My first love is landscape photography, but sometimes I need to resort to other types of photography to support my habit. This means doing product, stock, and portrait photography on a semi-regular basis. Especially with product and portrait work, I seldom need to return to images after an assignment, but I can’t afford to get rid of them completely either. Still, they take up space and add to the list of folders and collections in Lightroom.
Along the lines of James Duncan Davidson’s blog post of March 2, I’ve decided to use multiple catalogs to help my workflow. Unlike James though, I have a very easy way to tell where images might live. All my portrait work goes into a dedicated portraits catalog, which makes it easy to find clients when needed and has the added benefit of reducing the number of keywords in my main catalog.
The exception, and it seems that there is always an exception to everything, is stock photography. Originally I planned to have a dedicated stock catalog like I do for product and portrait work. But, I quickly realized that while I might shoot certain images specifically for stock, I’m often going through product and general images for specific stock requests. So, rather than a standalone catalog for stock, I use a combination of keywords and collections across multiple catalogs. If I shoot a subject specifically for stock, it goes into either the product or general catalog depending on the subject matter, tagged with the stock keyword, and when the image is submitted I add it to the stock collection.
I also use temporary catalogs when shooting in the field and editing on my laptop. I do my initial edits and keywording in the evenings, and when I get back I merge the images into the appropriate catalog on my office system. I also have the option to update the XMP file automatically selected to insure my keywords and adjustments migrate to the new catalog. Go to File > Catalog Settings and select the Metadata panel, then check the Automatically write changes into XMP checkbox.
I find that using multiple catalogs streamlines my workflow, and if you have the type of imagery that lends itself to this type of division, you might give it a try. If you decide it doesn’t work for you, it’s easy enough to merge everything into a single catalog.