When to split a LR catalog?

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eft

Well-known member
My LR catalog manages over 40K RAW images, is 400MB on disk and can consume 1-3MB RAM. It is still pretty responsive but I'm wondering if, at some point, I will need to split it for performance and/or reliability reasons. I know it's a subjective question because everyone's available hardware resources are different, but interested in your experiences.
 
My LR catalog manages over 40K RAW images, is 400MB on disk and can consume 1-3MB RAM. It is still pretty responsive but I'm wondering if, at some point, I will need to split it for performance and/or reliability reasons. I know it's a subjective question because everyone's available hardware resources are different, but interested in your experiences.
I'm not sure I'd ever split my LR catalog but FWIW cases where I could see it would be when you have substantially different types of photo projects and want to keep them separated. For instance maybe a commercial portfolio vs one for your recreational photography interests and everything else that's non-commercial.

You lose a lot of flexibility like being able to do metadata searches on your entire library if you split your catalog. It's also a hassle to remember which catalog to load when you're looking for specific images.

Also FWIW, I have well over 150,000 images saved in a single LR Classic Catalog and it's not an issue. A bigger issue is making sure the catalog is stored on a fast internal SSD even though the images themselves may be stored on different drives.
 
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Yeah, I have no desire to split the catalog. Good to know from your experience that I have room to grow. For now, all my images and the catalog are stored on a single fast SSD but that is nearing capacity so either need to houseclean or upsize.
 
My LR catalog manages over 40K RAW images, is 400MB on disk and can consume 1-3MB RAM. It is still pretty responsive but I'm wondering if, at some point, I will need to split it for performance and/or reliability reasons. I know it's a subjective question because everyone's available hardware resources are different, but interested in your experiences.
There are two ways to split the catalog.

1. Two catalogs. Don't recommend this. At some point you will have images on both or neither. Guaranteed to cause headaches eventually.

2. Place some of you images on the internal drive and the rest on an external drive. You can move them around (within LR, don't do this outside LR) so that the images you are working on, are on the fastest drive. Will work and if you limit to yourself to moving images via LR, should work fine. Risk is that copying images multiple times may cause an error. So be very careful.
 
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I have about 105,000 images, they are split on two external hard drives. My one catalog is kept on my computer. While there are reasons one might want to create an additional catalog it needs to be thought through first. I do have a second catalog that holds photos of my late husband's art work and I am positive that is the correct way to handle his work versus my work so two catalogs is the right choice for that. But all of the images I take go into that one catalog and that allows me to see any image that I've shot over the years as needed. I've gone to Yellowstone five times now and if I needed to review all of my Yellowstone shots I can easily do that. There is no limit to how many images can go into a catalog but keeping equipment up to date and in good working order is always a wise choice.
 
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I currently have 250,000+ images in my catalog. The catalog resides on a very fast SSD but the images reside on multiple internal and external drives. This is one area where I think that unless you are increasing image numbers really fast the increased speed and capacities of your hardware over time can handle the growing catalog.

The one thing I do from time to time is export collections as a LR catalog. I take a bunch of sports photos for my local high school and I create a collection for a given school year and then when there is no longer any need to regularly access those images I export that collection as a catalog.
 
Currently, I have 160K images in my catalogue and FWIW access and navigation are easy and quick. Though my images are all on an external DAS, configured in a five disk RAID array with dual disk redundancy, I have experimented with keeping the catalogue on both the external DAS and the native internal SSD of the iMac. I tend to favour keeping the catalogue on the DAS too (connected via Thunderbolt 2) as I will periodically switch to using my laptop for access to the catalogue. For me, Lightroom's organization capability is just so good I never give it a second thought. My bigger issue is probably just improving my file structures as time goes by. I've commented on this elsewhere in the forum but I think @Steve 's video tutorial of the Library module is highly worthwhile. Unless you know the programme inside out, I believe its value is enormous.
 
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Im likely the odd ball. I like to have a "working drive" that is very fast (NVME) and therefore every year I export the years photos into a catalog saved on a large external drive that is in turn backed up to backblaze. If I ever need to access a previous years photos I just switch to that catalog. This method in my opinion keeps the system fast and helps ensure safe redundancy in the event of a drive failure. While the number of photos in a catalog doesnt slow the system down an over stuffed drive will, as will a large spinny HDD.
 
Currently, I have 160K images in my catalogue and FWIW access and navigation are easy and quick. Though my images are all on an external DAS, configured in a five disk RAID array with dual disk redundancy, I have experimented with keeping the catalogue on both the external DAS and the native internal SSD of the iMac. I tend to favour keeping the catalogue on the DAS too (connected via Thunderbolt 2) as I will periodically switch to using my laptop for access to the catalogue. For me, Lightroom's organization capability is just so good I never give it a second thought. My bigger issue is probably just improving my file structures as time goes by. I've commented on this elsewhere in the forum but I think @Steve 's video tutorial of the Library module is highly worthwhile. Unless you know the programme inside out, I believe its value is enormous.
I bought it and it is top notch, like everything @Steve produces
 
Im likely the odd ball. I like to have a "working drive" that is very fast (NVME) and therefore every year I export the years photos into a catalog saved on a large external drive that is in turn backed up to backblaze. If I ever need to access a previous years photos I just switch to that catalog. This method in my opinion keeps the system fast and helps ensure safe redundancy in the event of a drive failure. While the number of photos in a catalog doesnt slow the system down an over stuffed drive will, as will a large spinny HDD.
Why not just have one catalog with your images stored on multiple discs? That way you have the ability to search and categorize your entire collection? You still get the speed you desire if you keep the current images on an NVMe or SSD drive. I would not want to have to search multiple catalogs for an image if I could avoid it.

--Ken
 
Why not just have one catalog with your images stored on multiple discs? That way you have the ability to search and categorize your entire collection? You still get the speed you desire if you keep the current images on an NVMe or SSD drive. I would not want to have to search multiple catalogs for an image if I could avoid it.

--Ken
I might need to dig for something once or twice a year honestly. Anything I fully process for export to use is saved in another folder at a good size for web or sharing so 99% of the time I dont NEED to find it in lightroom. It will likely already be exported and stored as a JPEG (in a file shared with google drive so I can access any processed photo from my phone or any computer). Also I'm fairly adept at knowing what year I took a photo so it's not hard to find anyway. I have the exported catalogs on an external drive that is backed up off site and can be accessed on any computer I will ever own simply by plugging it in. Everyone has their own way of doing things and for my workflow I feel this gives me the best compromise of access, security and low resource consumption. To me one catalog spread across multiple disks sounds like a source of anxiety... unless we are talking about RAID.
 
My LR catalog manages over 40K RAW images, is 400MB on disk and can consume 1-3MB RAM. It is still pretty responsive but I'm wondering if, at some point, I will need to split it for performance and/or reliability reasons. I know it's a subjective question because everyone's available hardware resources are different, but interested in your experiences.
I have 1.5 million images in Lightroom in one catalog and it runs fine.
 
I might need to dig for something once or twice a year honestly. Anything I fully process for export to use is saved in another folder at a good size for web or sharing so 99% of the time I dont NEED to find it in lightroom. It will likely already be exported and stored as a JPEG (in a file shared with google drive so I can access any processed photo from my phone or any computer). Also I'm fairly adept at knowing what year I took a photo so it's not hard to find anyway. I have the exported catalogs on an external drive that is backed up off site and can be accessed on any computer I will ever own simply by plugging it in. Everyone has their own way of doing things and for my workflow I feel this gives me the best compromise of access, security and low resource consumption. To me one catalog spread across multiple disks sounds like a source of anxiety... unless we are talking about RAID.
I totally understand that we all need to find solutions that work for us, so no worries.

But, I wanted to clarify one point. When I said that you could use multiple discs, I did not necessarily imply that you should introduce more discs in your system. I was just saying that you could use the same multi-disc arrangement that you are currently using, only using it with one catalog. A lot of folks are not aware that one catalog can contain images from any number of discs, and I did not know if you were aware of that or not.

--Ken
 
I totally understand that we all need to find solutions that work for us, so no worries.

But, I wanted to clarify one point. When I said that you could use multiple discs, I did not necessarily imply that you should introduce more discs in your system. I was just saying that you could use the same multi-disc arrangement that you are currently using, only using it with one catalog. A lot of folks are not aware that one catalog can contain images from any number of discs, and I did not know if you were aware of that or not.

--Ken
Yeah I get ya in regards to the 1 catalog on multiple disks but to me it FEELS like (and I'm not sure its actually true) that 1 catalog spread across multiple disks is less robust than separate catalogs. The separate catalogs are kind of a stand alone thing where as files being on a separate disk than the catalog info sounds like its open to corruption or loss. No idea if thats an actual risk as Im not an I.T. guy.
 
Yeah I get ya in regards to the 1 catalog on multiple disks but to me it FEELS like (and I'm not sure its actually true) that 1 catalog spread across multiple disks is less robust than separate catalogs. The separate catalogs are kind of a stand alone thing where as files being on a separate disk than the catalog info sounds like its open to corruption or loss. No idea if thats an actual risk as Im not an I.T. guy.
I think that there are lot of ways to slice and dice different arrangements depending on your perspective and needs. Since you are not really wanting global search features or collections, then it seems like any of the downsides of separate catalogs is minimal in your case. With general regards to corruption or data loss, I always assume that it is possible no matter how you set up your DAM and post processing, so I rely on multiple backups.

--Ken
 
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