Light room Catalogs - How do you organize yours?

Im interested in seeing how everyone organizes there lightroom catalog.

I have one giant catalog for personal family stuff. The folders are arranged by Year. inside that folder are simply by shot date. Unless it is something special. Such as "Beach Trip -Month", or Disney World"...etc..etc..

Everything else.... every job has its own catalog. So I have a big list when you go to.."Open catalog" However I very rarley have to go back after the sale is complete. And the most current ones are at the top.

One catalog for everything. No sense in using LR for DAM otherwise IMO.

Might use 2011 to start a new one, if the old one gets too big. (now 20k images)
But that's all the "splitting up" I'll ever do.

I will probably make 3. One for personal photos, one for photography on the business side and one for a separate artistic nudes/nsfw business.

I have 1 big catalog. Sometimes if Im out and about on my laptop, Ill make a smaller catalog to work on but will import it into my larger catalog later.

I organise by Continent then year(cause I do alot of travelling and Im good at remembering places) e.g.
Asia
->2010
-->100328-KL-Dance
-->100328-KL-Monkeys
->2011
-->111112-Beijing-TempleHeaven
Australia
->2010
->2011

Catalog A: General Photography
Catalog B: Aviation

Both are arranged:
- Year
-- Month
--- Shoot / Location
---- Picks
----- Posted On Website

Lightroom bogs at about 20,000 images, which is about what I shoot annually, so I do it by year. I wish I could do it all in one monster catalogue so I could cross sort.

New to LR3. When I have a particular catalog open in LR, I can only view the photos in that catalog, correct? Lets say I have 5 catalogs and I want to gather all the photos with a 5-star rating into one [collection]. Can I do this?

One catalog for One year, all folders within that catalog by Name..

One catalog with a folder structure:

year > month > day.

The rest is done with keywords and smart collections.

I have two locations set in LR: the first is an external drive where the bulk of my catalog is, and the second is the internal drive of my Mac where I import the latest images. I will work on them there, and when I'm done, upload them to the external drive and point LR to their new location (i.e. without re-importing them as I don't want to loose the editing history!).

Works well for me. When I reach the 20k mark, probably this year, I will create a second catalog.

I have a a Catalog for all my personal stuff, then a Catalog for every customer. I then keep each customers catalog and all there images in int he same folder. Makes it super easy to back up and work on the images across multiple machines on a newtwork ect..

Best,
Jay

buddy4344 wrote in post #11669959
Lightroom bogs at about 20,000 images, which is about what I shoot annually, so I do it by year. I wish I could do it all in one monster catalogue so I could cross sort.

LR bogs or your computer bogs? I know several photographers that do the one catalog thing with over 500,000 images in that catalog, and it is just as snappy as when it was first used.

kompressor wrote in post #11671096
New to LR3. When I have a particular catalog open in LR, I can only view the photos in that catalog, correct? Lets say I have 5 catalogs and I want to gather all the photos with a 5-star rating into one [collection]. Can I do this?

No, Lightroom handles one catalog at a time. If you want to work with all your photos together but at the same time have individual catalogs you might want to create a "master catalog" for everything then use the File/Import from Catalog function to update it when needed. Lightroom Help will have specific info on that function in the Import section.

Thanks for the reply Tony. I'll look into it.