P: support an external database for the catalog?

[TheBaronVonJ]

I just have one catalog for all my personal photos, so I can make use of the face tagging. So it would be counter-productive to split it into multiple catalogs each with their own face DB. But as each year goes by, it gets bigger, and Lightroom gets slower. So why not have support for storing the catalog in an external SQL database like digiKam does? Could even one-up digiKam with an offline mode to cache the catalog locally to do work when off the network and then sync back when you return. Then I wouldn't need to overspec my personal computer just for my Lightroom catalog. Which I only really use for organizing, and not really at all for editing (and Bridge doesn't do tagging, and Lightroom CC doesn't support XMP face region metadata because Reasons).

[GoldingD]

Some links to visit

Avoid using more than one catalogue | Lightroom Solutions

Should you have one catalog or multiple catalogs? | Lightroom Queen

Want to improve Adobe Lightroom Classic performance? Try some of these suggestions. | Adobe

Lightroom Catalog Management | Single VS Multiple Catalogs | Visual Flow

(in which, thoudasnds of images is a small catalog, millons is large)

[TheBaronVonJ]

Thanks @GoldingD I'll check the link on optimizing. All those other links sumarize quite well why I want a single catalog: so I have just the one place to search for my photos! I am in the market to replace my desktop, which is a late 2012 mac mini. So there will be huge bump in CPU, probably same amount of RAM but should be higher speed, from HDD to SSD most likely. But I have a hard time thinking that GPU should really matter for my use case, as I genuinely do not use the photo editing/developing capabilities hardly ever. Still it will be an upgrade of the Intel integrated GPU.