Where is the best place to keep my Catalogue?

[michael8765]

Where is the best place to keep my Catalogue, Previews, Back ups etc. When I recently installed Lightroom 4 the database files defaulted to my Pictures section of my Mac. See attachment. Is this the best place for them to be? If not how do I move them without disrupting things?

 

[clee01l]

I have a folder in Pictures called "Lightroom". Inside that I have another folder called "Master". Inside of "Master", I have my master catalog and my master catalog previews folder. (*.lrdata). While not necessary, I also have all of my cataloged images in a subfolder inside of the folder named "Lightroom". I like this arrangement because it isolates the original images that are managed by LR from all of the other crap that Apple tosses into the Pictures folder and from HD Publish Services images that are not managed by LR.
Backups are another issue. If my primary HD crashes, using LRs default location for back ups, I lose both the original catalog and those in the backup folder. For this reason I keep the Backup folder on a separate mounted HD.

If you have several drives and the primary OS is on an SSD, you might not want the master catalog and the Preview cache and the original images on the SSD because of space limitations. And sometimes it is useful to have the cataloged original images on a drive that is separate from the catalog. If you have that option your can do this too.

My Primary HD is 1TB so it is convenient for me to keep my LR catalog and cache on the primary HD. I have over 350GB of original images cataloged. So, in that "Pictures" folder below, I only keep the most recent three month of images (the ones that are most actively being worked.) The remainder I have on an EHD, and available in my master LR catalog if I need to print or publish something that I have finished all of my pros processing.