# How to split catalogue of 400K photos?



## A_Fotografy (Sep 11, 2018)

Hi everyone,

I know its madness and how I came to it, but I have a huuuge catalogue and I want to put things right now.
I would like to split catalogue per year and archive those previous years with all my edits.

I have 6 external drives and one catalogue. I want to get more drives and export on each drive one/two years and make a clone for it. Then just archive those away in safe. 

How do I go about it so I don't mess up everything? I guess there is no easy way anyway. I have a week free and ready to roll up sleeves.

Thank you,
Regards,
Armand


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## johnbeardy (Sep 11, 2018)

See my answer here - don't.

John


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## A_Fotografy (Sep 11, 2018)

johnbeardy said:


> See my answer here - don't.
> 
> John



Thank you for this. Sent you an answer. I'm facing this beast, but not sure where to start here.


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## johnbeardy (Sep 11, 2018)

You're doing the right thing by pausing to think!


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## Hal P Anderson (Sep 11, 2018)

John is right. Splitting up your catalogue is likely to increase your unhappiness. Far more useful would be to cull relentlessly and to keyword the survivors.


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## LouieSherwin (Sep 11, 2018)

Hi Armand,

I concur with John's suggestion of getting Peter Krough's new DAM book. It is chock full of up to date suggestions for managing your image data. 

First up I would think is  to acquire a couple of high capacity hard drives and copy your image data onto the new drives. This will give you an inital backup of your images which from reading the other discussion you do not have at all.  Also *do not* under any circumstances delete or initalize your old drives until you have a full verified backup of the new hardware. There is at least one poor soul that did that only to have the "new" drive fail and he lost his entire image collection.  

Getting a complete automated backup system would be my next suggestion. For a local backup Time Machine is great. I back up my whole system including multiple image storage drives to one Time Machine archive located on a Synology NAS. I also backup all my data, Documents, Pictures, etc. to CrashPlan for off site protection of my personal data. 

As John says proceed carefully with thought.

Good luck on your project and check back often if you have any questions.

-louie


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## A_Fotografy (Sep 11, 2018)

LouieSherwin said:


> Hi Armand,
> 
> I concur with John's suggestion of getting Peter Krough's new DAM book. It is chock full of up to date suggestions for managing your image data.
> 
> ...


Hi Louie,

Thank you for this. Yes I'm currently looking on some high capacity options. My understanding of Nas is that it is not connected to your computer but router. I think it would be great to keep there all my old work and have a couple drives attached to iMac to back up my recent years work. Plus need to back up everything for offsite as well. 

I will leave LR catalogue for now, but in future probably will organise everything per year as well. 

I probably will have questions about Catlogue files.


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## A_Fotografy (Sep 11, 2018)

So my question about catalogue file. 

Currently when I back up LR, it creates this zip file. I was reading somewhere that you can't open this zip file if you needed.  How could I decrease the size of this file below 4GB so it doesn't make a zip file. Or 4GB and above is norm these days?

Thank you all. 
A


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## Johan Elzenga (Sep 11, 2018)

A_Fotografy said:


> I was reading somewhere that you can't open this zip file if you needed.  How could I decrease the size of this file below 4GB so it doesn't make a zip file. Or 4GB and above is norm these days?


You misunderstood that. There is (was?) an issue on the Macintosh that the built-in MacOS X app for unzipping can't do this, but there are third party utilities that can unzip this backup just fine.


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## A_Fotografy (Sep 11, 2018)

JohanElzenga said:


> You misunderstood that. There is (was?) an issue on the Macintosh that the built-in MacOS X app for unzipping can't do this, but there are third party utilities that can unzip this backup just fine.


Oh I see, I think I have some other software to do this as well.


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## A_Fotografy (Sep 11, 2018)

While we on catalog topic. 
I check in catalogue settings where is my actual catalogue based and there is 45GB previews file as well. 

Would that mean LR is using only this catalogue for previews and edits? 

I have one more previews catalogue which is almost 120GB. This was created few years before current one. Could I delete that one? Or I will loose my edits from the current catalogue as well?


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## Johan Elzenga (Sep 11, 2018)

A_Fotografy said:


> While we on catalog topic.
> I check in catalogue settings where is my actual catalogue based and there is 45GB previews file as well.
> 
> Would that mean LR is using only this catalogue for previews and edits?
> ...


If you delete a previews file, then Lightroom will simply rebuild it when needed. You will not lose any edits.


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