As you import more and more pictures into your Lightroom Catalog, the Catalog and Previews file grow larger and larger. And since the Catalog is essentially a database, the bigger a database gets, the slower it will become.

If you encounter performance issues with your Lightroom Catalog, a first option might be to try to optimize your Catalog. You can do so by choosing ‘Relaunch and Optimize’ in the File Handling tab of the Catalog Settings. (Edit => Catalog Settings for Windows, Lightroom => Catalog Settings for Mac).

But there comes a time – depending on your hardware – when even that trick won’t do it anymore. In that case, another, more radical solution might be to work with multiple Catalogs. Examples include working with a separate Catalog per project (e.g. a wedding photographer might start a Catalog per wedding.

Another example is working with a ‘private’ and a ‘professional’ catalog, although the line between both might be hard to draw at times.

In general, working with more than one Catalog offers some advantages:

• The individual Catalogs are smaller, and therefore will run faster on slower hardware
• It’s faster, if not easier to backup a small Catalog and to keep an offsite backup of it (remember: Catalogs can become corrupt and harddrives can fail!). As long as you don’t work in the Catalog, you don’t have to make a new offsite backup.
• Finally, smaller Catalogs are easier to put on the smaller harddrives or laptops or on removable USB-drives.

However, all is not golden: working with multiple Catalogs also has a major disadvantage:

• Say you’re a wedding photographer, and you want to make a portfolio of your best work, which of course spans more than one wedding. You would then have to search every individual Catalog for the best pictures andexport those (either as individual pictures or as a Catalog). Hardly a convenient approach.

Luckily, there’s a ‘Best of both worlds’ solution, which is to work with a smal, individual Catalog per assignment. Once an assignment is finished, you can then import the smaller Catalog into a larger ‘Archival’ Catalog. As long as you have to do processor-intensive tasks such as developing, painting local adjustments and the like, you’ll be working in the small Catalog.

The large Archival Catalog will mostly be used to browse through, for example should a wedding client, after a couple of years, request a reprint, or should you want to make a portfolio of your best shots.

In next week’s episode, we’ll look into this option in detail.

This blogpost was derived from my (Dutch) book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’, published by Easy Computing.