how to organize my photos in lightroom

[daniela]

I purchased Lightroom CC some weeks ago and I sorted my photos. Reduced them radically. Now there are still 15.000 shots left.
How should I organzize them in Lightroom?
Making one catalogue and marking them by keywords, or better create seperate - smaller - catalogues where I put picturegroups in (wildlife, family, landscape,....) and providing them with cues?

Will my computer (I6600, 16GB, SSD 256 GB & 2x 2TB, 4K monitor) be slowed down, if I use only one catalogue?
If I use seperate catalogues, I could sort them and move all belonging shots into special folder.

What would you do?

G
Daniela

 

[Mikehit]

It sounds like you have 15,000 images in total.
The beauty of LR is that it is such a powerful cataloging tool that your main consideration will be speed and if you have 'only' 15,000 images I see no real benefit to multiple catalogs.

I have a i5 processor with 12GB RAM and all my images (45,000) are on an external 2TB HD with USB2 connection. I have found that it started to really slow down when the images were on a 1TB drive and occupied >70% of the HD and upgrading the external HD to 2TB really helped and I am installing a USB3 port as well.
I suspect the catalog, for my system, has reached a size that I should consider splitting it but speed is still not so bad it causes a problem and I think my greater priority is to weed out the duds.

 

[bwud]

The only advantages I have found to multiple catalogs is during active sessions. I import each shoot to its own unique catalog and, when work is complete, I then import that catalog into my master.

I thereby am not bogged down by hundreds of thousands of history steps, and in my case it keeps everything solid state until I'm done working with it.

 

[mnclayshooter]

I purchased Lightroom CC some weeks ago and I sorted my photos. Reduced them radically. Now there are still 15.000 shots left.
How should I organzize them in Lightroom?
Making one catalogue and marking them by keywords, or better create seperate - smaller - catalogues where I put picturegroups in (wildlife, family, landscape,....) and providing them with cues?

Will my computer (I6600, 16GB, SSD 256 GB & 2x 2TB, 4K monitor) be slowed down, if I use only one catalogue?
If I use seperate catalogues, I could sort them and move all belonging shots into special folder.

What would you do?

G
Daniela

My methodology (and I'm by no means an expert... more like I'm a bumbling idiot most of the time):

Most of my photos are chronological in nature... annual vacation photos, wildlife, and landscapes I've shot over time (which is somewhat obvious... all photos are photos shot over time, right?). I had a similar catalog conundrum earlier this year... I had a big library starting to build up in one huge catalog. Here's what I did:

I broke it apart and stored catalogs by year... it definitely helps speed things up when opening and closing the catalog/lightroom and makes the catalog files a bit smaller for archiving purposes.

If your catalog is more subject-based - meaning you have varied subject matter - you could save them as: portraits, landscapes and nature or something to that effect. It's hard to pick the broad categories for me though it usually will mean breaking a set of photos into different catalogs... for example: on a trip to the Rockies, I took photos of mountains, birds, deer, and a few of myself and my fiancée. How do I catalog that set of photos? I chose by year because I want that set of photos to stay together and used keywords to differentiate the different subjects. If you're shooting for clients repetitively, you could make catalogs just for them to keep them sorted and be able to archive by client name.


I go back to my original thought which is the archives. It generally is better to have multiple smaller files than one huge one in the event that your backup process isn't as rigorous as it probably should be. Smaller files are easier, in general to manage on multiple types of media, and in general tend to have less loss/corruption due to disk failures/bad sectors etc.... again in GENERAL. Some operating systems, even it today's day and age of technology, still choke or mis-handle files when they get TOO large. Also, When a drive "goes bad"... you might be able to recover most of your files, but not some. If they're all looped into one giant file, will you be able to recover it?

Storing by year seems to solve most of those problems... your storage system can handle the main and backup copies of older years... you'll access them much less frequently than the current year... and older years become true archives - you don't normally add anything new to an older year unless you have work that was incomplete etc.. the beauty is, once you get to next year, last year's go into the archive. I go back and re-process a file now and again - especially when new versions are released or when my skills have improved and I know how to do something better/more effectively, but it's not that frequent.

 

[Mikehit]

One thing to consider is that there is a difference between having multiple catalogs and having photographs stored in different places. LR catalog is a database and as ever, the larger the database the longer it takes to process them.
You can have a single directory or 200,000 images but multiple catalogs relating to that directory. So you can have loads of wildlife pictures from a tour to S Africa and you can have 2 catalogs: one of 'holidays' with all the thumbnails and one of 'wildlife' with all the thumbnails. The fact they overlap and have 50% of their images is in common is irrelevant - when you pull up the catalog and filter, search and edit you are only updating the dataset for the catalog not all 200,000 images.

Whether you choose to have images in separate directories is a different decision.

 

[privatebydesign]

One thing to consider is that there is a difference between having multiple catalogs and having photographs stored in different places. LR catalog is a database and as ever, the larger the database the longer it takes to process them.
You can have a single directory or 200,000 images but multiple catalogs relating to that directory. So you can have loads of wildlife pictures from a tour to S Africa and you can have 2 catalogs: one of 'holidays' with all the thumbnails and one of 'wildlife' with all the thumbnails. The fact they overlap and have 50% of their images is in common is irrelevant - when you pull up the catalog and filter, search and edit you are only updating the dataset for the catalog not all 200,000 images.

Whether you choose to have images in separate directories is a different decision.

That is not a sound approach.

If you had an image in two catalogs and edited it in one you would have to remember which catalog you did this edits in if you wanted to see them, unless you write to XMP and update all images every time you open a catalog, which isn't efficient nor sounds like fun.

 

[JPAZ]

In the past I used to have a separate catalogue for each folder and each folder was labeled (ie, "So and So's" Birthday - Aug 2013). I was concerned that one huge catalogue placed me at risk to lose a lot of work should I get a drive failure or a corruption. What this caused was a nightmare because I had to open a folder and change catalogues each time I needed to access photos.

Now, I have 1 catalogue. The tree down the left side has my folders, still labeled like before, but I can move from folder to folder easily. With Keywords, I can extract images from anywhere (ie, "Birthdays"). My catalogue gets backed up continuously to the cloud and gets a hard backup whenever I backup to an external drive. Not perfect but works for me.

 

[JonAustin]

I wouldn't break my LR library of images into multiple catalogs unless I absolutely had to for performance reasons. Doing so, IMO, impairs one of the great features of LR, which is keywording images, and then being able to find images by keyword search.

That said, I file my images on disk in a well-organized and -documented manner: commercial images in a separate folder from personal; commercial images organized by client and then by job; personal images organized by year and then by month/event. And I have separate catalogs for commercial and personal libraries.

Also, I will remove folders from my commercial catalog if / when warranted, to keep it trim and manageable.

Finally, I do regular backups, including backing up (and optimizing) the catalog each time I exit LR, as well as backing up the local disk to a NAS at least weekly, as well as an automated daily backup of the NAS to a portable USB drive.

P.S. Only slightly off-topic: when I first import images into Lightroom, I name the destination folder starting with an underline character ("_"). This sorts the folder to the top of the list in its parent folder, which makes it easier to find, and serves as a reminder. After I have processed the folder (reviewed all the images, culled the discards, processed (and, optionally) exported the keepers), I remove the "_" character from the folder name, and it resorts in normal order within its parent folder.

 

[Lurker]

Look on the Adobe WEB site, they had some great video tutorials on how to setup and use LR.

If I remember, multiple catalogs are not recommended for most people. It just makes things more complex and increases the risk of human error. There is a reason they support multiple catalogs, I think it was for event shooters like graduations or auto races. In these cases there are a lot of photos with a single theme and a limited shelf life (The photos only sell within a couple months of the event). When sales dry up the entire catalog and all the photos can be deleted.

I use a single catalog and I have a folder for each year and under these folders are folders for each date/event I was out that year. I use LR features to group photos into collections which cut across the date/event folders. It really is powerful and easy to use so you can set things up so they make sense to you. I highly recommend the videos if they still have them.

 

[vlad]

Keep it all in one catalog. With your catalog on your SSD, there will be no performance problems that would outweigh the inconvenience of having to constantly re-launch Lightroom to find the right photo or the right shoot.

My LR workflow is pretty simple. Import all the photos on the card into a new folder, which starts with a date, e.g. '16_03_14_01 Pi Day Events. Since I'm usually only working with the last few folders, often I'm done at this point. Keywords, smart collections, and collections help take organization to the next level for things that I want to access later by category.

Sometimes the folder-based browsing feels too restrictive, and I just go to "All Photographs" to browse the entire collection - 67K for me so far.

Quick collection is great for when you are picking and choosing photos from all over the place but you want to work on them in one session. Keyboard shortcuts: "b" to add/remove a photo from quick collection, "ctrl+b" to go to the quick collection.

And while I'm on my workflow soapbox - I never got much use out of the color or star metadata. I think it depends on one's personality - I don't really want to try to discern between a 2-star or a 3-star photo. To me it's either something I'm really happy with (flag), worth keeping (no flag) or unnecessary (reject, then delete). The colors can be good for some internal categorization, such as marking which photos I've sent in for a contest. I think of colors as keywords that I don't want "polluting" the keyword pool.

Here are some keyboard shortcuts that really helped make Lightroom a gamechanger for me. Keep in mind that a lot of the shortcuts have a "preview" mode if you hold them down before releasing:
g (grid)
d (develop)
p (pick)
u (unpick)
x (reject)
ctrl+backspace (delete rejected)
ctrl+' (create new virtual copy)
\ (see the unedited photo)

There are many more that will help you with whatever your workflow is. Good luck!

 

[mnclayshooter]

I purchased Lightroom CC some weeks ago and I sorted my photos. Reduced them radically. Now there are still 15.000 shots left.
How should I organzize them in Lightroom?
Making one catalogue and marking them by keywords, or better create seperate - smaller - catalogues where I put picturegroups in (wildlife, family, landscape,....) and providing them with cues?

Will my computer (I6600, 16GB, SSD 256 GB & 2x 2TB, 4K monitor) be slowed down, if I use only one catalogue?
If I use seperate catalogues, I could sort them and move all belonging shots into special folder.

What would you do?

G
Daniela

My methodology (and I'm by no means an expert... more like I'm a bumbling idiot most of the time):

Most of my photos are chronological in nature... annual vacation photos, wildlife, and landscapes I've shot over time (which is somewhat obvious... all photos are photos shot over time, right?). I had a similar catalog conundrum earlier this year... I had a big library starting to build up in one huge catalog. Here's what I did:

I broke it apart and stored catalogs by year... it definitely helps speed things up when opening and closing the catalog/lightroom and makes the catalog files a bit smaller for archiving purposes.

If your catalog is more subject-based - meaning you have varied subject matter - you could save them as: portraits, landscapes and nature or something to that effect. It's hard to pick the broad categories for me though it usually will mean breaking a set of photos into different catalogs... for example: on a trip to the Rockies, I took photos of mountains, birds, deer, and a few of myself and my fiancée. How do I catalog that set of photos? I chose by year because I want that set of photos to stay together and used keywords to differentiate the different subjects. If you're shooting for clients repetitively, you could make catalogs just for them to keep them sorted and be able to archive by client name.


I go back to my original thought which is the archives. It generally is better to have multiple smaller files than one huge one in the event that your backup process isn't as rigorous as it probably should be. Smaller files are easier, in general to manage on multiple types of media, and in general tend to have less loss/corruption due to disk failures/bad sectors etc.... again in GENERAL. Some operating systems, even it today's day and age of technology, still choke or mis-handle files when they get TOO large. Also, When a drive "goes bad"... you might be able to recover most of your files, but not some. If they're all looped into one giant file, will you be able to recover it?

Storing by year seems to solve most of those problems... your storage system can handle the main and backup copies of older years... you'll access them much less frequently than the current year... and older years become true archives - you don't normally add anything new to an older year unless you have work that was incomplete etc.. the beauty is, once you get to next year, last year's go into the archive. I go back and re-process a file now and again - especially when new versions are released or when my skills have improved and I know how to do something better/more effectively, but it's not that frequent.

To clarify or more directly answer the OP question... I was seeing a lag/performance hit when opening the catalog and closing it, particularly when an LR does it's automated periodic optimization of the catalog and takes your screen hostage while it does that task. I didn't see a performance hit (or at least not a noticeable one) when simply working within the catalog as one huge catalog.

I was over 100k photos... probably closer to 125k, but I don't know the exact number. My computer: i7 with 16 GB RAM etc... point being is that it is a capable-enough computer for most tasks - my catalogs are stored on the computer with automated overnight backup to RAID/NAS, so there shouldn't be any network issues related to speed as LR isn't looking anywhere outside of the native computer's system.

Your catalog at 15k images is not that large. Keeping as one catalog right now is fine with the computer you've described. It is not very hard at all to break it into multiple catalogs in the future if you feel the need. It took me maybe an hour total to do so with mine - the hardest/longest segment being the one that contains only 35mm chrome slide scans and not digital RAW's with EXIF info etc - mainly because of the sheer quantity of different folders to be selected when exporting to a new catalog - (I scanned all of the slides I could get my hands on: slides from my own work, slides from my parent's collection from when we were kids etc)...

Others' posts about keyword searching is one of the biggest benefits to keeping it all as one catalog.

 

[JPAZ]

One more thought. If you are seeing slowing, clear / refresh the cache. I am not at my PC right now but it is easy to do and there are lots of tutorials on this. My catalogue is huge and sometimes things slow down but they improve after doinf this.

 

[sunnyVan]

Imagine 5 years from now, you want to search all your photos and find the ones that contain your friend John Smith. If you keep everything in one catalog, you simply search for John Smith, and then add some additional criteria such as >3 stars, taken with certain camera, etc. This is the beauty of LR and you should utilize it. It'll be such a mess if there're multiple catalogs.

15K photos are not that many. LR can handle 10 times that without any issue. For personal use, there's really not many reasons why create more than one catalog.

I create many "albums" in LR, marked as favorite family photos, wildlife, weddings, portraits, etc. It's not actually called album but I forgot what it's called right now. A set, I think? Anyway, you can add the same picture to multiple albums. So for example my favorite picture with my wife can be in family, portrait, and wedding albums at the same time. It's just like the same song can be in different albums in iTunes. After I postprocess my pictures I add them to these albums immediately. This is how I manage my photos. If you shoot commercial your workflow will be different.

I purchased Lightroom CC some weeks ago and I sorted my photos. Reduced them radically. Now there are still 15.000 shots left.
How should I organzize them in Lightroom?
Making one catalogue and marking them by keywords, or better create seperate - smaller - catalogues where I put picturegroups in (wildlife, family, landscape,....) and providing them with cues?

Will my computer (I6600, 16GB, SSD 256 GB & 2x 2TB, 4K monitor) be slowed down, if I use only one catalogue?
If I use seperate catalogues, I could sort them and move all belonging shots into special folder.

What would you do?

G
Daniela

 

[Ryananthony]

On a related note, hopefully not hijacking the thread, but I have a 2015 8gb ram 160(ithink) harddrive macbook pro. I don't have the space, obviously for an entire catalog for my photos. Currently I load photos on to desktop in folder upload to lightroom edit, then throw both finish jpg and raw to external 2tb. Thus leaving my catalog useless after my photos have been moved. Any tips? I've been tempted to purchase a iMac for both larger screen and larger internal HD. I've read that using lightroom through my external would be slow, so I've yet to try it.

 

[privatebydesign]

On a related note, hopefully not hijacking the thread, but I have a 2015 8gb ram 160(ithink) harddrive macbook pro. I don't have the space, obviously for an entire catalog for my photos. Currently I load photos on to desktop in folder upload to lightroom edit, then throw both finish jpg and raw to external 2tb. Thus leaving my catalog useless after my photos have been moved. Any tips? I've been tempted to purchase a iMac for both larger screen and larger internal HD. I've read that using lightroom through my external would be slow, so I've yet to try it.

Smart Previews. Your situation is what the feature was designed for.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/lightroom-smart-previews.html

 

[mnclayshooter]

On a related note, hopefully not hijacking the thread, but I have a 2015 8gb ram 160(ithink) harddrive macbook pro. I don't have the space, obviously for an entire catalog for my photos. Currently I load photos on to desktop in folder upload to lightroom edit, then throw both finish jpg and raw to external 2tb. Thus leaving my catalog useless after my photos have been moved. Any tips? I've been tempted to purchase a iMac for both larger screen and larger internal HD. I've read that using lightroom through my external would be slow, so I've yet to try it.

You could do this: have a small "throwaway" workflow catalog that is just the newest photos you're working on. Once you're done with the work and have done your export, you could then use LR to move the files to the external drive (this will preserve the links) to their final home, and then you can have a larger single LR catalog on the external drive that you then import the smaller catalog into as a single merged huge catalog.

One other way - you could have the single large catalog on the External drive, import the photos from your desktop, and then use LR to move them afterwards.

The only penalty I can think of is that working from the huge catalog file, with broken links might really bog you down when trying to open LR.

EDIT: as an afterthought/clarification - there's no reason the single "master" catalog has to reside on the external drive, unless you want to also free up the space it takes up (which can be a sizeable amount). The key to my post: use LR to move the files, not your operating system.

 

[Nelu]

I have a very powerful MacBook Pro, top of the line machine with a 512GB SSD disk. Because my library holds around 60-70,000 images it would not fit on this laptop.
Because I didn`t want to give up speed I split my catalog in 500GB "sub-catalogs", sorted chronologically.
I have a few (maybe 5, if I recall well) Samsung Portable SSD T1 500GB USB 3.0 Drives), each with its separate catalog.

I make sure that I backup all of these SSD`s to a couple of big spindle disks (4TB) so whatever happens, I have multiple backups.

Because I only work from the SSD`s, there is no speed loss and I have no size limitation. If I need extra space I just buy another SSD, almost exclusively when they go on sale.

So far this works best for me. It`s not cheap but it`s not over the top neither.

Edit
You could have a single big catalog on your computer hard disk and reference files located on different physical hard disks. This way you don`t loose any functionality but in time, if your catalog becomes too big it will slow your computer down.

Nelu

 

[Ryananthony]

On a related note, hopefully not hijacking the thread, but I have a 2015 8gb ram 160(ithink) harddrive macbook pro. I don't have the space, obviously for an entire catalog for my photos. Currently I load photos on to desktop in folder upload to lightroom edit, then throw both finish jpg and raw to external 2tb. Thus leaving my catalog useless after my photos have been moved. Any tips? I've been tempted to purchase a iMac for both larger screen and larger internal HD. I've read that using lightroom through my external would be slow, so I've yet to try it.

You could do this: have a small "throwaway" workflow catalog that is just the newest photos you're working on. Once you're done with the work and have done your export, you could then use LR to move the files to the external drive (this will preserve the links) to their final home, and then you can have a larger single LR catalog on the external drive that you then import the smaller catalog into as a single merged huge catalog.

EDIT: as an afterthought/clarification - there's no reason the single "master" catalog has to reside on the external drive, unless you want to also free up the space it takes up (which can be a sizeable amount).

I didnt realize I could move files using lightroom. A follow up question, using this procedure, when I want to revisit an image or set of images from my external, should I move them back to laptop before working on them?

I will give this a shot. Thanks a lot for the idea, and a quick response. I appreciate it.

 

[mnclayshooter]

On a related note, hopefully not hijacking the thread, but I have a 2015 8gb ram 160(ithink) harddrive macbook pro. I don't have the space, obviously for an entire catalog for my photos. Currently I load photos on to desktop in folder upload to lightroom edit, then throw both finish jpg and raw to external 2tb. Thus leaving my catalog useless after my photos have been moved. Any tips? I've been tempted to purchase a iMac for both larger screen and larger internal HD. I've read that using lightroom through my external would be slow, so I've yet to try it.

You could do this: have a small "throwaway" workflow catalog that is just the newest photos you're working on. Once you're done with the work and have done your export, you could then use LR to move the files to the external drive (this will preserve the links) to their final home, and then you can have a larger single LR catalog on the external drive that you then import the smaller catalog into as a single merged huge catalog.

EDIT: as an afterthought/clarification - there's no reason the single "master" catalog has to reside on the external drive, unless you want to also free up the space it takes up (which can be a sizeable amount).

I didnt realize I could move files using lightroom. A follow up question, using this procedure, when I want to revisit an image or set of images from my external, should I move them back to laptop before working on them?

I will give this a shot. Thanks a lot for the idea, and a quick response. I appreciate it.

Like I've tried to say before: I'm not an expert by any means.

Adobe has a tutorial/help page for using LR to move/rename files etc. :https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/photos.html#move_photos_to_a_different_folder


I wouldn't keep moving them back and forth unless you are experiencing a significant speed penalty, which you might, working through USB 2 on what could be a slow HD to begin with.


What has been suggested by privatebydesign is smart previews. There's a size/space/storage penalty associated with that as well. I'm not sure how big your catalog would get to be, but the suggestion to use a built-in feature isn't a bad one. Maybe try it out to see how big the previews file gets to be? I'm usually trying to limit the number of "extra" copies of files I have floating around so I haven't used smart previews.

 

[wtlloyd]

You should ONLY move files within Lightroom. Doing so outside the program breaks the database links and Lightroom won't know where you've placed your photo.
Look. The catalog is at most a couple gigs of data for a large well developed photo collection. Leave it and the previews on your main system disk. Put your actual photos on an external drive if storage is limited.