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The Power of Catalog Re-organization
One of the very few annoying things in my Lightroom Experience has been what I perceived as the awkwardness of storing and moving my photographs to different media and drives as my work moved along. Often, in fact, if I was shooting a big job for one client, I'd just do all the "Lightroom" processing for that job in Camera Raw and store those files in their own folder. After all, I'm not usually going to use those photos to submit as stock or sell as fine art. To boot, not having hundreds of 16MB files in the Lightroom Library speeds everything else up quite a bit.
I knew that Lightroom 1.1+ makes it a lot easier to create separate catalogs for different purposes, but I was just lazy enough to stick with the system I had. The irony is, now that I'm working in a foreign country with only one computer at my disposal (my laptop, of course), working with one catalog is getting to be more, rather than less problematical. The main reason for that is that there just isn't enough room on my laptop hard drive for the library of pictures I want to have at my disposal;especially since I'm wanting to spend a lot of my time here creating collections for submission to various stock agencies.
So I've decided that I want separate catalogs for separate major categories of photos (and, yes, Miscellaneous is one of them): Abstracts, Architecture, Elements for Composites (skies, backgrounds, props, etc.), Glamour, Portraits, Landscapes, Cityscapes, Journalism, Equipment and Screens (for books, articles, and blogs), and Stock and Exhibit. Those are the categories that come to mind for me. Illustrations for my books and articles will generally come right out of the Stock and Exhibit collections. All of these categories will be stored on external hard drives. I'll have the pertinent hard drive hooked up to my laptop (or the new desktop, whenever that arrives) for the most frequently-used of these categories. As time and experience warrant, I'll move the least-used files to a second external hard drive, which is also where my client catalogs (one for each major repeat client and one for all the others) are located.
There is also a Laptop collection that combines any photos that are recent downloads and one big collection that's a subset of the Stock and Exhibit collection so that I'm likely to have a set of images that I can pull a quick illustration from when needed.
Subsets of these catalogs can always be shown by searching for a subset keyword.
Next week, I'll talk about the process I'm using to create, sort, and move images into these catalogs and where I'm putting them. I guarantee you though, that the first thing I'm going to do is eliminate the close duplicates, to create new catalogs for each of the categories I've listed above, and to begin backing up the subset "collections" keywords for each keyword onto gold archival DVDs. And yes, it's going to take a while to fully implement all of this and I don't currently have an assistant to do it for me.
One last thing: For those who work in a corporation or in teams and have to share computers, each of you can create your own catalogs and still use the same computer and installation of Lightroom.
So, until then, then. Also, I'm going to compare Lightroom's Clarity slider to Fred Miranda's Velvia Vision plug-in at some time in the very near future.
Comments (4)
With multiple Catalogs you can't search across them, which negates DAM. Other than performance problems with extremely large catalogs (I mean those with 50-60,000 images) there is little benefit to splitting them up. And for those with performance problems maybe try the optimize function.
The real benefit of other Catalogs is for traveling with a laptop on a location shoot, and reimporting to the main Catalog at the end.
I'm not sure this advice is that useful
That's precisely why we would need a kind of 'meta' catalog, allowing us to browse through different ones. It could store catalogs previews only and still let us perform searches within metadata.
The catalog concept is interesting and convenient but we need something above, storing references to catalogs and their pics (online and offline).
I sort of agree with Richard, but I have felt obligated to create different catergory catalogs based on Ken's comments above.
One issue I have is wanting to move an image from one category (catalog) to another.
Remove from catalog and then open the other and re-import.
This is bound to create more problems down the road. What will happen when a picture is an Exhibit and Landscapes?
On the main computer, keep one large catalog, but when moving away for a limited time, just export a subset as an independent catalog. When coming back you can reunite them quite easily (I do keywording on my laptop when I'm away).