<p>My current set-up is that I use my laptop for everyday management of my pictures and my desktop for detailed editing. So to make the images transferable I download my pictures to an extrenal HDD which I can then take to my desktop when needed. My workflow is:</p>
<ul>
<li>LR 5 on my laptop and desktop.</li>
<li>LR5 to download the memory card to the 'working' external HDD with a parallel copy to a second (download backup) external HDD which is only used to recover photos where necessary.</li>
<li>Sort/delete/basic editing on the laptop </li>
<li>Each time I close LR it is automatic back-up to the same external HDD as the photos.</li>
<li>FWIW, I also do weekly incremental and monthly full backups of the working HDD to a third HDD.</li>
</ul>
<p>So my question is this. To date, when I open LR5 I use 'select catalog' and choose the latest catalog from the external HDD so I know I am using the latest one. After many moons of doing this I have just realised (d'uh) that by opening the 'latest catalog' from the external HDD, what this means is that I have no version of the catalog on either the laptop disc nor the Desktop disc. <br>
Given that I have a back-up routine, would you say this is a problem? I can't see why it should be.<br>
<br />The reason I have started to look at this in more detail is that LR can be slow to open images and can have a long thinking time during processing and I have wondered if this is because it is having to access the catalog (now approaching 40,000 images) on the exernal HDD (all USB ports are USB2), and if the catalog was on the computer drive it would be much quicker.<br>
If this is correct, I would anticipate the following change to my workflow:</p>
<ul>
<li>copy the catalog from the external HDD to the computer drive using Windows Explorer</li>
<li>Fire up LR and select the catalog just copied onto the computer hard drive and work of that catalog with the images still on the external HDD</li>
<li>when I have finished back up the catalog to the external HDD as I currently do so it can be copied to whichever computer I use next</li>
</ul>
<p>So would this be the correct way to do it?<br>
Is there any other reason LR could be slow to open or process images? My laptop is i3 processor with 6GB RAM and my desktop i5 processor with 8GB RAM. Neither used to be as slow as this which is why I am thinking it is the catalog size as much as anything.</p>
<p>Any help is appreciated, and thank you for your time.</p>