How many lightroom catalogs should i have

I love Lightroom Classic CC. I think it is pretty user friendly. However, I also know that anytime you start using a new program there are questions and frustrations that come up. This blog series is intended as a resource to help you get up and running in Lightroom as quickly and as free of frustration as possible! As soon as you install Lightroom, it will create a catalog or ask you to find an existing one.

The Lightroom Catalog is the place that Lightroom will store links to your photos, previews of your photos, and all the developing info you do to your photos along the way. At any time you can go and find the photos on your hard drive. Your Lightroom Catalog can be stored anywhere on your computer or even on an external drive.

If you store it on an external drive, that drive will need to be plugged in when you want to use Lightroom. The only thing that really matters is that Lightroom and you know where it is!

I have been using Lightroom for a long time actually, since version 2! I have only ever used one catalog. I highly advise you to keep just one catalog too, and utilize Lightroom Collections to keep your personal and professional images separated. All my client images and family images are stored in one catalog. The main reason I chose to do this is because I think it is frustrating to go between two or more catalogs.

There is no limit on the amount of photos you can have in your Lightroom Catalog - I have many, many photos in my single catalog and it still runs perfectly. A common error that many new Lightroom users make is to create multiple Lightroom catalogs, often times a new one every time they import.

Fortunately, this can be fixed by merging Lightroom catalogs! Obviously if you wish, you can have as many different catalogs as you want if that works best for your workflow. For example, you could have a different catalog for different projects or even different clients. I have been using LR5 for years. Thanks Dan. Thanks HeartThing. It just keeps things simple. I did create a separate Scans parent folder to keep those photos separate from my digital ones, but that was just for my own organization.

As a pro, I keep a unique catalog and LR folder for each client. It stays in the client folder on my system along side their proofs, PSD files, retouched full resolution images, contract etc. Since I wrote this article, we have sync to add to the list of things that require a single catalog, and having the photos split over multiple catalogs makes it more difficult to group together all of the photos shot at a specific venue or similar. In your case, the benefit of not risking mixing up files may well outweigh those disadvantages.

Thanks for the information. I am in the process of organizing about GB of photos. I was planning to use multiple catalogs until I saw this post and a recommendation from a friend. But just to make sure I did my due diligence, I contacted Adobe. I explained my situation and their recommendation was to use multiple catalogs!

Good move Brad. Unfortunately the quality of Adobe support depends who you actually get to talk to on a specific day. Some of the guys are great and some will say anything to get you off the phone. When you get into the millions of photos, then it starts to notice a little more. Not as such, but if you use a hierarchy then you can collapse the other hierarchies. For example, create a keyword for the Team, then within that the players for that Team. Then with the other ones collapsed, you just have that Team visible to select from.

Question for you. My catalog has k photos. I am on a macbook pro, but my hard drive is only GB. My previews file got so large above 80GB that a few months ago, I had to move my lightroom file and previews file to an external hard drive, because my Macbook hard drive was constantly full because of the giant previews file.

Enter my multiple catalogs idea. Is this a horrible idea? What am I not considering? I just have to find a way to make LR run at a reasonable speed once again! I suspect the previews are a large part of my slow down. Instead, I think I just set myself back months and caused a big slow down. Thank you also for the SSD drive. Are there any knock-on concerns about that? Two catalogs avoids that completely.

Most professional photographers keep their work on a separate catalog from their personal lifestyle one. Yeah, agreed. Any potential issues aside from backup, but I know how to manage that?

How would I do it.. Does Lightroom support one catalog and multiple storage drives? My first drive is full and I have now purchased a second. Do I need a new catalog for it, or can one single catalog file contain images sitting on multiple storage drives? Lightroom is quite happy with multiple drives, they show in the Folders panel when you add the photos. Make sure to back up the additional locations.

Hi there, thanks for this great post! Cheers, Nadine. LR-MasterCatalogv10 will be the upgraded catalog created when you installed Classic Checking the dates used will confirm this. So, assuming LR-MasterCatalogv10 is your current catalog and is working fine, the other is no longer needed.

Your email address will not be published. There are Quick Start eBooks for both the traditional desktop-based Lightroom Classic, and for the new Lightroom cloud ecosystem. The eBooks are yours to download absolutely FREE, along with a number of other free member benefits, when you register for a free account. Already registered? Sign in to download your copy. Mobile sync only works with one catalog.

Why do some people recommend multiple catalogs? Some people say that small catalogs are faster than big catalogs, and this is true in some circumstances: Smaller catalogs are faster to open and back up than very large catalogs — but how many times a day do you need to open and back up? Best practices for working with Lightroom Classic catalogs.

Decide in advance where you want to store your Lightroom Classic catalog. You can't store it on a network. You'll probably store it on your computer's hard drive or an external disk. After you decide where you'll save the catalog, consider the specific folder or path where you'll put it.

Determine where you want to keep your photos. How much disk space is on your hard drive? Will it be enough? If you're working on multiple computers, consider keeping your catalog and photos on an external drive that you can plug into either system. Copy or move your photos to that location before you import them into Lightroom Classic. Finally, start Lightroom Classic and import photos into the catalog by adding them in place. Two final recommendations: Although you can have multiple Lightroom Classic catalogs, try to work with just one.

There's no upper limit to the number of photos you can have in a catalog, and Lightroom Classic offers myriad ways to sort, filter, and otherwise organize and find photos within a catalog. For example, you can use folders, collections, keywords, labels, and ratings.

With a little thought and practice, you can probably find ways to organize and manage all of your photos successfully in one catalog.