Photo archiving sistem for hobby photographers

[ann]

Mine is not as involved, very basic , but works for me.

Import all images from the card into a folder i.e. Rome (all orginals) then i have a subfolder called rome work files (place images I have worked on in that folder), then another subfolder rome prints.

I am not a fan of LR which really isn't important.

Then i have 4 archival copies on 4 different external hard drives (don't keep them on my working computer until i work on them) one drive on site.

 

[KmH]

So basically you have one folder for your Catalogs and one folder with photos?
That is simple, but then you have all the photos you have ever taken in one huge LR Catalog, if I understand this right?

Lightroom's biggest drawback is it can only access 1 Catalog at a time, and can only be accessed by one user/computer at a time.
However, a catalog can have many 'Collections'.

Since Lightroom's main functions is image database management, it's main reason for existing is image database search/retrieval.

If you have multiple Catalogs, you short circuit Lightroom's main function.

 

[Primoz]

Thanks for the response, guys! =) My main goal with this tread was to help me find any holes in my workflow.

I have decided to keep only two lightroom catalogs - a huge "Master Catalog" and a small "Costumer Catalog" - just to separate the bussines from private.
I won't export any of my raw files into jpegs and keep ALL photos in One huge database, controlled by Lightroom with the two catalogs.

I have one question though... Where is the technically correct place to keep my lightroom catalogs?
Till now I had a dedicated hard drive for Photos and on this hard drive there's a folder "Photos" with all the photos in it and a folder "Lightroom Catalogs" (created by me manually) with all the Lightroom catalogs in it...
Is that ok? Because I watched a video, where they had the lightroom catalog and photos in the same folder - is this technically better?

 

[KmH]

Yes, that is OK.

 

[dbvirago]

As long as both are backed up adequately, I don't think it matters. Remember, you can always build a new catalog if you have the images, but the opposite is not true