I'm new to LR4, and I'm trying to understand how I organize my shoots. Should I use one catalog for all my, which each shoot has it's own folder on my hard drive. Or should I start a new catalog for each shoot?
It depends on your style and how much you shoot. If you want images to be easily searchable then creating a catalog for each shoot is NOT the route to go. I'm pushing 20K images (RAW/DNG) on a laptop with 2GB RAM and haven't had any problems. Just be sure to back up often because if LR crashes then it will take the catalog down with it.
I just have lightroom create folders by date and apply keywords on import... very simple to do this way. I also have it backup images to seperate drive also. Creating a different catalog for each shoot seems like it would take forever to find what I'm looking for cause I would have to load each catalog prior to searching.
Google Lightroom workflows and see what will work best for you
Robert Jewett wrote: At 20K, my laptop began to slow down, at 40K it was unbearable. I do not use LR to catalog now, instead using a system of folders.
I love the idea of LR, but even with a SSD and 8GB of RAM on a newer Mac, it really doesn't perform well.
Actually, Bridge might do what you want pretty well.
that is strange. I have 27k photos in one catalog 4gb ram and no ssd. Lightroom works perfectly.
I do use a PC though. Maybe you need a genius to look at your Mac:)
Kidding about the last sentence. Were you using 4? then again I never had a problem when I had 3.
OP I do it exactly as your first choice. One catalog with each shoot(day) is in one directory. So far it works fine for me.
I use one catalog per project.
If I was selling images to stock or some other purpose where I needed to do bulk searches, I'm sure I wouldn't do that. But for the project-centric work I do, one-catalog-per is just right.
I use 1 catalog for all photos (nearly 60k). I've never had a performance issue related to the catalog, but my PC has always been well spec'd even with the actual photos stored on another server.
I even used the catalog today to determine that only 2% of my shots are at 1/8000 so debating between the D600 and D800 became a little easier.
Within the catalog, I have 2 folders, personal/business, then a folder by year, and then by "date - shoot name" to make sorting/backups nice and easy.
I catalog per year. Its makes it easy to go back and all 3, 4 or 5 star images from a year. I've been with LR since v1 and my first catalog started to take to long to backup, test integrity and open, etc. But that was after multiple years with everything in it.
I know some people who 1 catalog a month, or 1 per quarter.
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