Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should : one or many Lightroom catalogues Lightroom 1.1 made it easier to create and work with more than one catalogue, and it's making some people think that's how they should work. I'm not talking about when you're travelling or need to move pictures between computers, but as a routine way of working. Apart from seeing it in blog posts and forum threads, I've been asked about it on a couple of occasions recently, and was also forwarded a discussion where one photographer quoted from my book:  Another way to think of Lightroom is as a centralized inventory system managing a warehouse - you no longer need to look through each pallet or bin to find the parts. And as your business grows, and you rent the neighbouring warehouses too, you still only need one system to keep control of your work.
The trouble is that those who are actually advocating the idea of using multiple catalogues (eg another one popped up just today at O'Reilly's blog and has a particularly rich selection of dumb ideas) never reflect all that deeply on their true reasons for doing so. When you read between the lines, there are essentially two strands to their arguments: - It's a workaround for performance problems they've experienced with large catalogues
- They're working "Bridge-style" and don't really think about DAM
Looking first at the "necessity" argument, if it is indeed so, then clearly you do have no alternative. Just don't believe, let alone advocate, that such working methods are the Holy Grail of good practice. Is it necessary anyway? That's a maybe. It is not yet possible to give simple guidelines (unlike iView's 2Gb file size limit) for when a Lightroom catalogue might run up against a performance limit*. As a DAM program and image processor, Lightroom probes most areas of your computer's operations, and let's also allow for the possibility of some less than optimal code. Many factors other than the number of records in the database could be degrading performance, and so you may not really gain much, if anything, from splitting it up into smaller catalogues. If performance limits did indeed force you to break your work up into multiple catalogues, there's plenty to lose. For one thing, there is no better way to let some of your pictures slip through the cracks when you forget to import one folder, or when you add more images to a folder and forget to update the Lightroom catalogue covering those folders. As well as omitting items, you can easily duplicate them. Images may end up recorded in more than one catalogue, with adjustments and their descriptive metadata diverging, keyword spellings too, singular here, plural there. And unless your search needs are very primitive, you're going to have to repeat searches in each catalogue file. So there's a time cost. Frankly, while you may think you are smart enough to cope with such a "system", few of us are, not for long anyway. So multiple catalogues need to be used sparingly, if at all, and need to be tied to physical locations that you can control without thinking - one for the Raid, one for each drive etc - and not to how you analyse your work at a certain point in time. I do use them, after shooting a wedding or event, or when travelling. I like to have a temporary catalogue, usually on the Mac laptop so I can run through pictures while watching United winning on the telly. But once I've decided which images to keep, I'll copy it over to the main PC and import the catalogue into my main one. So the multiple catalogues are for convenience and portability and are temporary residences, like brief affairs after which you always go back to your true love - you never forget who's really the boss. I might budge from this hard "one ring" line if divisions are enforced externally. Say you moonlighted as a wedding shooter and wanted no risk of your regular employer seeing the personal work. Or if you don't want client A to see client B pictures, use a temporary catalogue in front of clients. Another strong reason might be if you shot something you didn't want the kids to see. And let's not forget the other main reason for advocating multiple catalogues is that some people work "Bridge-style". They archive the job catalogue after finishing the work, or in some cases they delete it and start afresh on the next job. Some wedding and event photographers can work this way - after all, they may be right in thinking that if they ever need to find some pictures, they'll look up the client or date in their desk diary and then find the archived catalogue. Of course, they also have portfolio catalogues, others for jobs shot over a period that don't really fit the date structure, others by client, others for images that they might keep needing, another for personal photos.... In other words they are not using a chunk of Lightroom's capabilities and maybe they "don't need DAM". Maybe they don't, but let's be clear that this is their true reasoning and acknowledge that their systems are little better than amateur. I started off with the analogy of a warehouse. Another is with a book. Does a book have an index for each chapter or one for the whole body of work? *As a detail, my biggest test catalogue contains 75000 images and runs OK - most of the time - on a 4 year old PC. I've a lot more hands on database experience than most photographers and I've not seen anything that makes me question Lightroom's database engine - and I do dig around and abuse it, believe me. Frankly 75000 isn't a big number in database terms - add a zero before I start getting concerned. Permalink Category: Lightroom21 comments |
I wholeheartedly agree. The biggest benefit to tagging and metadata in general is when it spans an entire collection. Otherwise, you're just back to a variation of the old hierarchical file system. That's certainly useful for organization, too, but I prefer not to sacrifice the benefits of a cross-hierarchy system such as tagging.
Excellent article, John, thanks for sharing your views. I've seen this debated many times on forums and having read 'The DAM Book' and spending time reading yours, Peter's and other's posts on the book's forum I wholeheartedly agree with you. You have explained your reasons extremely well and I'll be sure to reference this article in future when debating this subject.
Multiple catalogs are brilliant: self-contained packages of everything I need and nothing I don't. That L'Oreal shoot from August? …all in this folder. The L'Oreal shoot from June? …in the other folder. And the Nike shoot from last month? …in the folder over here. I have no need or interest in mixing shoots and seeing irrelevant stuff. And in the wee hours of the night when I'm done retouching… load up the personal catalog and get to work on pictures of the baby. Posted by: Enrique on Nov 21, 07 | 2:10 pm
Enrique, but what about the small shoot for a prospective client, the one you shot between other jobs in June? Ah, those pictures didn't get in any catalogue at all - maybe they were in the one on the laptop and you copied across the images but not the catalogue. In other words, pictures slip through the cracks if you rely on multiple catalogues and your memory.
And what happens when your L'Oreal shoot changes its name after the product's sold to Chanel? So you now have Chanel catalogues and L'Oreal ones, or go back renaming? Or take other fields such as landscape/travel - countries change names and divide. Go back renaming? In time you're going to have duplication or need an application to catalogue your catalogues.
Of course, some people may have limited search requirements and be able to get away with using multiple catalogues to mimic their folder system. But it's not a good starting point to control most archives. Posted by: John on Nov 21, 07 | 2:46 pm
Couldn't agree more. I did a multiple catlogue experiment, while maintaing a full one "just in case," and quickly ran up against proof, at least in for me, of your statement "Frankly, while you may think you are smart enough to cope with such a "system", few of us are, not for long anyway." Posted by: Dan on Nov 21, 07 | 3:07 pm
I agree also, however, on my machine, for performance sake, i use 2 different catalogs. one of them i use when i import new photos. this is the one where i make any quick modifications to and assign any keywords that i need to. once done with them, i import them into my "archive" catalog.
i found, for my system and configuration, that doing edits and the like to my photos, is much quicker if the catalog has very little in it. Posted by: Marc on Nov 21, 07 | 4:38 pm
It doesn't have to be quite so black and white!
I started out using more than one library because I was worried (early beta) of performance issues. Adobe isn't telling (everyone) the max number of images a catalog can accept without exploding.
Then I read Peter's DAM book, the idea of buckets seemed good. I ended up with 3 50gig buckets. We all know the problems (I'm using bucket/catalog 1, the image I want is in another bucket). Then there's the issue of transporting images on the road. External buss powered FireWire drives that I'd hook up to the Laptop were 160 gigs. That would mean for many of us, no way to take all our images unless you didn't mind hauling around a huge, powered by the wall drive.
What I ended up doing was this: I have a folder structure on the main master Raid. With 3 catalogs, each accesses the folders of images. Then I made a NEW catalog, imported all three smaller catalogs accessing the images in their original locations (import at current location). This new mongo catalog references all the images in their original locations. IF I update the master mongo catalog, and I want Catalog #1 to reference the changes, its quick doing either Sync Folder or Import Catalog. You can go in either direction (smaller to larger catalog, larger to smaller catalog).
What I now have are three buckets and I can take one on an external drive, or just open when I know that's all I want to access. I also have one big (mongo) catalog of all the other catalogs. Key is (and its a bit of work), making sure that when I need a smaller catalog to see updates from the big mongo catalog, I do a sync or import. But as I said, this is quite fast. If I decide to build a fourth 50 gig catalog (which I will), I do that and import the contents into the big mongo catalog.
if I want to take one of the smaller catalogs on the road, I just export and move the Raws to that drive. If I make changes, I simply update to the master drive (and tell LR to move the newer files onto this drive). With what Adobe has done with import/export and Sync, it works pretty darn well. But I do have to say, when I want to do major organizing, one big catalog is the way to go. Oh, and if you have two folders of images on two smaller catalogs you want to view as one on the big mongo catalog, no problem, just make a collection. Instead of having to look into two different folders of split images, the collection shows everything from both locations.
I was just thinking about your comment about Wedding photographers and their keeping each shoot in separate catalogues and wondered about the merits of that versus one central DB.
As the content of most wedding will probably keyword almost identically, the benefits of DAM are much less than say for a stock photographer. All that will differentiate most weddings are the couple's names, the location and the date. So if you simply have a HD with all the wedding on and label each wedding folder with the Names, location and date, then finding the wedding you want, will simply be a matter of quickly scanning the folder names. Or the spines of archived DVDs on a shelf. This also aids archiving as the images and database are together, so a bit more disaster proof as you've distributed the DB.
Now if you want to find the best images amongst all catalogues that would however be a pain, unless when processing the shoot you added any stunning shots, to say a separate portfolio folder and then you simply look in that folder rather than searching 50,000 images for the 40 best shots ranked 5 stars.
I also know a very successful wedding photographer whose business model gives the couple all the processed images on a DVD, so they don't have the hassle of doing prints etc months later. They charge an awful lot upfront instead of making money on prints afterwards.
So they could simply bin the images, apart from anything that may be useful for marketing. Posted by: jjj on Nov 21, 07 | 6:26 pm
I like your post. I also use a travel catalog on my laptop and then import that into the main catalog on my Mac Pro when I return with all the nice meta added and shots developed out. A great feature.
I general I agree with your post here and thing that creating another catalog should be done with great thought. Having a technical background, I think of it as another name space. There are reasons to have multiple name spaces, and I think there are reasons to have multiple catalogs.
I'm curious if people have thoughts on the one I've been pondering. I've been scanning some old negatives from 20-30 years ago. I've put these into Lightroom but I've considered the benefits of putting them in a separate catalog. Thoughts?
Andrew, yes I do put things in rather black and white terms but I do also throw in a few caveats starting with "I'm not talking about when you're travelling or need to move pictures between computers, but as a routine way of working". It's great that LR gives us the flexibility to use multiple catalogues as needed and I regularly peel off catalogues for specific demos or work through a shoot on the laptop - but the mongo catalogue is always there as the rock (I'm still maintaining parallel iView catalogues, but that's me). Most of all, I'd hate to see people following siren advice to break up perfectly-good mongo catalogues by category of work.
jjj, I've met wedding shooters who choose either method and I think you've hit the nail firmly on the head. In this market, LR is more rewarding as a bulk processor, making it easy to correct large volumes of pictures, and then spew out b&w versions, sepia versions, web images, images for the DVD etc. There's value and timesaving in those tasks, but much less long term value in the non-portfolio images. Posted by: John on Nov 21, 07 | 7:05 pm
>but the mongo catalogue is always there as the rock
Indeed. And I consider that my master catalog now and use the splitter catalogs if you will only for special needs, like traveling or to keep tasks focused. There's no question, a big catalog is best up until you can't move it elsewhere or it bogs down which so far, hasn't luckily happened to me. But I don't shoot that much. I wonder about people who need X-Serves to store terabytes of images each year and how this will work with LR (well I would submit it can't).
What I'd really like to see someday in LR is collection spanning. I also think that Adobe needs to keep pushing the toolset so we can merge data in the event that a single catalog simply isn't possible.
Bottom line however is, one big catalog is more effective than multiple catalogs, that much I've learned since combining my three buckets into one.
I keep my images in separate folders named for the date of import to LR, however all in the same catalogue.
Does anyone see any disadvantage to this or is this the norm? Posted by: Rusty on Nov 22, 07 | 4:12 am
Pretty well the norm, though using the shooting date rather than import date. Posted by: John on Nov 22, 07 | 5:38 am
>"I keep my images in separate folders named for the date of import to LR, however all in the same catalogue. Does anyone see any disadvantage to this or is this the norm?"
Date of capture would make more sense, as you may empty several days worth of images onto a computer at a time or you may upload some birthday pictures 2 days later, after the hangover has worn off!
Filing by date taken is fine and often used, that's my primary method of filing personal stuff and work stuff. Though big or repeat projects tend to go into separate categories of their own. BTW, both Bridge and LR allow you to upload images to into folders automatically sorted by date. Posted by: jjj on Nov 22, 07 | 7:19 pm
Using iVMP, I split my images into separate catalogs not because of the image limit but based on subject matter. I got away with it only because iVMP allows you to search for images in the current and other catalogs even if they weren't opened. Since LR, as far as I know, doesn't allow for that then I totally agree one catalog is best from the user perspective. However, I still fear having a single large catalog and then all of a sudden something fails and it all comes crashing down. I have my fingers crossed that Adobe performs serious long term large catalog testing.
One of my gripes with LR is its limited search capabilities. Can't save em, can't search within a particular field, can't search for images with/without adjustments, and can't search across multiple catalogs. Posted by: lenny on Nov 27, 07 | 11:30 pm
John, I agree that the single catalog is the ultimate goal and as far as most Lightroom users are concerned, a single catalog is all they need to be using. It is much easier to split work up into categories through keywords rather than physically splitting them up into multiple catalogs. However, I have a large collection of archive work that is four years or older that is kept stored on separate drives. These mostly stay offline. For the time being at least, I have found it convenient to manage these as a separate catalog. For one, I find the red off-line folder status annoying in the Folders panel and I don't want to have every hard drive switched on all day long. Plus, in my line of work these images are outdated and I rarely need to access them. When I find the ideal storage solution that will allow me to securely store everything in one location, I will eventually merge these into one catalog. And you know, for all those out there who have been swayed by the multi-catalog approach, it is really easy for them to do likewise and merge all their catalogs back into. Posted by: Martin Evening on Dec 12, 07 | 9:33 am
I only have one catalog, and I'm happy with it.
I also want to add to Martin Evenings post even if it might be a bit off topic...
I'm also a bit annoyed by the red off-line folders, but not only when they are off... It's more annoying when they are on... Since I don't always have them on, and then need to turn them on to find/work on some images, they don't get the same drive letter as they had when importing the images. That is also the case even if I turn them on before booting the PC. What is the best way to avoid this? I know I can change the drive letter, but I don't want to do that every time, and sometimes my built in card reader has got a drive letter that one of my external hard drives had before. Is there some way of "reserve" a drive letter in Windows?
Sorry if I went off topic here. Posted by: Håkan Olsson on Jan 12, 08 | 6:32 pm
Hakan, you need to go to Device Manger/Disk Management and there you can assign any Drive Letter that is not currently being used to your ext or even int. drives. Though do not alter your drives with your OS or programmes on it, just the drives that are empty or store data like photos, music...etc.
So the best way to do change letters is to attach only one ext HD to start with and then assign letter you want, add another HD, change letter and so on. I have 12 ext HDs in 6 pairs attached with each pair being K,L; V,W; Y,Z etc for ease of finding them in my file manager. I also attach them to my laptop and assign them the same letters. That way if my main machine dies, my laptop can just get the external drives added and away I go. Posted by: jjj on Jan 12, 08 | 9:43 pm
I have one catalog with network storage. How can I share it between two PC's. Lightroom does not allow a catalog to be located on a network drive. Any ideas on how to manage this better? Posted by: Bill on Apr 15, 08 | 11:49 pm
No easy way yet - I just copy the whole catalogue across. Posted by: John on Apr 16, 08 | 10:24 am
The only and only reason to think about seperating my dear huge catalog is the suspect on that threatening "performance limit". 75K was a good number to be informed practically. I have 15K items yet but still worry as I target an ideal infinitive. Saving metadata back to files may be helpfull for any possible migration in future, as new versions (or alternative catalougers) may yield better solutions. LR have to fascilate (1) more easy operations moving items through catalogs (2) multiple launches and dragdrops (3) keyword search among multiple catalogs with result catalog etc. With current features, multiple cataloging is headache for especially those aim to manage photo warehouses. Posted by: Coskun Pinar on Jun 04, 08 | 7:07 am |
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Create a new catalog
Using Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder, locate the catalog folder you created and drag it to the trash. 
Anita Dennis said on Oct 4, 2007 at 9:41 AM : 
var addthis_pub = 'oreillynetwork'; 
Another habit of mine, especially when I am working with a large number of images, is to go in occasionally and have Lightroom export the metadata and develop settings to the XMP sidecars just in case something goes wrong. To do this, first select all the images you’d like to export metadata and develop settings for, then go to Metadata > Save Metadata to File as in the image below. 
Some other photographers I have consulted with have had massive crashing issues with Lightroom but it wasn’t the software. It turned out to be bad RAM. Lightroom, and all imaging applications can tax the RAM and your computers processing engine, and expose weaknesses in the hardware that other applications won’t. Once the RAM was swapped out there were no more issues at all. I’ve spoken with a few people who have had this problem and I have to say I am surprised it is a somewhat frequent issue. All this is to say buy your RAM from reputable dealers and don’t go for the cheap stuff. That’s it for this session. See you next week…. Adios, Michael Clark 
