How often do you create new Lightroom catalog?

[bleirer]

There is a setting in there about when to automatically delete the previews. Never is a choice, but I go for 30 days. It will make a new preview when needed, but if takes a couple seconds.

 

[DRwyoming]

I really think it’s time to start fresh and was just curious how often others do this?

I only keep one catalog on my photo editing computer and that goes back over a decade. I have occasionally maintained a separate catalog on my travel laptop for quick field editing but on my main computer there's only one catalog holding several decades worth of digital images.

The trick to catalog speed is a fast internal drive that holds the catalog even if one or more external drives or cloud storage is used for actual image storage. I have a fast internal SSD where my catalog lives and that works nicely.

I've worked with other photographers trying to hopelessly untangle a mess created by thinking multiple catalogs would make their lives easier. I think it can work in some special situations like a commercial photographer who wants to keep all client related images in one catalog and everything else in another catalog with segregated image storage to match but frankly most that I know still maintain one master catalog for all their LR images.

 

[sh1209]

I only keep one catalog on my photo editing computer and that goes back over a decade. I have occasionally maintained a separate catalog on my travel laptop for quick field editing but on my main computer there's only one catalog holding several decades worth of digital images.

The trick to catalog speed is a fast internal drive that holds the catalog even if one or more external drives or cloud storage is used for actual image storage. I have a fast internal SSD where my catalog lives and that works nicely.

I've worked with other photographers trying to hopelessly untangle a mess created by thinking multiple catalogs would make their lives easier. I think it can work in some special situations like a commercial photographer who wants to keep all client related images in one catalog and everything else in another catalog with segregated image storage to match but frankly most that I know still maintain one master catalog for all their LR images.

Yeah I keep the catalog on the internal ssd as well as current year images. I offload current year images in January and have found it much easier to mess with. It sounds from what you and others are saying that it is certainly not the catalog size causing the issue. My catalog size currently is 4.2GB which is the largest I've had over the years. I'm guessing it's something in this latest Adobe release or the OS causing the issue.

 

[sh1209]

I have only one catalog that has over 500,000 images. A large percentage of the images in my catalog are from shooting sports and I have collections back to 2004. My catalog is about 5GB at this point and it does take about 6 minutes to backup. The catalog is simply a database of your editing instructions and values and I don't think a 5GB database is that large. I have about 14TB of images, some on local drives, some on external drives, and some on archival drives. I am asked every now and them for images from 10+ years ago so having them in one catalog makes them easy to retrieve. It is also nice to have lots of old images to revisit when you have better processing techniques and software. I don't notice any sluggishness while editing or working in LrC. There is a little sluggishness when I first open LrC and I give it a minute to get the catalog completely loaded before adding collections and the backup on exit takes about 6 minutes. I am working on a pretty hefty 2020 Windows PC with 64GB of memory.

I do delete my Previews.lrdata folder about once a year because it becomes bloated with lots of previews, and then rebuild the collections as necessary.

I normally delete the previews a couple times a year and it can get pretty large after a while.

 

[sh1209]

I would say overall operation is better but still much slower with pasting edits and such over the previous LRC version.