How to split/organise/archive 400 thousand photos from single catalogue.

[afotografy]

Hi everyone,

I know its madness and how I came to it, but I have a huuuge catalogue and I want to put things right now.

I would like to split catalogue per year and archive those previous years with all my edits.

I have 6 external drives and one catalogue. I want to get more drives and export on each drive one/two years and make a clone for it.

How do I go about it so I don't mess up everything? I guess there is no easy way anyway. I have a week free and ready to roll up sleeves.

Thank you,

Regards,

Armand

[john beardsworth]

Don't.

400k is above average, but I often work with one that's twice that size. Think of what you are contemplating as fragmenting control of your picture collection. It's hard enough to keep control of lots of pictures on lots of drives without having lots of catalogues too. Just ask how will you find all the pictures of trains or a favourite dog when you have to search through every catalogue? In other words, LR does let us create extra catalogues, but that doesn't mean it works optimally with them.

Instead, spend your time doing things like optimising the catalogue, reviewing your backup procedure, pretending you need to restore everything and seeing if your backup is as good as you thought, maybe consolidating older drives onto one big new one, and taking pictures.

John

[afotografy]

Hi John,

At the moment if disaster struck, I lose everything. I have a crash plan, but that is back up of my machine only and I have time machine of main iMac as well. But there is no back up of external hard drives.

I like the idea of having a larger drive to consolidate some drives. But 3 of those drives are 4tb each. So I'm not sure if there is anything bigger out there where I could put all these in one. Of course apart of expensive Nas systems.

I also pretty much don't look at photos from 2009-2014 and was thinking maybe to separate them out of catalogue and have catalogue only of the last couple of years. But I would do this only if this speeds up my catalogue. You mentioned that splitting might not be good idea so I will stick with that.

Thank you John

[JohanElzenga]

afotografy  wrote

Hi John,

At the moment if disaster struck, I lose everything. I have a crash plan, but that is back up of my machine only and I have time machine of main iMac as well. But there is no back up of external hard drives.

So how do you think that splitting up the catalog is going to protect you against drive failure?

[john beardsworth]

"I have a crash plan, but that is back up of my machine only and I have time machine of main iMac as well. But there is no back up of external hard drives."

Maybe I've misunderstood, but I wonder if you're focussing on the size of the catalogue when the problems are really your storage/backup needs? There are plenty of 8tb externals around, which might make cloning more comfortable, and while I think that 16tb ones are coming, maybe look at alternatives to NAS such as external HD enclosures which allow you to use bigger and more affordable internal HDs?

The only thing that's slower with my big catalogue is backing it up, which happens when I'm asleep. While one doesn't continually look at older pictures, what would certainly be slower is the odd time when one does want to do so, loading one catalogue after another. A single pre-2014 catalogue would obviously make this easier than keeping ones for each year, but I wouldn't generally recommend it.

John

[afotografy]

Thank you John,

Yes you are correct. I have bit of both issues. Hard drives and catalogue.

So in terms of copy everything on larger drives. How do I reconnect everything once I have moved from one drive to another?

Also how would I keep all edits. Currently my previews file is almost 120gb but I'm not sure if LR is using this file for my edits. It is not under pictures-LR-etc path. That previews catalogue is only couple hundred mb.

So I'm not sure which actual catalogue and preview files LR is using.

Thank you for help John.

[dj_paige]

So in terms of copy everything on larger drives. How do I reconnect everything once I have moved from one drive to another? Also how would I keep all edits?

Instructions are here (scroll down to Part 2 — Updating Folder Location)

Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

So I'm not sure which actual catalogue and preview files LR is using.

Look in Catalog Settings

[Joe Foe Toe]

This thread gives two methods that will work: Can I split a catalogue into two

I'd start this all off by moving all photos to respective year folders inside of Lightroom, and making sure you have a catalog backup before doing any splitting.

[afotografy]

Thank you,

I wanted to do this by using LR filter by year. The problem I'm facing is that my photos are all scattered over many hard drives.

Do I make folders in the left pane under folders section? So I make a year folder and add photos from filter in there.

How do I keep the same folder structure what I have in each separate hard drive? 

So my structure would be

year

- shoot folder1

- shoot folder2

[john beardsworth]

Remember smart collections would allow you to keep yearly or other views of your images, regardless of which drive they're physically on. Rather than moving legacy stuff around, I would advise you to focus on its physical safekeeping (ie storage, backup, restore plan) or adding keywords or whatever to make your pictures more accessible.

And maybe consider reading Peter Krogh's The DAM Book?