daniela said:
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.