P: Multiple catalog syncing

Feel free to disagree. You are entitled to your opinion.

My experience with 3-4 dozen 250K catalogs on which I've consulted regarding speed issues is that in very isolated areas, performance may improve i.e. launch time, backup time and large scale metadata writing.  Catalog size will not typically have an effect on Grid scrolling, Grid/Loupe switch, Develop/Grid switch, Loupe/Develop walking, Develop slider performance, Import/Export processing. 

If you are seeing improved performance, I am happy for you but not convinced it is due to catalog size. The real world does not all seem to agree that monolithic catalogs cause performance issue. I see the question asked a lot and the answer from those who work with large catalogs regularly seems pretty consistent.

Regardless, this thread is concerned with multi syncing and we should return to that discussion. Feel free to start a new thread about single vs multi catalog performance perceptions if you like.  

The name is spelled "Rikk" by the way - unless you are speaking about someone else. 

I couldn’t disagree more with Ricks assessment. I just split my catalog because it became too slow, and the performance was immediately evident. Whenever I do a large photo shoot, like a dance performance, I always give it its own catalog because if I try and use my main catalog it’s just too slow, and I have a very powerful machine.

If LR really was designed to have a monolithic catalog then they did an extremely poor job of it.

I’m sorry, but I’ve been using LR since day one, and I’m dead sure that large catalogs become extremely slow. Mine was 11 GB when I slplit it. Anyway, regardless of what the marketing specs say, or what the champions insist on, real world users all seem to agree that a monolithic catalog causes performance issues. And now with this classic cc and cc and poorly thought out product confusion with dualing versions, neither of which handles cloud sharing well, I’m on the search for an alternative.

For processing raw photos and batch editing, LR is awesome. But for continued storage, key word searching, maintenance and cloud sharing, it’s really not at all very good.

A couple more datapoints to add, just for fun.

My business partner does raw editing for other professional photographers, so speed is of the essence. Currently his catalog is running over 14GB, and it's been bigger.

And the biggest catalog I know of is over 7 million photos. That's a bit slow to open and back up, of course, but beyond that...

Many professionals work with two catalogs - a smaller working catalog, including everything that needs to sync to the cloud and is currently being worked on, and a larger archive catalog that they don't need to access very often.

An additional data point, Daniel. I am a professional. I have hundreds of thousands of images in a single catalog - the same catalog with which I started in Lightroom 1.2. I have never seen a catalog corruption of my own catalog and even if I did, I maintain a robust backup strategy- something more difficult to do in the multi-catalog verse.  Your work is no more safe in a single catalog  than multiples - one corruption and data is lost.

I prefer a single keyword hierarchy. My catalog is GB in size (7 to be precise) and the previews while large still are not even half a terabyte. 

Victoria beat me to the history of Lightroom demonstrating original design and intent. 

> Lightroom Classic was not "designed" to work with a single catalog.  If it were, the File menu wouldn't have options to open and close catalogs.

A little bit of a history lesson... Lightroom 1.0 could only use a single catalog, because that's the way it was designed. Import/Export catalogs were added in 1.1 so that people could take part of their catalog off to another computer, or start a new shoot on another computer and merge it in later. The intention was never that people would have lots of little catalogs on the same computer, but that's the way it's ended up being used by some people.

Brian, that is a plausible hack, but beware that when I tried that it began corrupting large catalogs because sometimes Google Drive wouldn't write the entire file in one go.  Same problem with Dropbox.

Syncthing seems to do okay, although it requires a lot of setup. This is made easier with SyncTrayzor.

How do you deal with the fact that program preferences aren't stored with the catalog? (Or at least, they're not on a PC.)

Scott, agreed on many counts.  Don't forget to say these things if and when Adobe sends you surveys about the product.

I've also been shopping for alternatives to the new-and-disimproved Lightroom ecosystem.

Nearly every day, I wonder who designs this software and whether they have ever worked as a professional photographer (because LR wasn't designed for high volume or efficiency). I also wonder if they have eyes (because it's not designed to be readable -- What's up with the GREY on GREY microtext???).

Scott, that's a workable solution if your files will FIT on a removable USB drive.

Right now, I'm literally (not figuratively, LITERALLY) driving a file server around in order to maintain access to my original photos.  Performing a full backup of this  server literally takes more than a day.

Professionals can have hundreds of thousands of images to work with.  Keeping them in one catalog is simply not practical for many reasons.  A single catalog file endangers all your work when it inevitably corrupts (as one of mine did last week).  A single catalog file has one keyword hierarchy for everything.  Merging my catalogs would produce a file that is GIGABYTES in size.  The preview directories would take up TERABYTES in addition to the original photos.

Contrary to Rikk's assertion, Lightroom Classic was not "designed" to work with a single catalog.  If it were, the File menu wouldn't have options to open and close catalogs.  There wouldn't be preferences stored on a per-catalog basis.  (In contrast, the new Lightroom is apparently designed for NO catalogs, which is equally impossible in my scenario. The new product isn't even remotely ready for professional use.)

I resolved this by putting my files on a removable USB drive, and I can plug it into whatever computer I'm on. Both the photos and the catalogs are on the removable drive, so the relative path remains the same no matter which machine i'm on, and it works seamlessly. 

I just split my catalog into smaller catalogs because it was getting soooooo slooooowwwww. So with all due respect, if Adobe LR was designed to only have a single catalog, then it was designed poorly. 

I too just ran into this issue. I split my catalog because with over 25000 photos, it had become too slow, and even on a super new MAC with all the memory available to mankind, LR was lagging. Now I realize that LR can only sync folders from a single catalog, and of course I find that very lacking and lackluster. What's more, my recent discovery means that I find the new LR Classic CC and CC to be even less useful in a connected world. 

In my less than humble opinion, I think that Smart Collections should be able to be turned into mobile collections with a single click. I think users should be able to make a folder mobile/sync with a single click, and I think users should be able to sync folders from various catalogs, especially given the physical limitations of large catalogs. 

Lastly, Adobe should ditch the CC version and make the Classic CC version more versatile in terms of synching. The current arrangement is more than confusing, and honestly, even though I've been a LR user since day one, I am actively reorganizing my photos and looking for a cataloging system that does not include Adobe LR. While LR is still invaluable for processing photos, it has very quickly become unusable for cataloging and maintaining photos. 

thanks for listening.