Note I’m only talking about catalog, not files. No way would I keep *all* of the files together, the size of the images only impacts it if they’re all connected. Once I’ve finished editing a wedding it’s archived off my fast drive, onto a slower one. The files are still within the catalog, but not on the local storage, so there’s no performance impact.

I think the limiting factor on your notebook will be the ram, LR is sadly, becoming a real RAM hog and 16GB just isn’t cutting it anymore sadly.

And you would only confuse images from different channels, if your catalog is poorly organised 😉

Hey,

Oh there are absolutely some use cases where it’s not convenient, or workable, to use a single large catalog and in that case I’d do exactly what you suggest! Work on a local catalog and then import into a master one at the end. Best of both worlds then I think 🙂

This method only works if you are home bound local photographer with one computer or many computers and access to good high speed internet a given.

I work on a desk top at home and a laptop one the road. I need to access my catalog files from both computers.

I suppose you don’t sync your Catalog files to a cloud drive. As the catalog file becomes larger, each tiny any change in even one picture means the whole massive catalog file needs to be synchronized to the cloud drive.

So it doesn’t work to have one large Catalog file. Especially if your project is located in a remote part of the world with very slow internet access like say the Serengeti or Madagascar.

The work around is to:

1. Start the project in a dedicated catalog file.
2. When project is complete, merge the project into the master catalog file.

This is where Adobe should innovate with tighter integrating the catalog file with their cloud drive service such that only changes are written to the cloud drive and not the whole file on every 2bit change.

It is, but it wasn’t when I originally wrote this. But the only noticeable speed increase over my previous system is the import and export, because of the faster M.2 drive.

My previous build was a Core i5 4690k, 32GB RAM with the OS and Catalog files (plus working files) on an SSD. Now when I’m referring to the catalog, it doesn’t have to have all of the images in the same place, on the same drive, or even currently attached. My LR cat has approx 250K images in it, and its only 2GB. I think a lot of the slowdown comes when people are letting their drives with the OS or Scratch Disks assigned, to fill up with images as they keep the LR catalog and all the files together.

Rather then keeping the Cat and files they are currently editing on a faster SSD, and back catalogue of work on a bigger, but slower drive. I’d be interested to look at specific set ups of people who are finding it really slow, and seeing if some minor changes to file organisation would let them keep the performance, as well as the utility of a catalog.

Of course, the important thing is that the workflow works best for you, and yes the title is a bit click baity… But I think many, don’t realise how much they might be missing out on utility wise of the catalog.

I do know others to me who have similar setups, but rather than work from the one big catalog. Have either: A master catalog, and a catalog for the current year. At the end of the year they import it into the master.

Or a cat per shoot, and a master one, and again, import after delivery. So they keep the library functionality without any (even if IMO, it’s misplaced) concern about performance.

Current system is: Core i7 9700K, 32GB Ram, 1TB NVME drive, 2 x 4TB Western Digital HDD, GTX1060 GPU. So a workhorse, but not overkill and probably cheaper than the cheapest iMac..