Lightroom — How Many Catalogs?
Lightroom: How Many Catalogs?
How many catalogs do you need in Lightroom? Many people have only one Lightroom catalog, some photographers have a catalog per customer with dozens and hundreds of catalogs. How many Lightroom catalogs you have, will dictate your workflow. The more catalogs, the more complicate your workflow. I know of at least 1 photographer that has over 375 catalogs1. He uses one catalog per customer per session, he is a prolific shooter. Weddings are at least a thousand photos, and sometimes as many as three thousand photos per wedding.
I have 3 Lightroom catalogs:
- WIP2: This Lightroom catalog is the equivalent of an inbox. I have to confess that right now, I have currently 9087 photos in it that I still need to process, mostly travel and family photos.
- Customers: All the processed photos for all my customers. This includes all the photos they have purchased and all photos that I showed them but decided not to buy3.
- Syv: all my personal photos such as travel, family... and customer photos that I want to keep for my portfolio or otherwise.
- All photos are imported in the WIP catalog. Nothing gets deleted in the camera. Deleting in the camera may corrupt the card and the camera LCD screen is not good enough to make a final decision. Many times, I have been able to rescue a photo with Photoshop.
- I process all of my photos in the WIP catalog, by entering the keywords, the IPTC data, and doing the local adjustments. 99.x% of all my photos are processed in Lightroom without using Photoshop4.
- Depending on if the photos are for customers or myself, I open the correct Lightroom catalog, Syv or Customers and import them. All their settings and processing are copied over.
- When I'm happy with the results then I can delete these photos from the WIP catalog.
1 He started with Lightroom 1.1 which seriously slowed down around 10 000 photos. ↑
2 Work In Progress ↑
3 They may want to buy them later. ↑
4 I'm starting to loose my Photoshop skills, I use Photoshop so little. I have use Photoshop only once since upgrading to Lightroom 2. ↑
Tags: Dam | Lightroom | Lightroom-Why | Technical
Lightroom: How Many Catalogs?
How many catalogs do you need in Lightroom? Many people have only one Lightroom catalog, some photographers have a catalog per customer with dozens and hundreds of catalogs. How many Lightroom catalogs you have, will dictate your workflow. The more catalogs, the more complicate your workflow. I know of at least 1 photographer that has over 375 catalogs1. He uses one catalog per customer per session, he is a prolific shooter. Weddings are at least a thousand photos, and sometimes as many as three thousand photos per wedding.
I have 3 Lightroom catalogs:
- WIP2: This Lightroom catalog is the equivalent of an inbox. I have to confess that right now, I have currently 9087 photos in it that I still need to process, mostly travel and family photos.
- Customers: All the processed photos for all my customers. This includes all the photos they have purchased and all photos that I showed them but decided not to buy3.
- Syv: all my personal photos such as travel, family... and customer photos that I want to keep for my portfolio or otherwise.
- All photos are imported in the WIP catalog. Nothing gets deleted in the camera. Deleting in the camera may corrupt the card and the camera LCD screen is not good enough to make a final decision. Many times, I have been able to rescue a photo with Photoshop.
- I process all of my photos in the WIP catalog, by entering the keywords, the IPTC data, and doing the local adjustments. 99.x% of all my photos are processed in Lightroom without using Photoshop4.
- Depending on if the photos are for customers or myself, I open the correct Lightroom catalog, Syv or Customers and import them. All their settings and processing are copied over.
- When I'm happy with the results then I can delete these photos from the WIP catalog.
1 He started with Lightroom 1.1 which seriously slowed down around 10 000 photos. ↑
2 Work In Progress ↑
3 They may want to buy them later. ↑
4 I'm starting to loose my Photoshop skills, I use Photoshop so little. I have use Photoshop only once since upgrading to Lightroom 2. ↑
Tags: Dam | Lightroom | Lightroom-Why | Technical
