organizing workflow with several catalogues

Question

hey
i have the task to organise thousands of photos into different topics (with overlapping themes so some photos could end up in more than one topic)
they are all already perfectly organised by year and month into more than 20 yearly folders, each with 12 monthly subfolders of originals, plus one folder for a lightroom catalog of the years photos with extensive keywording, tagged locations and faces and of course a lot of develop settings.

my ideal idea is to have all this with all the settings and tweaks in one big catalogue.
has anybody any suggested workflows to get his? Experiences? Or mistakes to avoid?

Conrad_C · Accepted Answer

As far as how you would combine catalogs, that part should be relatively straightforward:

1. Create one catalog that you designate as your primary or central catalog.

2. In it, choose the command File > Import from Another Catalog.

3. Select the first catalog you want to combine, and continue on to import it.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each of the other catalogs you want to import.

It’s highly recommended that you test this on expendable copies of the catalogs before the final run, just so you can be sure you’ve been selecting the right options, and that you are successfully getting all the necessary information into you primary/central catalog.

For more detail, you can refer to this article:

Merging Catalogs – The Overview

For even more detail about the features, the web site that article is on offers one of the best references for Lightroom Classic:

Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ

For expert advice about institution-level organizing of images using Lightroom Classic, and avoiding large-scale mistakes, there might not be better books than those by Peter Krogh, who has helped many well-known organizations and institutions organize their images for optimal preservation and curation:

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

dj_paige · Answer

my ideal idea is to have all this with all the settings and tweaks in one big catalogue.  Let me say that I completely agree with this one big catalog as the best end result. As far as advice or mistakes to avoid, the process is up to you ... as things have been described, there is a lot left out and the situation is very vague based on your description to offer specific advice. If you have specific questions, or you are at a specific step in the process, I'm sure I could give advice for those specific questions.

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