So where did you learn about cataloging using Lightroom? I use Camera RAW and can access the folders which are stored by date and subject but perform all my editing through Photoshop, not Lightroom. I know there's a ton of info online about how to do it - just wondering if you have a name or two you can toss out who is good with explaining things. I still have trouble wrapping my head around cataloging. :shame:
Are you confusing Catalogs with Collections? Collections are supposedly "powerful ways to organize your photos" but I find them counterintuitive for the way I shoot. Maybe it's easier when you're shooting multiple commercial shoots across many days and want to be able to access all of them en masse while keeping shots organized by day, which makes sense. That said, I don't use them.
Catalogs are essentially the organization of my photos and the raw edits that go with them. I have a "Current" catalog which covers all my non-drone and infrared shooting for the current year only. A couple weeks after the end of the year I will take all the photos in the current catalog from the year just finished and create a new catalog from them, and then after verifying the new catalog I will
remove (
not delete!!) the old photos from the current catalog leaving me with just the current year and other ancillary permanent residents of the current catalog (textures, prints to sell, etc.).
I organize my shooting by year and by topic, so I have one catalog per year for all my regular shooting with subfolders built around events and dates (Musikfest, Summer Vacation, etc.), or subject matter (street, concerts, birds, wildlife, landscape). These photos are all stored on external USB drives (backed up in triplicate) so I can see the previews in Lightroom but I can't do the edits unless I plug in the external. My current catalog generally contains just the last 2-3 months of shooting depending on how much that is, with prior months migrated to the external drive (again backed up in triplicate).
As an aside, I use a free program called FreeFileSync which is great at identifying differences in files between backups and syncing them. I have a primary drive that I use first and then I sync that drive with the other externals.
I do this because Lightroom will slow down as catalogs get larger and larger since the catalog is where all your edits reside. I back them up regularly (default asks every 2 weeks, I do it every week but will skip if I haven't really shot anything) and keep only the last 4 backups and then back those up as well. If I make changes to older catalogs I'll take a new backup of that one as well, which Lightroom will generally ask for when I exit. Some people like everything in one place, and that's fine. If you're using XMP files then there's a lot less overhead in the catalog so it doesn't slow down as much - but your preview files can get very large.
I should add that Fred is right about catalog location. Keep
all the
lrcat files on your main computer's hard drive and only the image files themselves on an external. Those get backed up with everything else on my MacBook, but I also will back them up to the externals with the images as well - just in case.
