Two LR catalogs for personal/professional work?

<p>Hi everyone. <br>

Input needed: I use Lightroom CC. I'd like to keep my personal/family images separate from my professional work images. Is there any good reason to NOT have two separate catalogs? I already key word and use collections, etc, but I'd like to keep things separate. Thoughts? </p>

<p>I don't think keywords, collections or presets are shared amongst catalogs but if that's not an issue for you.....</p>

<p>This seems like a perfect situation for having two catalogs. You won't be able to search across all your images (professional and personal) at the same time, but it doesn't sound like you want to be able to do that anyway. By the way, you can export presets from one catalog and import them into another. You can also export and import lists of keywords, but I guess you wouldn't be using the same keywords for both catalogs since they'll contain very different images.</p>

<p>It's a real pain to switch catalogs. You have to shut down LR, which takes an unreasonably long time, and launch it again, which also takes too long. And, if you want to switch off quickly (doing some personal work during lunchtime, for example), you'll find this very annoying. If you have a long-running operation, such as uploading, you'll have to wait for it to complete before you can make the switch, which is another problem.</p>

<p>It takes about three seconds for LR to shut down on my computer, a two year old iMac. It takes 12-14 seconds to launch it. This doesn't seem like "too long" to me.</p>

<p>I'm with Jeff. I have 307,000 images in one catalog. From the click on the task bar until the splash screen goes away it's 10 seconds. Shutdown is almost instantaneous. Lightroom CC 2015.</p>

<p>I can't see any reason why you would need two catalogs to achieve what you want. If you want to separate personal and professional simply... <br />1. Create two folders. One personal, one professional.2. Set up an Import preset to import images to the personal folder (and apply any other settings you might want applied) - this could include adding a "personal" keyword and putting the images into dated sub folders.<br />3. Set up a second Import preset to import images to the professional folder (and apply any other settings you might want applied) - this could include adding a "professional" keyword and putting the images into dated sub folders.<br /><br />During image import simply select the preset you want and LR will do the rest.<br>

To view either set go to the LR Library Folder panel and simply click to hide the contents of the folder you don't want to see and do likewise to open the folder you do want to see. You can switch between personal and professional in one second, which is a massive saving of 9 seconds each time you switch, compared to using two catalogs. A more serious advantage is that you can search through all images (if you want to) and you don't need to maintain two separate keyword libraries.</p>

<p>I'm with those that suggest <strong>one catalog!</strong> It's not the issue of how quickly you can move from one to the other catalog that slows you down, it's trying to keep both in sync with all kinds of files and finding images scattered over more than one catalog. It's SUPER easy to separate personal and professional work in one catalog (keywords, smart collections, other metadata etc). </p>

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<p>I don't think keywords, collections or presets are shared amongst catalogs but if that's not an issue for you.....</p>

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<p>Keywords should be embedded into the data (well if you use DNG yes, otherwise sidecar files? Certainly DNG for the raws store this and of course rendered images). Collections, nope, that's an issue. Presets would also be an issue too.<br>

KISS, one catalog. </p>