Help: best Lightroom practices using a Drobo
jb2sprint Feb 20, 2013 8:15 AMHello,
I apologize in advance for what will be a long post. I'm a newbie when it comes to Lightroom, so forgive me if these questions seem elementary.
Background: I have a Drobo b800fs, connected to our network via gigabit ethernet. I have roughly 225,000 photos on the Drobo - stored by year and then by event. We're adding roughly 30,000 photos per year to the system. Searching for specific photos is an absolute nightmare at times. That is why I am looking at purchasing Lightroom. It'll be a massive project, but if we can add tags/keywords to our photos, the search feature would then be a breeze. Not sure if it is important to note, but I dont anticpate using Lightroom to alter the images much (if at all) - it'll mainly be used a giant search tool. Assuming Lightroom is my best option for tagging all of these photos, here are some questions I have...
1) Can I store the catalog file on the Drobo, in the same location as the original images? My reasoning for this would be so that I could access that catalog file from any machine in our office that is running Lightroom. If not an option, what is the best location for the catalog file to reside? Obviously speed would be a big factor here.
2) Can I run one master catalog for all of our photos or would that be too cumbersome? If not, would it be better to run a separate catalog by year? Obiviously, the more catalogs I have, the more searching I have to do... but I also don't want to wait 5 minutes for a enormous catalog to load.
3) What happens if a drive fails on drobo and I have to insert a new one? When the drobo regenerates files, will that screw up the catalog association with the images?
4) I currently have all original photos on the Drobo backed up to separate external WD hard drives (one for each year of photos). To speed up the keywording project up, could I hand these drives out to my team members and have them run Lightroom and keyword all of the photos on each respective drive, and then merge all the catalogs onto the Drobo without having to copy over all the original photos (since they are already on the Drobo)?
Thanks for any tips, opinions, and help you can provide!

