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Author Topic: Searching across multiple catalogues  (Read 1468 times)

Lost

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Searching across multiple catalogues
« on: October 05, 2010, 01:34:27 am »

To date, I have been using a single LR catalogue for most photographs, other than specific projects that I need to keep separate. However, this is becoming impractically large, with LR's "backup and optimise catalogue" sometimes taking more than 15 minutes to run. I am running LR3.2 on Mac.

If I change the usage so that I have many smaller catalogues, is there any way to perform a keyword search so that I can list matching photographs along with the catalogue that they appear in?

john beardsworth

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Re: Searching across multiple catalogues
« Reply #1 on: October 05, 2010, 03:02:23 am »

No, Lightroom's not designed that way. Fragmenting control of your picture collection has many disadvantages, and you can always set off an optimise when you're taking a break.

What sort of quantities are you dealing with? Big numbers are perfectly possible - see http://forums.adobe.com/message/3172681#3172681

John
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Lost

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Re: Searching across multiple catalogues
« Reply #2 on: October 05, 2010, 04:12:14 pm »

The database is not really that big - about 25000 images, with a 330Mbyte catalogue file.  It is not clear why backup/optimisation is so slow on my machine, as these are not particularly large and the computer is only a year old.

I think that what I am going to try is breaking splitting the catalogue in to two, divided by subject matter to make searching less painful.

digitaldog

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Re: Searching across multiple catalogues
« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2010, 04:22:39 pm »

The database is not really that big - about 25000 images, with a 330Mbyte catalogue file.

That’s actually not at all big by comparison of many other users.

Splitting catalogs is often more time consuming and ineffective than the alternative.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Searching across multiple catalogues
« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2010, 04:47:15 pm »

Something is definitely odd with the backup / optimise. You shouldn't be having a problem with that number of images on a relatively new machine.

Maybe trash the Previews.lrdata file.  When LR is closed, just move Previews.lrdata out of the folder containing the lrcat file. Restart LR and it will rebuild previews as needed.

John
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Re: Searching across multiple catalogues
« Reply #5 on: October 06, 2010, 02:27:57 pm »

I profiled Lightroom's run-time while optimising/backing up (via the Apple developer tools), and it looks horribly like it is a problem with the hard disk taking ages to respond in some cases.  There are also some IO stalls logged in the console.

I think before anything else I need to make sure that my backups are up to date and then install a new disk :-(
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