One catalog or several

Question

Hello, I have a question. I have several external hard drives on which I store photos from my various projects. Until now, I had created a separate catalog for each hard drive, but this is very inconvenient when I want to view images from different projects. Would it make sense to have just one catalog, which would then be located on the computer's internal hard drive? I have tens of thousands of photos on the various drives. I am currently still working with an iMac from 2019, but I will be getting a Mac Studio soon.

AxelMatt · Accepted Answer

@svenh11138716  Here you'll find a good article with pros and cons of multiple catalogs: Should you have one catalog or multiple catalogs? | The Lightroom Queen

Conrad_C · Answer

If you need to search or make collections of images across multiple hard drives, it’s much easier to keep them in a single catalog. When a single catalog references images across multiple hard drives, Lightroom Classic lists each hard drive at the top level of the Folders panel, and you can expand the folder tree of each of the drives from there.

Also, one catalog means when the next major version of Lightroom Classic comes out, you upgrade the format of just one catalog. If you keep multiple catalogs, then you have to go through the catalog format upgrade step for however many catalogs you have.

I have tens of thousands of photos on the various drives.
By @svenh11138716

So…not a lot then. 🙂 My one catalog is approaching 200,000 images, but that isn’t even half of what some users have in a single catalog.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.