New to the forums - questions about workflow, LR, PM, DAM, etc

[Dan Mueller]

I'm new to the forums. Looks like a great place for info.

I'm about half way through the DAM book. It's a great read. I have some questions. I'm a Mac guy. Use a Canon system. I currently have PS, LR, Photomechanic, I have perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 photos. Most are fairly well organized onto drives and into folders by year and date. I also have thousands and thousands of older photos spread across numerous drives. But I'm "relatively" organized. Nothing is keyworded.

Most of my photos need to be pulled into LR, renamed, catalogued, keyworded, etc, etc, etc.

A huge part of my photography is devoted to bodybuilding, powerlifting, fitness, etc. Currently I have all of those together by year on drives. All the rest of my photos I have on other drives. Everything is backed up.

A question I have is if I should integrate all of my photos into one huge catalog. My computer is set up so that I have a Boot drive devoted only to OS X and applications. All my data (photos, documents, music, etc) sit on separate drives. My plan is to have one drive set up exclusively  as the Working and Catalog drive. All the other drives would contain the Original Photos, etc.

I'd kind of like to follow Peter's suggestion in his book as much as possible. I'm wondering at this point, if I should integrate all my photos into one Huge LR Catalog, or if I should use separate LR catalogs for all the bodybuilding photos, and other LR catalogs for different types of photos I've taken. One HUGE catalog, or separate Catalogs for different types of photos?

Next question...if I already have PM, is there any advantage to using Imageingester Pro?

My plan is to use PM to import and keyword. LR to catalog and edit, etc. PS for producing final edits and prints, etc.

I have all of my original photos pretty well organized and named. But my derivatives are a mess...scattered all over, all with a multitude of names, etc. It would be great to organize this mess, but not sure how much work it would be. Going forward, I'll use Peter's suggestion of retaining the file name for both originals and derivatives I currently have. But not sure what to do with all the jpeg and tiff derivatives I've created over the years. Any suggestions for me would be helpful. I hope to learn a lot from these forums.

Dan Mueller

[johnbeardy]

A lot of questions in one post!

My feeling is that unless there's a good reason to the contrary, you go with one catalogue. Good reasons might include performance, but I know of 200k catalogues working fine. Another good reason might be privacy, so if you wanted no possibility whatsoever of someone else seeing one category of pictures.

Once everything is pulled together into one big pot, then you can subdivide it as you need into personal and other themes. You could add bodybuilding as a keyword for all those pics - so you're just a click away from finding them all. You can then add other keywords over time.

One idea is to use existing filenames. For instance, if they contain a word such as "championship", you can script various applications (eg Bridge, maybe PM) to add the keywords "bodybuilding, fitness, championships, competitions...." automatically.

And once everything is together, LR makes it pretty easy to find all the derivatives - Library Filter and Smart Collections. If you identify duplicates, you can be brutal with them - but you'll be doing so on the basis of having an overview thanks to the database structure.

John

[peterkrogh]

Dan,
On your way to a very large Lightroom catalog, I'd suggest using smaller catalogs to wrangle groups of images that get added to the master.  You'll find a 200,000 catalog to be pretty slow, I think.
Peter