Lightroom users? Cataloguing question . . .

dissent

What say you folks? Now that I have a D7000, I'm wondering if I should keep a separate Lightroom catalog between what I shoot with the new camera and what I shoot with my older D5100. Or is this making things too complicated, and I should just keep them all in one catalog? Can I just set up collections based on the two different cameras?

sevencrossing

No need for separated catalog . L R allows you to sort / filter , by camera as well as a lot of other things.

Gareth

Why would you want a separate catalog? Surely your photos haven't changed that much. If your photos are organised by date it will be easy to see when you started using the new body and much easier to browse through.

TaoTeJared

I use multiple catalogues and find that they work much quicker, easier to back up and archive, and flows well.
Catalog for each new year and for current, recent, archive in each year. Obviously by the following year, the previous year's catalogue is totally in the "archive" catalogue. I have been setting up a "favorites" catalogue as well. I use catalogues as "parent folders".

I use different folders for different cameras as that is how I remember taking them. I do have a separate catalogue for my D50 that is converted to IR but that is just because it is so different, and I don't use it for "work" usually.

sevencrossing

Tao - if you use multiple catalogues, does this not mean if are doing a key word seach, or want to find all your 4 or 5 star photoes, you have to seach in each and every catalogue? how do use collections with multiple catalogues?

Msmoto

I change catalogs with the year. However, I have all the finished prints exported to an external hard drive and on Flickr. Thus I rarely have to go back and use an older catalog.

TaoTeJared

Tao - if you use multiple catalogues, does this not mean if are doing a key word seach, or want to find all your 4 or 5 star photoes, you have to seach in each and every catalogue? how do use collections with multiple catalogues?

For the work I pull up regularly I dump that into my "favorites". I don't tag stars or colors for favorites. I find that to be useless other than to say I like it or not. I use the colors for my workflow, i.e. flag to edit, green-done edit, Blue-2nd edit, orange-edit 2nd version copy, red-fix quickly.

For searching I do have to search multiple catalogues but that is the trade off for having a smaller but quicker SSD. All my files include the original file name, so when searching I can usually tell what spot it will be in just by the name.

Basically my workflow hard drive space is really why I have multiple catalogues. SSD - current work, internal SSD/HD hybrid, finished to client/video/large shoots, 3tb USB 3.0 external current finished work, NAS old work, archive, back-up. It is a bit convoluted but that is what I found worked quickly. Someday I will get it lined up better, but I just don't have the time to spend days transferring TBs of data or can eat up that much bandwidth on my network and be productive. I'm sure it is not the best way at all, but it works.

dissent

Thanks for the input. I just shoot for myself, and family events, so my catalog is considerably more modest than what many of you are dealing with. For now I have main folders set up by year within my main catalog, with subfolders for special subjects or events. At this point I may just set up an import preset for the filenames coming in from the D7000 to distinguish them from the D5100 files and leave it at that with one catalog. And I can always search and sort on metadata too.

spraynpray

There used to be a rumour that large catalogues slowed down your computer but that has either been fixed after LR3 or was a myth so whatever works for you is OK. I do it by year for my stuff and by event name with the year for others.

sevencrossing

I suppose it depends on the definition of "large"
I have just one catalog with about 40,000 files
on an i7 proceesor 12 GB RAM and just one main 2TB drive with old RAW files on externals
I don't shoot events, needing 1000s of shots a day and I do delete all old rejects

dissent

Also, I'm finding that I'm getting less and less sentimental about some images, which is probably a good thing.

Msmoto

@dissent

Ah yes....there are over 20,000 files somewhere on hard drives, from Aperture....over several years old.....have no intention of looking again..... unless something unusual happens.

On Flickr I have about 2000 images, one or two which are fairly good. I use Flickr to store my images in a "back up" capacity.

As I get older, the importance of things changes...

dissent

Pretty much, Msmoto; and I'll bet your 20,000 are better than the well under 10,000 I have at present. There are a bunch of images that I was thinking "well, maybe when I get better at post processing, I'll be able to do something with that"; now my thoughts are more becoming "dude, who are you kidding; throw that out already".

Vipmediastar

I had separate catalogs before but that just confused me and kept forgetting to change back to the one that I wanted to add the new photos to.
It comes in handy when doing a project (wedding) but once you are done you can merge it and hope that everything goes smooth.

Recently I been looking at my archives and deleting the non keepers. My suggestion is to keep one unless you are very savvy with light room and software.

Make sure to backup and backup your backup.

sevencrossing

There used to be a rumour that large catalogues slowed down your computer but that has either been fixed after LR3 or was a myth so whatever works for you is OK. I do it by year for my stuff and by event name with the year for others.

And we now have LR 5 (or at least LR5 Beta) which claims to be even faster and seems to remove the need for CS5 for a lot of retouching