Lightroom Workflow - Catalogs

<p>I'm trying not to let my catalogs get too big. Currently my catalogs are covering about a 100GB at a time. I've been having a hard time trying to create a workflow as far as consistency and efficiency within my catalogs. What are you doing? What works?</p>

<p>and what about backup catalogs. </p>

<p>Out of interest, what do you see as the problem(s) associated with catalogs that are "too big?" - and how did you decide what size is "too big"?</p>

<p>Your question is a bit unclear. Can you explain further what you mean by "consistency & efficiency between catalogs"? I agree with Alec, where is it written that a catalog needs to be a given size? The only reason I can think of to have more than one catalog is if one needs to separate professional work from personal work, and even then, I'm not sure it is necessary. My catalog is currently about 600GB and it searches fine, it is backed up regularly.<br>

Eric</p>

<p>Best to stick with one catalog for all kinds of reasons. Unless you’re dealing with well over 100,000 images, LR is more than capable of handling your images. Multiple catalogs are a drag and until such a time that LR allows you open multiple catalogs, search, move images from catalog to catalog this way (don’t hold your breath), its far more effective and in terms of back up strategy safer to stick with one catalog. </p>

<p>i did a turorial on lynda.com with chris orwig, 9 hours of training. he suggested that you don't let your catalogs get too big. i had one catalog for about 700gb's. and it was really slow. LR would freeze up, crash, or take a long time to switch between modules, or even between tools. </p>

<p>so i split up my catalogs to about 1 years worth of photos. this doesn't seem all that efficient though. if i want to do a search with keywords, i'll only be getting photos keyworded within that one catalog. LR works much faster now that i have minimized the catalog size. so i have cured the problem of slow, but it sure isn't the most efficient way.</p>

<p>Right, its not at all efficient. I don’t know the OS or speed of your machine, but do you really mean you have a 700 GIG catalog or 700 gigs of images? My current catalog which has about 25K worth of images is about 500mb. Not a big deal at all. Again, unless you’re in the 100,000+ range of captures, there’s aside from some speed issues scrolling in Grid, there’s far more reasons not to split up your catalogs than there are reasons to do so. The issues you report (lag in moving to modules, crashing) sounds like other issues with either the database (did you optimize?) or your system. </p>

<p>700gigs worth of photos. it's about 9 years worth. after burning out 3 cameras and about 300,000 images. i'm running windows vista with 4gigs of ram. i've been having trouble with vista from day one though. </p>

<p>That’s a LOT of images and its possible at this limit you’re near self destruct <g>. Then again, 4 gigs isn’t that much Ram. It should be 64-bit under Vista (it is under OS X). You could use a lot more Ram. </p>

<p>I don't think that's a lot of images at all. I normally average 80,000 a year and have 1.5TB just on one drive.</p>

<p>One catalog is a silly idea imo. Too hard to back up onto dvd for starters. I break mine up into genre's. I'm a hybrid workflow user with Bridge so I suggest you look at Bridge for your work flow as well. It shares almost the identical work flow methods of LR. You can do all the library stuff in terms of key words and searches etc and best of all, there's no data base to worry about. For windows users in 64-bit and lots of ram, the cs4 version of Bridge is quick. They've really cleaned it up on this version.</p>

<p>The Flickr LR group is great. There are many there that shoot the amount you and I do as well. Might wish for more input there.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Hi,<br>

I'm a Wedding Photographer and the way I work with LR is creating one catalog for each event I do. It's easy to backup and manage. I have 2 external hard drives that I copy the catalogs to in order to keep a extra backup.<br>

Simple, fast and efficient to me.<br>

I use a Mac G5 and a MacBook Pro and I can work on any machine if I want.<br>

That's my 50 cents.</p>