[Leica] How do folks manage catalogs in Lightroom?

[Adam Bridge]

Thanks everyone for your valuable insights.

I definitely understand Tina’s system and why it’s valuable.

If I go that way I’ll have to figure out how to split off a catalog of old images, or of this year’s images.

Just to update how I store things:

This year’s images are stored on an SSD in an external enclosure on my MacPro connected with Thunderbolt 2. The catalog is also on this SSD.

All other images are stored on a Promise Pegasus2 RAID (in Raid 5 configuration).

Files are sorted in folders by year and date within the year. Because I keyword I don’t feel the need to organize by trip. The trip will be a keyword.

I back up that data set to another RAID, this time a SOFTRaid on four drives in a different enclosure. I use a program called Chronosynch to make sure they’re up to date. I also backup the catalog and the current years’ images to the SOFTraid.

All of these devices are backed up to the cloud via Backblaze. The initial backup took months… I like Backblaze. If I have a total failure they’ll send me a drive with the entire backup set on it.

And, of course, my computer is backed up with TimeMachine to three different devices.

yeah, I’m paranoid.

I find it odd that I probably have more storage in my studio that existed in the United States in, say, 1960 or maybe 1965. My watch probably has more compute power than the on-board computers that took Apollo to the moon.

Again, thanks for sharing insights and methodology!

Adam Bridge