Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: zobeleye on April 22, 2013, 03:54:08 am
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hi there,
I have been thinking about having a small extra catalog for this years pics , and ,after editing, syncing the changes back to the main big catalog on a weekly basis.
not quite sure what the best strategy for that would be ?
any tips appreciated
cheers from NZ
stephan
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Best strategy would be to think twice before you do it! You're always going to hit problems if you have images in more than one catalogue (eg keywords with different spellings or plurals, different adjustments etc as well as searching) and the only benefit may be that backups are faster. But if you want to do it, use the small catalogue as a "inbox". When you've finished adjusting images in it, use Fiole > Import from Another Catalog to bring everything into the master, empty the inbox catalogue or discard it and start a new one.
John
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Hey Stephan glad to make your acquaintance.
My first thought on reading your post is that unless there is a really good reason to attempt what you are contemplating don't do it.
If you are sitting at home on the same computer don't bother making another catalog.
If on the other hand you are setting off on a grand photographic expedition to foreign climes with a laptop then doing something similar to your suggestion is probably a good solution.
Feel free to discuss the circumstances governing your post - more information may well help.
Tony Jay
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I strongly agree with the "don't do it" suggestions.
Some people have a need for totally isolated collections of images, such as business/personal, or to separate different clients' work. Otherwise I would not recommend multiple catalogues on one machine. LR doesn't cope well with the idea that images are in multiple catalogues, and moving things between catalogues is tedious and (IMHO) error-prone. LR works fine with catalogues of hundreds of thousands of images without slowing down significantly, and you have the advantage of searching/sorting over all your images.
So far as I can tell, the only disadvantage is that backing up the catalogue takes longer. My catalogue (for 64,000 images) is 1.3G, but what's a couple of minutes to back it up over a 100M network?
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To lend another point of view, I work extensively with multiple catalogs that are assignment-based, often created on the road to portable hard drives; and a Master Catalog that lives on a large storage volume. To suggest that the program can't allow this, or images that are shared between catalogs is untrue in my experience. There are needs, to be sure, to understand that when you Import From Catalog new metadata changes for images that already reside in a master catalog, you will be obligated to make decisions of which metadata state is to be prevail, or whether both states shall be saved with a Virtual Copy allowing the "second metadata set" for a given file.
Not saying the other respondents' views are wrong; only that they don't speak for my experience over a few hundred assignment-based catalogs that are coalesced into a large Master Catalog.
John Caldwell
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Hi John
I merge assignment catalogs all the time but I think (not completely certain though) that the OP has none of the sorts of needs that would mandate multiple catalogs in any way.
I think he is far better off levering all the advantages of a single catalog to the max.
I am hoping that he will still tell us why he wants to do what he is proposing.
I agree with Simon that merging can be a bit tedious but it is not error-prone IMHO.
Tony Jay
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If you have to ask the original question, then you probably shouldn't be doing it. Once you do know what you are doing, then you can make any system work, but that doesn't make it the best strategy or good general advice.
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hi there,
I have been thinking about having a small extra catalog for this years pics , and ,after editing, syncing the changes back to the main big catalog on a weekly basis.
not quite sure what the best strategy for that would be ?
any tips appreciated
cheers from NZ
stephan
Hi Stephan
It depends on what you want to achieve with the subcatalogs, but maybe a smart collection is all you need? One that has all the current year's picture in it? If the idea of the separate catalog was to keep track of what was processed/keyworded etc. you could do that with a smart collection based on year and color labeling as selection criteria. The smart collection could then contain all 2013 pictures with the (e.g.) red label. Once you're done with a picture, remove the color label and it's gone from the smart collection.