Adobe Lightroom Catalogs?

csgaraglino

Senior Member
Being new to LR, I just created one catalog and I have everything I have shot since 2000 in there - everything!

While I do like the ability to see everything - it is starting to get very cluttered.

I do shoot commercially and personally and I am thinking that I should at least separate the main catalog into two, or maybe more, catalogs?

Personally is simple - this would be all my "personal" photos and projects.

As for commercially I shoot mostly Events, Real Estate and Products - should I keep all commercial clients shoots in one cat, or separate them out into each discipline?

Its nice having the commercial shoots cataloged as I do occasionally go back and get images for clients, or even for my own use in other projects.

Thoughts, those that shoot both commercially and personally, what are you doing?
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
If I were a Lr user (spoiler alert: I'm not, though I am somewhat familiar with how it works if only in theory vs practice...) I would keep to the one catalog; mainly because I don't see the need for more than one. There's no ceiling on how many files can be contained in a single catalog and Lr provides a myriad of options for organizing within the catalog (folders, collections, keywords, labels, and ratings). It seems to me multiplying catalogs only increases the workload as you now have multiple catalogs to maintain.
 

RocketCowboy

Senior Member
I tend to keep a catalog per year. Personal projects may deviate from that, but my paid shoots stay organized that way so that I know what catalog to open.

I do this because I have to work mobile quite a bit, so my archival process takes this into account to reduce the risk of loss if a travel hard drive is lost/stolen/damaged.
 

Scott Murray

Senior Member
Learn how to use Lightroom and it pros and cons. There are a lot of videos to help you. Google is your friend.

Simple terms, lightroom sorts/organises/edits your photos for you.
 

csgaraglino

Senior Member
The problem that I am running into is when searching for something - I am either having to filter out all the personal images of vice versa - all the commercial images.
 

csgaraglino

Senior Member
Learn how to use Lightroom and it pros and cons. There are a lot of videos to help you. Google is your friend.

Simple terms, lightroom sorts/organises/edits your photos for you.

I have a pretty good handle on LR - I was just looking for the workflow of some of the other folks who shoot both commercially and personally - this is more of a best practice or personal preference vs technical functional of the application.
 

Scott Murray

Senior Member
I have a pretty good handle on LR - I was just looking for the workflow of some of the other folks who shoot both commercially and personally - this is more of a best practice or personal preference vs technical functional of the application.
Awesome let me know how you go, ps it could help having 2 catalogues. 1 for personal and one for professional or even one per client. But of course you would have to choose to select individual catalogues. Or you could save as individual collections ETC. the beauty of work flow wis its the same as photography what works for you works for you. But then again what do I know :) . Have fun.
 
I have only 1 catalog and it covers a lot of shooting. I have folder for years with dates from that month under it. It is starting to get difficult to navigate since I shoot every day almost. I am thinking about some other way to organize it at this point. The first way may to be a different catalog for each yer and then go from there.
 

Scott Murray

Senior Member
Screen Shot 2016-09-27 at 1.28.58 am.pngScreen Shot 2016-09-27 at 1.29.09 am.pngScreen Shot 2016-09-27 at 1.29.36 am.png
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
The problem that I am running into is when searching for something - I am either having to filter out all the personal images of vice versa - all the commercial images.

That isn't a problem with a single catalogue as much as it is a problem with your naming conventions. I use a single catalogue because I don't want to load/unload search across multiple catalogues...

I import stuff using the yr/month/day date construct... after weeding out the chaff, I re-name (retaining the date) the catalogue entry for that batch...

so I might end up with something like...

2016
09-26 Commercial Jones Wedding
09-27 Food Cheesecake shoot
09-28 Trip Yelleowstone Park
 

cwgrizz

Senior Member
Challenge Team
Not to take this on too much of a rabbit chase, but I (probably like many here) have problems with tagging and naming conventions. I shoot such a hodgepodge of photos in a day, each one needs it's own naming/tagging. I usually can't group them into anything more than the date shot. The other thing is how far do you go with tagging ie Wildlife; Birds; dove, owl...
 

cbg

Senior Member
Not to take this on too much of a rabbit chase, but I (probably like many here) have problems with tagging and naming conventions. I shoot such a hodgepodge of photos in a day, each one needs it's own naming/tagging. I usually can't group them into anything more than the date shot. The other thing is how far do you go with tagging ie Wildlife; Birds; dove, owl...

Tagging can be a problem. For wildlife, especially birds, I tag them by location, "bird" and species. I keep everything in folders by year and date taken. I'm sure there are better ways, but this seems to work for me.
 

nickt

Senior Member
I import everything to 'Pictures'. They automatically go to dated subfolders. General pictures stay that way. Special occasions get moved to a specially named folder. Like a 'Vacation' folder with subfolders of Vacation 2015, Vacation 2016, etc.
You could have a main picture folder and under that a Personal and Commercial folder. You can change import destination, but that is a good way to aggravate yourself when you forget. I would just import to Pictures and drag to personal or commercial after importing. You can further organize into addition folders. Of course you must do this moving using Lightroom.

When you search, you don't have to search from the highest level folder, you can drop down to a lower level subfolder and just search from that level to constrain your search just to that branch.
 

GracieAllen

Senior Member
I read through this topic and didn't see the question asked and answered, but it may have been... You said you shoot commercially and personally. How frequently do your searches for images encompass both types of shooting? If the answer is rarely or never (why would you be searching personal images along with commercial ones?) then having separate catalogs would seem to make sense.

I recently taught a 2-week Lightroom class, and just finished this week a class on organizing, and pretty much everyone struggles with exactly what and how they want their data and metadata organized. And exactly what workflow will work best for them.

I shoot events and have those in a separate event-based catalog. My personal images are in a catalog organized largely according to the DAM method (using buckets for storage and non-contextual naming conventions).
 

Danno

Senior Member
I have several catalogs. I create a new catalog every year, plus I have catalogs based on categories like family photos and graduation photos... these I do for friends. I found LR runs better then when I have one huge catalog, especially on loading and backing up etc.
 

GracieAllen

Senior Member
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.
 
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