Monstrous Lightroom Catalog.. When to Start Anew?

D-B-J

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I currently have 12k+ images in my lightroom catalog, with another 1000+ in quick collection, etc. I feel like it's all too big. Too clunky. Slow for editing. When do I start anew? And to that end, how do I start new? I've thought of editing/hosting photos locally, then transferring them to a main catalog, but I don't really know the best way to do that. Thoughts?

Cheers!
Jake

P.S., currently running a 2015 Macbook Pro, with the catalog and photos hosted on an external G-Drive, which I need to connect before opening lightroom.
 
When I got a new computer a year ago, I began creating new catalogs for each major event (each wedding, race, or even, or broad categories, such as one for our puppy), and then filing all the catalogs under a folder. Sometimes it's annoying if I'm switching back and forth between catalogs, but much easier to find what I'm looking for
 
When I got a new computer a year ago, I began creating new catalogs for each major event (each wedding, race, or even, or broad categories, such as one for our puppy), and then filing all the catalogs under a folder. Sometimes it's annoying if I'm switching back and forth between catalogs, but much easier to find what I'm looking for
That's a good idea. I never thought of trying it that way to further separate categories of photos. Up to this point I was breaking it apart by year, 2013, 2014, 2015 ... which makes finding things sometimes a bit difficult.
 
I'm unsure whether its the best, easiest, or most practical method, but it has worked for me so far. I can easily open "Jessica + Bryan's Wedding", and know that everything from that day is in one place, and never have to search through thousands of photos to find that one event or gig.
 
When I started with LR I made a number of Catalogs. Now I tend to have one for every couple years. I think it can depend on what you shoot. I put events in Collections, these may cover part of a day or a few consecutive days.

I have some subjects that have their own Collection that would be similar to product photography (for 2010 to 2013 I pulled those out of the year catalog and those images are now in their own catalog - and I can pull those out from the current catalog and import them into that catalog at the end of this year).

I like to try and make as much use of the LR database capabilities so the more images in one Catalog the better. Not sure at what point things can slow down - currently 48k photos. For example today I worked on images that were all in the one Catalog covering 2014 and 2015 and the subjects were all varied so if I used multiple Catalogs I would not have worked on all these images.

I am also using a 2015 Macbook Pro and have the catalog on the SSD and RAW files on an external drive.
 
When I started with LR I made a number of Catalogs. Now I tend to have one for every couple years. I think it can depend on what you shoot. I put events in Collections, these may cover part of a day or a few consecutive days.

I have some subjects that have their own Collection that would be similar to product photography (for 2010 to 2013 I pulled those out of the year catalog and those images are now in their own catalog - and I can pull those out from the current catalog and import them into that catalog at the end of this year).

I like to try and make as much use of the LR database capabilities so the more images in one Catalog the better. Not sure at what point things can slow down - currently 48k photos. For example today I worked on images that were all in the one Catalog covering 2014 and 2015 and the subjects were all varied so if I used multiple Catalogs I would not have worked on all these images.

I am also using a 2015 Macbook Pro and have the catalog on the SSD and RAW files on an external drive.

My catalog AND files are external. Maybe I should host the catalog on the SSD?

Jake


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Best to have the catalog on the SSD. Just checked and mine is at 1.6 gb in size. The catalog backups are not on the SSD as they go to the external drive, and that drive is backed up on two other external drives.
 

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