Lightroom 4 AND Photoshop?

Steve, with only one catalogue, you can keyword all of those images with "Cornwall Autumn 2012". If you have other images of Cornwall keyworded EG: "Cornwall Spring 2012", you can easily search for all images taken in "Cornwall 2012" and have them all there instead of loading different catalogues.

If you were to add other keywords like "Landscape", "Seascape", "Sunset", "Family", etc. You can easily find all images taken of the family in cornwall.

You can also of course maintain a normal folder hierarchy in Lightroom.

A single catalogue is very much simpler in my opinion, but I appreciate if the way you work suits you, that's fine too.

Hi Peter I hear what you say and appreciate the logic of it.

I may have a go in the new year merging several 'Lake District' catalogues together. That probably involves around 6000 images, so it will be a good examination of my tagging skills and the capability of my current PC to handle a large catalogue.

Regards - Steve

From what Smeggy has written, Lightroom is much faster working with smaller files. I only ever shoot RAW, but if you normally shoot JPG you shouldn't have any issues. That said, I have no speed issues with RAW files either.

I believe Adobe's recommendation when Lightroom was first released was to use multiple catalogues. That recommendation was primarily because their cataloguing mechanism was so slow at the time.

I think it has since been rewritten and handles large numbers of files very well now.

I will let you know about speed, after I create the Combined Lake District Catalogue. They will all be Raw files 80% from the K10 the rest from the K5.

Regards- Steve

That's why I have only a single catalogue for all my exported images. I don't keyword original images, and thus there's no issue with having multiple catlagues for them

There's no issue with the number of images in a lightroom catalogue. I have close on 250,000 in my main exports catalogue. Things slow down when working through original images that have a lot of edits, especially sharpening and noise reduction on them, that's why I do that in other catalgues

Whichever organisational system we use, or particular software, the main thing (in my view) is to keep clear dividing lines between the key file types / workflow stages as you go, and ensure your catalogue can distinquish between these easily.

For me , I shoot DNGs, so these will automatically become the 'master' files, with the built-in advantage that they can not be altered image data-wise. DNGs should also be able to record a wide range of camera specific parameters in the metadata, as well as many generic edit parameters that a wide range of RAW software will offer, so they are really best for this 'master' role I think.

ASAIK DNGs will store most applied metadata within the file itself, so are therefore versatile if you will ever move them to another computer or open them in newer / different software. Some proprietry RAWs won't store some of the specific edit parameters from a program like Lightroom, so your adjustments would be recorded in the program database - you then need to be careful and know how to backup this database and transfer it to another computer so that your files will match up to their 'coupled' metadata.

Then there are 'derivitive' or working files, used for editing with minimal quality loss (eg PSD, TIFF), and finally 'output' files, created for specific purposes, often JPEGs of a precise file size and shapening amounts.

It makes sense to separate these distinct files in your workflow, both by storing on different drives and distinct cataloging. You might tag them with labels to this effect, of embed some XMP / IPTC property info if you database can sort and search based on this.