Adobe Lightroom Catalogs?

[Don Kuykendall_RIP]

GracieAllen, I just set up a new computer and I have a 128GB SSD drive for Windows and most programs. I also have a 240GB SSD drive just for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom and the scratch drive. All photos are on external drives Where the photos are is not to important since once you load the photo it is in memory so the speed is there. My computer boots from off to ready to go in under 20 seconds and Lightroom only take aobut 5 seconds to come up and be ready to go.

 

[Danno]

Danno, I'm not sure I'd create a new catalog every year... I haven't seen any improvement in performance with a catalog with only 10,000 images versus one with 100,000 or so. I know of others with over a million images in a single catalog. But, I, and most of those folks are using SSDs for the catalog and multiple, fast drives in RAID 0 configurations to speed access.

Having each year in a separate catalog makes searches really limited unless you're looking by date... At least for me it would since I largely search by keyword and there may be images from any of 10+ years that fit the keywords. It would be nice if Lightroom would allow searching across catalogs, but until they do (which I suspect they won't), I generally recommend to people that choose to organize by date (ignoring the umpteen entries on the Internet that claim it's a terrible way to organize) to use a single catalog and just use a folder structure based on year/month or year/month/day... But, as always, everybody does things slightly differently, to fit what works best for them.

I appreciate what you are saying Gracie Allen. I have only been doing this for less than 3 years, but for now I have found this to work for me. I actually struggle with working through big files. I just find it easier for me to work through a smaller number of files. It is just easier for me.

 

[GracieAllen]

Don, that's a really nice way to set up. It keeps all the catalog and cache and other stuff away from the O/S. I like fast drives configured in RAID 0 because I'm impatient and don't like waiting for the image(s) to load into memory, especially the previews. It got more important to me once I started using the Nikon D810 and dealing with very large images and VERY large .psd files.

 

[Don Kuykendall_RIP]

Don, that's a really nice way to set up. It keeps all the catalog and cache and other stuff away from the O/S. I like fast drives configured in RAID 0 because I'm impatient and don't like waiting for the image(s) to load into memory, especially the previews. It got more important to me once I started using the Nikon D810 and dealing with very large images and VERY large .psd files.

I can open Lightroom and have a photo in the develop mode in less than 10 seconds. I love this setup. USB 3 for my external drives is pretty good. My only slowdown now is this was a gaming computer so it did not come with a built in Media card slot. I had to buy a external USB3 reader. it takes forever. Got to find a cure for that.

 

[GracieAllen]

Unfortunately, I haven't found many computers with current media card readers... I'm using fast CF cards in the D810, SDHC cards in the D7200, and 2933X XQD cards in the D500, so I do all my reading from an external reader. For everything but the XQD card I've got an $8 Transcend that's extremely fast. For the Lexar XQD I've got a Lexar reader that's USB3 and is dog slow. Hopefully some other companies will start supporting XQD so I can get a reader that's as fast as the card.