organizing workflow with several catalogues

[PROVINZ]

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?

[dj_paige]

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.

[PROVINZ]

im completely at the beginning of the process.

the data-dump is here, on a harddrive and now i dream to have all photos in one catalogue. But with all the additional data and tweaks that are already made (and stored- i guess) in their respective yearly catalogues. (which i prepared via a chain of updates to be the same actual version of LR catalogue-file) 
so i can then start to sort through them easily by the keywords that the client gave them. 
the goal is to then build different collections/ selections.

[dj_paige]

Why jump from keywords (which you have) to collections (which I assume you don't have)? Why not leave this part of the organizing as keywords?

A question I have is: who is going to use the final catalog? Is it just you, or will there be multiple users trying to access the final catalog.

[PROVINZ]

the goal is to use the whole collection of a clients photographic life to build several possible presentations (more emotional themed than the keywords can).
so there will be a lot of curating later. And for me collections (inside the big combined catalogue) seem more versatile for this task - at least thats how i understand the promotional comunication from adobe-team.
So there might be a small team of different people providing curational ideas, but all this work will be on the same local PC. 

[dj_paige]

I feel collections are extra work that provide no benefit in this case. If you already have a keyword "Boston", for example, do you really need a Collection that has the name "Boston" with the same photos? Do you really want to do the extra work to create this collection? As far as "emotional themed", I see no difference between keywords and collections either.

If these people providing curational ideas are working on the same LrC catalog (which you didn't say, you just say they will all be working on the same local PC), this is a problem for two reasons: first LrC is not a multi-user tool, only one can be working on the catalog at a time; and secondly the LrC license does not allow multiple people to work with the same installation of LrC software.

[PROVINZ]

to be as precise as possible:
1: the collections would not have the same Name as one keyword, maybe they will be named for an exhibition title or a booktitle. 
but anyway, as happy as i am for answers on this forum, my original question wasnt about preferences to this  workflow, and i would prefer to stick to the original topic.

2.: its one LrC installation on one computer with one license.
Most of the time its me in front of this computer. Sometimes its me and different (old) people behind me. 
Also a topic that deviates from my original question.

[Conrad_C]

I’ll weigh in on the side that there is nothing wrong with the approach you are about to take. In fact I support it, because I’ve been doing it that way for years.

Why it’s OK:

I keyword as much as I can, but keywords are not appropriate for all curation needs. When I try to gather images from across my entire archive for a specific presentation or exhibition, I often find that I end up creating:

• A collection set for that project. 
• Multiple collections within that collection set, to do some sub-sorting and further curation before arriving at the final set of images, and also to explore different approaches such as alternate groupings, alternate sequences…
• At least one of the collections in the set is a Smart Collection based on some keywords that I’d like to gather images for.

For example, if I’m making a web site about railroad steam locomotives, I might do all of these inside the collection set I created for a project:

1. Set up Smart Collections for the keywords in images I want to gather, such as “railroad” and “steam”. It automatically lists all images matching the Smart Collection criteria.

2. Drag images from those to the static collections where they need to go, for example maybe I made some collections for different types, regions, or eras. 

3. After each collection has a good group of images, in each collection I drag images around to sequence them, or delete some and add others, until the whole project looks good. 

4. Now I can simply select all of the images in each collection, and export them as a unit with a sequence number automatically added to the beginning of each filename, and those can then be used in the project.

Many of those tasks are not suitable for keywords. In theory you could set up keywords that could be used to gather images into multiple sub-groups and sequences within different projects, but that would really stretch and overburden how keywords work. Some metadata experts here on the forums say keywords should not be used for that kind of thing. You’d also have to suppress those keywords from export, so that the images only have the keywords that are doing what they’re supposed to do (identify people, places, items…).

So yes, collections and keywords are best used as complementary tools for organizing presentations. Not just one or the other, but both, using each for what they’re best at.

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

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