? It's not as good as Extensis Portfolio, but better than most. A problem can be discarding previews after a defined time, but some people want that.

John
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
The images are not that much, I process less than 5'K in a year. I think my main problem is that I have been using bridge / explorer as the primary organizational tools in my workflow for the last few years, and kinda got stuck in that mindset. I dont have any reason to abandon it, but I just feel like without LR I might be missing out on something. 7 Years ago I had no reason to abandon paint shop pro for photoshop too... if you know what I mean :mrgreen: (For the price, I still think PSP is great though)

I am wondering about one thing though. If you keep all your photos in one catalog, and seperate different shoots in folders on importing them, how do you archive them after you are done? Also, if you use collections to seperate different shoots from each other, wont the list of collections become rahter long?

Maybe a nice feature for LR3 would be to be able to label your collections?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
"If you keep all your photos in one catalog, and seperate different shoots in folders on importing them, how do you archive them after you are done? Also, if you use collections to seperate different shoots from each other, wont the list of collections become rather long?"

After backing up the folder to DVDs, I just drag it from my work drive to my archive drive in Lightroom. If I didn't want to keep the originals on the hard drive too, I'd then just delete the folder in Explorer/Finder, so LR would see the folder as missing.

What does it matter if the collection list is long? It's broken up in sets.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Neither do I like folders to be missing, but if I've dragged them into a folder called offline archive, they're all grouped together and I can quickly see they're missing because they're on DVD. To a certain extent, you can also control backing up to DVD by seeing if the folders are missing - if there's a folder in that area which isn't offline, the job has been finished but it hasn't been backed up. But that's just an idea.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top