How many Lightroom catalogs do you have?

Does anyone break up their photos into more than one catalog?
I am thinking of doing this. If so, what criteria do you use?

I have one catalog for all my photos, and I do backups of it every 7 days.

I use only one. I have the option to back up each time I exit, but in practice only do so after considerable editing, or after two or three days.

One

One catalog, and I have it set to backup "Once a day, when exiting Lightroom".

One here as well. Prior I used Aperture and had a library for each year. It became a pain to find things.

Keep it simple if you can and start with one.

I have two; "Current" with everything from this year and "Old" with files from 2001 to 2012.

One per year for me with everything from that year.

I have three. One for my main photographic interest; Aviation, which is fully keyworded and uses lots of collections and smart collections. I then have one for all of my other general shots, family snaps and the like. I am also involved with a local youth organisation. I am the one that usually ends up photograhing the activities. It makes sense to keep those images in another catalogue out of the way.

Alan

Clark wrote in post #15478944
Does anyone break up their photos into more than one catalog?
I am thinking of doing this. If so, what criteria do you use?

Are you aware that Lightroom can only have one catalog open at a time. Assuming you rely on keyword searches, as I do, If you have to do a keyword search, then you may end up searching through each catalog. This means you have to open one catalog, then another etc. I am not sure how many images you have in your catalog, but I have heard of pros who have over 250,000 images and still use one catalog. My advice - don't do it - there are more cons than pros IMHO.

WesternGuy

Like so many things, "It depends" is a good answer.

I keep all my 50k images in one catalog, and then have them organized into collections and keyworded, so that shoots/files are easy to find and I don't need to close/open a seperate catalog to find something.

However, people have popped up here who have good reasons to keep seperate catalogs. These are frequently people who run businesses and keep seperate business-related catalogs, Some keep catalogs that are "family-related" and ones that are "fine-art" related. So, it's really a personal preference thing..."It depends"!

One catalog here as well with a bit over 50k files, slightly over 800GB in photos and videos.

Thanks for the input, I think I will stick with one catalog.

Why only one?

I've split mine by month. Then I split by subject/event.

So for January I have three so far:
1 - Pics of my daughter
2 - My wife's last day at work
3 - Sunrise Hike

I will also create a misc catalog for January, when I get around to talking any non-event/subject specific pics.

2 one for each computer.