Thanks WobertC. When I start using LR I did the one catalog approach, but it rapidly got hard to manage (over 25,000 image in 79 folders just this year) and it was several GB long (I do not build smart previews to save time, the catalog might have been larger with them). One day the catalog got corrupted (yes I did the optimize at least once a day !) and I had 3 full back ups. I could never get the backups to totally replace the original file: with many broken links, folders whose images were only partially recognized, erroneous star assignments and failed "synchronize" I have a well-honed, meticulous filing system by century > Decades > year > month and day. And I have close to 2TB of non-professional images. Picture go directly from the DSLR to the folder on my laptop, get edited and cataloged there, the entire folder is tripled backed up and one of the backup restored on my desk computer. This is actually not very many transfers, and I know that images are not "deleted, displaced, renamed or misplaced". I use the original file name from the DSLR as it is highly unlikely that i will ever do 9999 images in one setting and thus duplicate file names will be several directories apart. I occasionally change the DSLR file name prefix too in fact. So I am very willing to do a "trip" or even a "year" catalog but that does not change the fundamental issue: either I can do some editing while traveling (which I like because it allows me to correct acquisitions errors, review focus, lens etc) or I can edit only at home. I do 3 backups on 3 different SSD drives as I find them more reliable then HD. The vast majority of the time only one copy is needed (unless a fellow passenger drops one of my bag from an overhead compartment !) Yes I am familar with her ebook and several others. I do not believe the issue is there. In the example above I believed that the catalog gets somehow corrupted though still readable (I have not open any copy of a catalog with a text editor yet). When it read the images it did find 230 something out of 280. No amount of clicking "missing photograph" clicking or Library > Find missing files would find them. Even after searching for individual one and locating them with Explorer, LR would acknowledge their presence, and offer to find "similar" but failed to import them. Dragging them on the Library grid did not work either. Finally the only practical way to get access to all images on the folder was to erase the catalog and restart from scratch. I suspect that if this problem happened in that folder it might happen to others. As if you say multiple catalog is a nightmare, why is that and what could be done to fix that ? I suspect others do also edit while away from their desk and that if merging catalog was better optimized it would be useful This is really not a criticism of either LR or Adobe, I am a big fan of both, just a query to understand the source of the "nightmare" so that it can be resolved more efficiently. Thanks for your suggestions!
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