Large image archive, one Catalog?

[FAUNA]

Hello,

I want to create a general catalog of all my photographs taken over the years, hundreds of thousands of images.

I have read that LR handles this, but am curious regarding the best practices in organization for this concept to work flawlessly.

For instance, do people subdivide the catalog per project and date in Collections?

What happens if you don't have all of the photographs of the Catalogue in a single drive?

Would like to know how you are handling a large digital archive.

Thanks!

ƒ

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

FAUNA  wrote

Hello,

I want to create a general catalog of all my photographs taken over the years, hundreds of thousands of images.

I have read that LR handles this

Yes, one  catalog. Some people report over 600,000 images in one catalog working well.

but am curious regarding the best practices in organization for this concept to work flawlessly.

You need to organize. There's no simple easy way out of it. It doesn't matter if you use Lightroom or some other tool, you need to develop an organizational scheme that works for you, and then apply it religiously to your photos. I highly recommend organizing by keywords in Lightroom to describe the content of the photo, plus other metadata as needed (captions, titles, GPS locations, etc.) Keywords give you the most flexibility and power. I also highly recommend that you avoid putting much effort into developing a folder based organization, keep the folder structure simple, when you import the photos into Lightroom, have Lightroom put the photos into folders named by the capture date of each photo (this takes no effort on your part and is a Lightroom default). And then the rest of your organization should be done via keywords and other metadata in Lightroom.

For instance, do people subdivide the catalog per project and date in Collections?

Keywords, keyword, keywords and more keywords.

What happens if you don't have all of the photographs of the Catalogue in a single drive?

It's like you'd never even know they are on different drives. Lightroom has no problem at all.

[FAUNA]

Thank you dj_pagie, keywords do seem like a recurring trend.

[john beardsworth]

Just keep one catalogue, routinely backed up. It doesn't matter if the photos are on different drives - one catalogue can record as many drives as you need. Folders are purely date-based and set up for storage/backup/recovery purposes, while collections handle all organisational aspects like projects, plus one has keywords and other IPTC metadata. In other words, the same principles apply whether it's thousands or hundreds of thousands.

[FAUNA]

Thanks John!

[gary_sc]

Hi Fauna,

You do not mention if the images are lose on the drive or in folders nor how well annotated the folders (if any) are.

The amount of organization you want is completely dependent upon how much work you want to do (in other words, how anal are you). I'm fairly anal so I have my images blocked out in many folders within LR but that way works for me.

Others have their images sorted by the time they were taken and rely upon keywords to find anything. (Actually I use both keywords and folders because if I'm looking for "flowers," I want ALL flowers, not just those that I photographed in Vancouver.)

You can leave the images where they are, when you import you can select "Add" which will add them to the catalogue but not move them anywhere. If you want them to be in a new location, select "Move."

The one big warning here is that if you have a disk full of folders and want to add the folders as is, you do have to move them one at a time. If you Add all of the images, LR will see ONLY the images and not the folders.

Also, let's say you have a folder called "Flowers in Vancouver" and you go to import this on the folder that is sitting there in LR as "Flowers in Vancouver," you will have Flower.jpg, Flower-1.jpg. Etc. In other words, it will add the image to the folder that it already exists but since that file is already there, it will prevent overwriting and give it a "-1" end to the name.

This might get you started but first it'd be good to know how your files are currently organized.

[FAUNA]

Thank you Gary, I have my folders set up in a project basis. I am going to start a test catalog based on all the information from the thread, many thanks.