Catalog best practices

[ron_hiner]

I got started in PM+ with just one giant catalog that has 20+years of images.  I'm beginning to think thats not such a good idea for a variety reasons -- one of which is it makes MacOS TimeMachine backups take forever every time there is any change at all.   What is the best way to catalog 20 years of images?

If it matters, all my images are stored in folders organized by year then named with the date, then some descriptive word.   For example, photos from today's lacrosse shoot (april 4, 2024) would be stored in a folder thusly:  /photos/2024/240404_lax

[Jon Paul Davidson]

Ron, glad to see someone else has a collection similar to mine.  I have over 100,000 images organized somewhat the way you do. One folder forr each year, which contains 12+ folders for the months (roll numbers for earlier film rolls).  I use a filename structure: YYYY.MM-000 (For the months, I use A-M so they stay in numerical order. Then for the "000" part I use numbers 001, 002, etc so everything stays on the same order.  So far, no issues with either the Apple OS or PM+ - Jon Davidson

[C-F]

Nice!
Just curious, with that amount of images, what is the actual catalog size on your system?

Thanks!

[Earl M]

I have a PM6 catalog with over 850,000 images from more than 50 years of photography. The photos are all on a locally attached disk system organized similar to you with a folder for each decade then folders for each year in the decade and folders within the year by date of the project and a short description. The image metadata is all in one catalog file (database) that is less than 25 Gigabytes. I do not create proxies for the images but if yours were stored off-line or on slow media you might need them and they could take up much more space than the catalog.

I used the decades folders to make backups easier (the older decades seldom change) and it would simplify splitting things up if I ever needed to use multiple catalogs. I once had two catalogs (one for old scanned images and one for newer digital images) but that was more trouble than it was worth and I did not notice any performance issues when I put them all in one catalog.  I am a Mac Studio user.

I have used and tried other DAM systems but PM is the most complete and best supported one I have ever found.

[krakouer]

I get TimeMachine to skip my catalog database.

But I get syncthing to backup once every day. It seems the most effecient in transferring and is free.