How many Catalogs, where should I put them and when should I back them up?

The Catalog

Below the Navigator window are the panels by which Lightroom® organizes your images. The first panel is the Catalog panel. Only one catalog can be open in Lightroom® at a time. To open another catalog, you will have to go to the File menu at the top left of the screen and choose either “Open Catalog” or “Open Recent” from the drop down menu. When you select another catalog you would like to open, Lightroom® will ask you if you want to relaunch Lightroom®. If you choose to relaunch Lightroom®, you will be asked if you would like to backup the current catalog. If you choose to backup the current catalog, Lightroom® will back up the catalog, close the current catalog and relaunch itself and open with the new catalog. The Catalog Contains the following:

• Preview information for all the images in the Catalog.
• The Location of the folders and number of files in each folder, and all the files on the computer and external hard drives that have been imported into Lightroom®.
• Module settings for each of the seven Lightroom®4 modules.
• Metadata, keywords, ratings and labels for all the files.
• Information for all the Collections of images you have created.

In the Catalog panel are four sections, All Photographs, Quick Collection, Previous Import and Missing Photographs. To the right of each of these choices is a number indicating how many images there are in each of these sections. You can see the missing images by clicking with the cursor on the Missing Photographs section of the Catalog panel. You can go to the Library menu at the top of the page and select “Find Missing Photos” and Lightroom® will first show you all the missing photographs on screen and then will scan your computer and any connected hard drives in an effort to find the missing photos.

One of the things you need to decide about your Catalog is, do you want to have just one Catalog with all your images in it or do you want multiple catalogs? In previous versions of Lightroom® the catalog tended to slow down as more and more images were added. Starting with Lightroom®3 that has not been a problem, Lightroom®3 and 4 catalogs are capable of handling vast amounts of images. The reasons a Catalog slows down are more dependent on the computer than increasing numbers of images. The things that affect how fast or slow Lightroom® runs on a computer are the following:

• Computer CPU speed.
• Amount of RAM.
• The Drive speed is too slow.
• The size of the images you have is very large.

Lightroom® 4 seems to be able to handle tens of thousands of images without noticeably slowing down.

The advantage of having just one catalog is it simplifies the workflow and makes it easy to search for just one image because the entire Catalog can be searched at one time. Also, you can create collections of images from any one of your folders. At some point, Lightroom® may start to slow down. To improve the performance and possibly speed up Lightroom®, do the following:

• Go to the File menu at the top left of the screen.
• From the drop down menus, select “Optimize Catalog”.
• A dialog box will appear telling you when the Catalog was last optimized and that optimizing may improve the performance.
• Also, it will tell you that you will not be able to use Lightroom® during the optimization process.
• Ignore the warning and click with the cursor on “Optimize”.
• Lightroom® will optimize your catalog and tell you when it is finished optimizing with a pop up window on the main screen.

The advantage to having multiple catalogs is that you can place different types of images in separate Catalogs. For example, you might have one catalog for business and one for personal or for family. Some professional photographers have one for weddings, one for portraits and one for personal. Others have one catalog for each year. The disadvantage to multiple catalogs is that to go from one to the other you need to relaunch Lightroom® every time you switch catalogs. While not hard to do, it does take some time. Of course, the decision as to how many catalogs is up to you and how you want to organize your images.

One other thing to decide is where to locate your catalog. By default, Lightroom® places a Catalog in the Pictures folder on your hard drive for a Macintosh computer and on a PC the Catalog is in My Pictures. My suggestion is to not have your catalog located on your computer’s hard drive, but instead, locate it on a large external hard drive. There are several reasons for this, first, you will not be taking up space on your computer’s hard drive and second, when your computer’s had drive fails or if you get a new computer it will be easy for Lightroom® to locate the images when you first open Lightroom® on the new computer. A third reason is that if you are working with both a desktop computer and a laptop, you can move the hard drive from one to the other and always have access to your images. If you do put your catalog on an external hard drive, make sure that the hard drive you choose for your images is included when you backup your computer system.

Lightroom® comes with a default catalog which will be located on the same drive as the one on which you installed Lightroom®. The easiest way to place the catalog on a different hard drive is to do the following:

• From the File drop down menu select “New Catalog”.
• A dialog box entitled “Create Folder with New Catalog” will appear on screen.
• In the box that says “Save As:” give your new catalog a name.
• Below the “Save As:” box is a box that allows you to choose where you want the new catalog.
• Click with the cursor on the drop down menu and select the drive for the new catalog.
• Click with the cursor on “Create” at the bottom right of the dialog box.
• Your new catalog will be on the hard drive you chose and will open.

Another important thing to decide about your catalog is how often you want it backed up. Choosing this and some other things are done in the Catalog Settings. Catalog Settings are found under the word Lightroom® at the top left of the screen on the Macintosh and under the Edit menu at the top of the screen on the PC. When you bring up the Catalog Settings dialog box, you can set up how often Lightroom® backs up your catalog under the “General” heading. Also under the General heading you will find the date your catalog was created, the date of the last backup, the date of the last optimization and the size of the catalog. The backup setting is at the bottom of the General settings dialog box and has a drop down menu from which you can choose how often to backup your catalog.

Other choices in the Catalog Settings dialog box are for file handling. Here you can choose the size and quality of your previews and when to discard 1:1 previews and Metadata, which deals with where develop settings are recorded. In most cases, the default settings are more than adequate.