Should I use one Lightroom catalog or create a new catalog for each shoot?

Question

I’m a casual photographer and currently keep all my photos in one large Lightroom catalog, using keywords, smart collections, and collections like trips or family to organize them. I’m wondering if that catalog will become too large over time and hurt performance.

An alternative workflow I’ve considered is creating a new catalog for each new shoot or event, saved alongside that folder of photos. But I’m concerned that splitting everything into many catalogs will make it harder to find older images later.

What’s the better approach for organizing photos in Lightroom: one catalog for everything, or multiple catalogs? If using one catalog, what should I rely on for organization?

user89 · Accepted Answer

Keep everything in one library. Lightroom 3 has overcome some of the past performance issues with large catalogs, so the benefits of having a good search ability dictate a single library.

I use a lot of Smart Collections that are based on metadata and workflow steps. I also create standard collections for each client job that I shoot.

Caption and keyword anything that's worth keeping.

Much like GMail showed the world that powerful search is better than a jillion manually-managed folders for email, good DAM tools like Lightroom or Aperture reveal that keywording and search is more efficient than manually managing collections and folders.

Should I use one Lightroom catalog or create a new catalog for each shoot?

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