Lightroom and more catalogs

[Jiří Poláček]

Hi,

I am new to Lightroom and want to import about 500 000 images from last years. I will store images in folders like 2016/12/30.

For performance, I read (with this huge number of photos) it is good to have more catalogs - one catalog for every year etc.

But I need my collections and smart collections to find photos from every year (every catalog) without switching between them. Is it possible?

Can I have more catalogs but see everything like in one catalog (for any common action)? - How to do it?

Thanks.

[John Waller]

For performance, I read (with this huge number of photos) it is good to have more catalogs - one catalog for every year etc.

Be interested to see where you've picked that up from. Got a link?

One catalog is almost always preferred in a case such as yours with less than 1m images.

See

More than one catalogue? – Lightroom Solutions

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/one-or-multiple-catalogs/

[Jiří Poláček]

for example: How to Optimize Lightroom Speed and Performance  > 8) Organize Lightroom Catalogs

[ManiacJoe]

What he says there are his preferences, not really recommendations.

Using multiple catalogs can be useful, but more for an archiving strategy.

For example, my sports and corporate event photography are organized into a yearly catalog for each.

The catalog and the images it references get archived together and removed from my active hard drives.

Once I am done processing those images, they are usually never edited again.

My personal images are all in one catalog, granted not anywhere close to 500K of images.

In my day job, I am a software engineer with lots of database experience. Current versions of Lightroom will not be having performance problems due to large numbers of images in the catalog.

The hard drive space that all takes up is a different story. This might be a reasonable reason for multiple catalogs, but it still needs to be thought out. The general recommendation for a single catalog is still a good recommendation for starters.