Creating a new catalog - Due to the large size of my current catalog

The size of the catalog is probably not the source of the problem. My Master Catalog of ~375,000 images is about 10% larger than your catalog and I’ve not had any issues.

To give everyone an update…  I was keeping an eye on the status of the catalog while writing my original post above.  While the catalog was showing that it was syncing, LRC would not load and was stuck in the Reading Preferences stage each time I tried to open it...  

About an hour later, when I checked again and saw that the sync was complete, I attempted to open LRC again, and it opened completely with no issues or locks.  So, in my opinion, my issue does seem to stem from the syncing to the cloud.

With that said, before I possibly create a new smaller catalog, does anyone have any suggestions for investigating why the sync is taking so long, even after quitting LRC, and how I can possibly speed it up.  As I look at the catalog now, with LRC open and running, the sync indicator is showing, which to me makes sense, since the app is open, even with me not doing anything.  It is syncing to OneDrive.

As an added note, I have not had this type of issue until about two weeks ago, when this issue began.  I am sometimes afraid to shut down LRC or the computer for fear of not being able to get back in.

This is the current status with LRC open. 

I appreciate all the suggestions already provided.

The size of your catalog rarely causes these types of problems.

File > New Catalog might be the obvious answer, but you say:

“can I carry over some of my most recent photos which I have already edited and am still working with?“

So in your big catalogue, use File > Export as Catalog and ensure you check the setting to include the selected photos only (ie your most recent ones). This creates a small catalogue with just those photos. 

However, two downsides of having more than one catalogue is that you quickly end up with some photos that are recorded in more than one catalogue (so which is the latest work you did on pic x ???), and also photos that slip through the gap and aren’t in any catalogue.

So, if you do go ahead with File > Export as Catalog, remove (not delete!) the selected photos from the big catalogue. Then develop a reliable way that you can ensure that you avoid confusion going forward. For example, when you have finished work on those recent photos, go to your main catalogue and use File > Import from Another Catalog to bring them into the main one. Or another way might be to have a catalogue per year, so all 2026 photos go into a new catalogue, and only at the end of the year you’d Import from Another Catalog and get 2026 into the main catalogue.

I’ve tried to explain this simply, but I hope I have also conveyed that this relies on you keeping your head screwed on. Some folk work this way all the time, others find it’s a recipe for confusing themselves and wasting time shuffling photos between catalogues.

Fragmenting control of your pictures across multiple catalogues isn’t what I’d recommend. Instead I’d suggest resolving the problem you have at present, not least because problems like you describe tend to be unrelated to catalogue size.

So I’d suggest focussing on resolving the problems you have now, rather than creating new ones for yourself.

Just FYI, sync problems and launch problems might not be directly related to the size of the catalog. Sync problems can happen with small catalogs too. 

There are separate kinds of troubleshooting you can do that are independent of each other, which you may or may not have already done:

• Troubleshooting cloud sync problems 
• Troubleshooting catalog integrity (for example, when was the last time the catalog was optimized using the File > Optimize Catalog command?)
• Troubleshooting startup problems (could be related to catalog integrity, but could be something else)

After you create a new catalog on startup using advice like what AxelMatt said, you can choose File > Import From Another Catalog and bring in the images from the catalog you were using before. This is preferred to re-importing images, because importing starts over without any edits you might have done before. Import From Another Catalog not only brings over images, but any Lightroom Classic edits, history, etc. that were done in the other catalog, preserving your work. 

To create a new catalog hold the Ctrl-Key while starting LrC. This opens a catalog selection dialog.

To create a new catalog click on “Create a New Catalog...”.

To import only a part of the images from the “old” catalog organize the appropriate images in a collection in this catalog and export the collection as an temp. catalog. This catalog import into your new created catalog.