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How to split one large catalog into parts?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
September 12, 2017
7 replies
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Looking for the best way reorganize images by splitting one large Lightroom catalog with 40k images into several, smaller catalogs.

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Correct answer dj_paige

>>this is pointless. You won't solve any problems, and you will create problems.

Hmmm... thought it was a pretty simple question and did not expect my workflow to be challenged.

Surely all LR users don't have ALL of their images in one huge LR catalog. We have a number of LR catalogs (doesn't everybody?) each of which represents a particular segment of our overall work. Some have 100k+ images. But aerial photography images for example have no place in our commercial real estate catalog, not do we want to combine product photography with wedding or portrait photography. Then there's personal travel & family images, etc. etc. Actually some jobs are so specific that we create a catalog for that one single instance.

Yes theoretically one could have ALL in a single catalog, but why deal with juggling meta data filters, collections, keywords etc. if that was the case? But hey, if the single catalog approach works for others and their workflow then that's fine with me!

But getting back my original questions, let's say for example that you have 40k images taken over the course of one year in a catalog which is specifically used for aerial images. Somewhere along the way family photos were imported into the same catalog on a number of days throughout that year. I would want to break this single catalog into two. As cute as my cat is I wouldn't want to be working with a client at their site and have his cat face pop up on the screen.

We have a number of LR catalogs (doesn't everybody?)

No. This is false.

I don't. Many people in this forum don't. One user in this forum has over 600,000 images in his only catalog, and he has tolde many people that you should use one catalog.

But aerial photography images for example have no place in our commercial real estate catalog, not do we want to combine product photography with wedding or portrait photography. Then there's personal travel & family images, etc. etc. Actually some jobs are so specific that we create a catalog for that one single instance.

Yes, these are valid reasons for using a separate catalog. These were not stated in your original post, thus the advice to keep one catalog ... which in the absence of valid reasons is the best advice.

So to answer your original question, using your operating system you could copy your original catalog as many times as needed. Then open each copy, remove undesired photos (but don't delete from the hard disk), close the catalog, repeat as many times as needed until now you have catalogs to your liking.

R

Roenel25829493ne50

Participant

I recently had to do this. The main reason was for user login. I wanted to split up my personal and commercial workflow. I ended up creating a new login for windows specifially for focusing on my business and only wanted to see photos I took for my business so I wouldn't get distracted with my personal photos. I had already split things up with folders, but again the distraction. I used both NVME, 2.5 SSD, and the old spinners. Yes, the cache helps but I did notice an improvement when I split up the catalogs as my images are stored on the HDD. Hopefully I'll see more of an improvement when I implement raid config for my HDDs. Thanks to the OP and the person who responded with a good solution!

dj_paige

Legend

I recently had to do this. The main reason was for user login. I wanted to split up my personal and commercial workflow.

There are valid reasons to have multiple catalogs. This is a valid reason.

Yes, the cache helps but I did notice an improvement when I split up the catalogs as my images are stored on the HDD.

There should be little or no performance improvements when you split catalogs. (Exception: time to perform a backup will be faster). But since you didn't say WHAT improved, it's really hard to know what you mean.

Hopefully I'll see more of an improvement when I implement raid config for my HDDs. Thanks to the OP and the person who responded with a good solution!

I don't know enough about RAID to understand what the benefit is. I'm guessing these will be faster than your existing HDDs. Generally, disk speed doesn't affect anything in Lightroom Classic except the Library Module. If you are having performance problems in the Develop Module, faster disk speed will not help, other than by a trivial amount that you will never notice.

merrillier78181659

Known Participant

I end up splitting my Catalog every year. I take a lot of photos and since going to the Nikon D850 with the larger file sizes plus shooting in Raw and often having Tif files as well as the JPG and video files my catalog always seems to slow down my computer after a year or so of files around 12k to 15k of them per year.

In fact tonight I just split the 2021 files away from the latest catalog leaving 2020 in its own catalog.

I always sort my files by year which makes it easier to do this.

These were easy instructions to follow and worked well but it did take somewhere between 1 to 2 hours to process and finalise but all worked perfectly.

http://asktimgrey.com/2020/04/24/dividing-to-two-catalogs/#:~:text=Tim's%20Quick%20Answer%3A%20You%20can,information%20from%20the%20original%20catalog.

dj_paige

Legend

I doubt its the number of photos in the catalog or the size of these photos in the catalog that slows things down. There are probably dozens of reasons why Lightroom Classic slows down, and number of photos in the catalog is not in the top 25.

You don't say what parts of Lightroom Classic are slow, and without that, we can't pinpoint the reason.

merrillier78181659

Known Participant

When I have it open and am working on photos this time around my mouse was the first to start to behave erratically, slow to respond everytime I opened Lightroom Classic. I restarted computer a few times, checked mouse driver, took out the wiress dongle a few times for the mouse and restarted it. Processing was also starting to slow down in Lightroom.
I have had a problem with the computer slowing down with lightroom classic open once I get close to 20k in images basically every year and it is always solved by starting a new Catalog. Task Manager shows Lightroom Classic power usage goes very high and things start to slow down yet when I start a new Catalog and transferred over the 3.5k in photos from this year everything is back to normal. If I open up last years Catalog now minus the 3.5k photos/videos that have been removed leaving it with 12.5k it is working beautifully as well.

For me this has always been the case once I start nearing 20k in images. Even though I have since increased the RAM, the size of the SSD drive and my Catalogs are on the SSD drive, my cache is set at 50gb.

The only other thing I have done is unlink the Flickr plugin in last years Catalog and authorised it in the new one, whether that is the cause for the slowdown it may be possible as I always use both Lightroom Classic and the flickr plugin although I regularly remove the albums from the Flickr section in Lightroom once I have finished with uploads to them.

J

johnarobb

Participant

There is also a file size issue. Not so much the file itself but what happens when you have a large catalog. Any global action you want to take on that catalog like backing it up, recovering it or repairing it takes longer. There is also a risk mitigation strategy of having small blocks of your work in any given catalog.

Everyone has their own reasons for doing what they do. Learn from best practices and add what you can to your individual workflow.

R

richardplondon

Community Expert

Discussions of ideology and working tactics aside:

highlight the set of images you want to separate out

Export as Catalog which creates a fresh Catalog which only contains these, their Develop metadata and their organisation including Cirtual copies, Collections, keywords etc.

There’s a decision here: are you looking to also separately manage the source files belonging to these particular images? If so, you can have LR copy these files and their containing folder arrangement into the location you have chosen for the new Catalog and these new copies will be the ones referenced by the new Catalog. Otherwise the new Catalog is now sharing these files and folders with your main Catalog where all these images still remain.

Now you can remove from your main Catalog this same set of images which you have just exported. They are still highlighted. As appropriate, if you have just copied their source files to a new location you may want to also ‘delete from disk’ at the location still referenced from the main Catalog. If you didn't Copy them as part of the ‘export as catalog’ then obviously you would not do that.

Backup files and Catalog before doing any of this!

C

cindid

Participant

I have many Catalouges, as i have Terabytes of photos.

I met an Adobe rep who advised that the best thing to do 'is keep many catalouges to keep the LR system fast'.
I can't believe the number of people on this forum who are suggesting otherwise. Wanting LR to be fast is invalide?

KR Seals

Community Expert

I have 7TB of photos. 192,000 images in my single LR catalog and I am happy with the speed of loading the catalog and accessing the previews.

The one thing that will help with loading of the catalog and previews is to put your catalog and preview files on a separate dedicated SSD drive. 512 GB drives are very affordable now.

Ken Seals - Nikon Z 9, Z 8, 14mm-800mm. Computer Win 11 Pro, I7-14700K, 64GB, RTX3070TI. Travel machine: 2021 MacBook Pro M1 MAX 64GB. All Adobe apps.

T

tymbeAuthor

Known Participant

One user in this forum has over 600,000 images in his only catalog, and he has tolde many people that you should use one catalog.

Ok, that's fine. But of course I don't think it would be doing anyone any favor not to recognize that there are a number of valid reasons for maintaining separate catalogs. IOW, not a blanket "never" but rather, "it depends".

Yes, these are valid reasons for using a separate catalog.

I guess I just figured it would be understood I had a valid reason.

So to answer your original question, using your operating system you could copy your original catalog as many times as needed. Then open each copy, remove undesired photos (but don't delete from the hard disk), close the catalog, repeat as many times as needed until now you have catalogs to your liking.

Excellent. Since posting I found the same advice in another discussion and I think this will be the best way to break up a catalog. Thanks much for your assistance!

dj_paige

Legend

tymbe wrote
One user in this forum has over 600,000 images in his only catalog, and he has tolde many people that you should use one catalog.
Ok, that's fine. But of course I don't think it would be doing anyone any favor not to recognize that there are a number of valid reasons for maintaining separate catalogs. IOW, not a blanket "never" but rather, "it depends".

I'll stick with my approach. The advice is to keep one catalog, unless the user presents a valid reason. Far too often, the user has invalid reasons, and splitting up his catalog would be the wrong thing to do, and it would be making a major mistake for me to say "it depends". It would also violate my conscience to say "it depends" in the absence of a valid reason, because you could then be interpreted as saying go right ahead and do the wrong thing.

T

tymbeAuthor

Known Participant

I'll stick with my approach. The advice is to keep one catalog, unless the user presents a valid reason. Far too often, the user has invalid reasons, and splitting up his catalog would be the wrong thing to do, and it would be making a major mistake for me to say "it depends". It would also violate my conscience to say "it depends" in the absence of a valid reason, because you could then be interpreted as saying go right ahead and do the wrong thing.

Understood. And I'll stick to my approach where if asked how to split a catalog rather than saying that's a bad idea I'd ask what was the reason for wanting to do that? Keeping all in one catalog may in the end be the thing to do, but it seems to be a better way to teach one IMO rather than a blanket "don't do it".

I do understand your point as I've worked with a lot of people with only a rudimentary understanding of how LR works ("Database? What's a database?") and perhaps more often than not there are ways to keep all in one DB and learn how to utilize the many tools & options LR offers to organize images.

The best example I have of not understanding how LR works happened a few years ago when the son of a partner of mine at the time, just starting to use LR, imported hundreds of aerial images into the catalog. He then, reasoning that since they're now "in" LR-- deleted the source images. Lesson learned the hard way for sure.

JoeKostoss

Community Expert

Why? This is not necessary and not advisable. You can organize in several other ways that don't involve several catalogs, such as collections or keywords or even searching using metadata filters in grid view. 40k images is not a lot for Lightroom to handle in one catalog. Splitting images into several catalogs will only cause more work and frustration for you in finding images in the future. What criteria are you considering to organize images?

dj_paige

Legend

Agreeing with @JoeKostoss, this is pointless. You won't solve any problems, and you will create problems.

dj_paigeCorrect answer

Legend

>>this is pointless. You won't solve any problems, and you will create problems.

Hmmm... thought it was a pretty simple question and did not expect my workflow to be challenged.

Surely all LR users don't have ALL of their images in one huge LR catalog. We have a number of LR catalogs (doesn't everybody?) each of which represents a particular segment of our overall work. Some have 100k+ images. But aerial photography images for example have no place in our commercial real estate catalog, not do we want to combine product photography with wedding or portrait photography. Then there's personal travel & family images, etc. etc. Actually some jobs are so specific that we create a catalog for that one single instance.

Yes theoretically one could have ALL in a single catalog, but why deal with juggling meta data filters, collections, keywords etc. if that was the case? But hey, if the single catalog approach works for others and their workflow then that's fine with me!

But getting back my original questions, let's say for example that you have 40k images taken over the course of one year in a catalog which is specifically used for aerial images. Somewhere along the way family photos were imported into the same catalog on a number of days throughout that year. I would want to break this single catalog into two. As cute as my cat is I wouldn't want to be working with a client at their site and have his cat face pop up on the screen.

We have a number of LR catalogs (doesn't everybody?)

No. This is false.

I don't. Many people in this forum don't. One user in this forum has over 600,000 images in his only catalog, and he has tolde many people that you should use one catalog.

But aerial photography images for example have no place in our commercial real estate catalog, not do we want to combine product photography with wedding or portrait photography. Then there's personal travel & family images, etc. etc. Actually some jobs are so specific that we create a catalog for that one single instance.

Yes, these are valid reasons for using a separate catalog. These were not stated in your original post, thus the advice to keep one catalog ... which in the absence of valid reasons is the best advice.

So to answer your original question, using your operating system you could copy your original catalog as many times as needed. Then open each copy, remove undesired photos (but don't delete from the hard disk), close the catalog, repeat as many times as needed until now you have catalogs to your liking.

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