One Database or Multiple?

[Ed Wolfstein]

From a workflow / performance perspective, would it be better to create one massive (20 years worth of images) and then search particular years or would it be advantageous to create one database per year and search the years of interest, or every year if you want to search everything?

[Dub]

Hello Ed,

Personally I prefer a single catalog, maybe an old habit taken with Lightroom !
Easier to manage in my opinion.
It also depends on the number of photos, but as long as it remains fluid...

 

[Kirk Baker]

Ed,

From a workflow / performance perspective, would it be better to create one massive (20 years worth of images) and then search particular years or would it be advantageous to create one database per year and search the years of interest, or every year if you want to search everything?

While it is true that the database will take longer to index as it grows, unless your 20 years worth of images is over a million photos, I'd keep it to one catalog.  If anything, splitting the two between professional work and non-professional photos could be good if you really want multiple catalogs.

-Kirk

[Ed Wolfstein]

It'll be over a million images when all done, so, I think I'll start with individual Catalogs for each year. Thanks for the insight.

[PauloBMB]

Hi Ed, as a former Lightroom user I had the same question on my mind. Started with multiple catalogs, one per year, but right now collections are restricted to one catalog and since all my LR organization workflow was based on Collections that would gather images from different years, I had to start from scratch and work on one single catalog hoping that performance would not be significantly affected.
Have not had the time to import all my images yet so I am not sure.
Just wanted to give another point of view in case you use collections as I do.

regards.

Paulo

[Ed Wolfstein]

Thanks for your input Paulo. My archive is large, (around 200k images per year) so each year is taking several hours to scan in. And with every new generation of camera bodies, the file image file size grows in pixels/resolution every couple of years on top of that. When I get all the catalog scans done, I'll see how the searching goes - spanning a number of catalogs (years) per search for a test. I could always make one humungous catalog (spanning 20 years) but I'll wait and see how this current approach works out. Cheers!