Thu Nov 08, 2007
Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should : one or many Lightroom catalogues
Lightroom 1.1 made it easier to create and work with more than one catalogue, and it's making some people think that's how they should work. I'm not talking about when you're travelling or need to move pictures between computers, but as a routine way of working. Apart from seeing it in blog posts and forum threads, I've been asked about it on a couple of occasions recently, and was also forwarded a discussion where one photographer quoted from my book:
Another way to think of Lightroom is as a centralized inventory system managing a warehouse - you no longer need to look through each pallet or bin to find the parts. And as your business grows, and you rent the neighbouring warehouses too, you still only need one system to keep control of your work.
The trouble is that those who are actually advocating the idea of using multiple catalogues (eg another one popped up just today at O'Reilly's blog and has a particularly rich selection of dumb ideas) never reflect all that deeply on their true reasons for doing so. When you read between the lines, there are essentially two strands to their arguments:
- It's a workaround for performance problems they've experienced with large catalogues
- They're working "Bridge-style" and don't really think about DAM
Looking first at the "necessity" argument, if it is indeed so, then clearly you do have no alternative. Just don't believe, let alone advocate, that such working methods are the Holy Grail of good practice.
Is it necessary anyway? That's a maybe. It is not yet possible to give simple guidelines (unlike iView's 2Gb file size limit) for when a Lightroom catalogue might run up against a performance limit*. As a DAM program and image processor, Lightroom probes most areas of your computer's operations, and let's also allow for the possibility of some less than optimal code. Many factors other than the number of records in the database could be degrading performance, and so you may not really gain much, if anything, from splitting it up into smaller catalogues.
If performance limits did indeed force you to break your work up into multiple catalogues, there's plenty to lose. For one thing, there is no better way to let some of your pictures slip through the cracks when you forget to import one folder, or when you add more images to a folder and forget to update the Lightroom catalogue covering those folders. As well as omitting items, you can easily duplicate them. Images may end up recorded in more than one catalogue, with adjustments and their descriptive metadata diverging, keyword spellings too, singular here, plural there. And unless your search needs are very primitive, you're going to have to repeat searches in each catalogue file. So there's a time cost. Frankly, while you may think you are smart enough to cope with such a "system", few of us are, not for long anyway.
So multiple catalogues need to be used sparingly, if at all, and need to be tied to physical locations that you can control without thinking - one for the Raid, one for each drive etc - and not to how you analyse your work at a certain point in time. I do use them, after shooting a wedding or event, or when travelling. I like to have a temporary catalogue, usually on the Mac laptop so I can run through pictures while watching United winning on the telly. But once I've decided which images to keep, I'll copy it over to the main PC and import the catalogue into my main one. So the multiple catalogues are for convenience and portability and are temporary residences, like brief affairs after which you always go back to your true love - you never forget who's really the boss.
I might budge from this hard "one ring" line if divisions are enforced externally. Say you moonlighted as a wedding shooter and wanted no risk of your regular employer seeing the personal work. Or if you don't want client A to see client B pictures, use a temporary catalogue in front of clients. Another strong reason might be if you shot something you didn't want the kids to see.
And let's not forget the other main reason for advocating multiple catalogues is that some people work "Bridge-style". They archive the job catalogue after finishing the work, or in some cases they delete it and start afresh on the next job. Some wedding and event photographers can work this way - after all, they may be right in thinking that if they ever need to find some pictures, they'll look up the client or date in their desk diary and then find the archived catalogue. Of course, they also have portfolio catalogues, others for jobs shot over a period that don't really fit the date structure, others by client, others for images that they might keep needing, another for personal photos.... In other words they are not using a chunk of Lightroom's capabilities and maybe they "don't need DAM". Maybe they don't, but let's be clear that this is their true reasoning and acknowledge that their systems are little better than amateur.
I started off with the analogy of a warehouse. Another is with a book. Does a book have an index for each chapter or one for the whole body of work?
*As a detail, my biggest test catalogue contains 75000 images and runs OK - most of the time - on a 4 year old PC. I've a lot more hands on database experience than most photographers and I've not seen anything that makes me question Lightroom's database engine - and I do dig around and abuse it, believe me. Frankly 75000 isn't a big number in database terms - add a zero before I start getting concerned.
