# On the many-headed evils of controlling your pictures with more than one catalogue



## johnbeardy (Apr 18, 2008)

It's hard enough to keep control of your pictures, thousands of them, without fragmenting your control across a series of catalogues.

In theory you can do so, and Lightroom offers some tools to help you, but realistically and in the long term you don't want to make things any more complicated than necessary.

The danger of more than one catalogue is that it works for a while, but you always end up with pictures being recorded in more than one catalogue (eg does that picture of your kids playing volleyball belong in the volleyball catalogue or in the personal one - hey let's stick it in both) or not quite fitting into some multi catalogue scheme (eg a shot of a spectator which isn't really a volleyball shot and isn't really personal), and then being forgotten and recorded anywhere other than in your head. You then start shooting soccer too, and baseball etc etc, and end up messing around with so many catalogues you have to keep your head screwed on to keep things clean. And then something else goes wrong, you get really busy, have to work away from your main computer for a period etc etc and soon your multi catalogue "system" starts to crumble. 

In the end, you're so much better off controlling your picture collection with a single catalogue, then using keywords and other metadata so it's easy to find stuff in it. 

One thing you might consider is what I call the "inbox" approach. Use one catalogue for current work, your inbox, and another for the archive. Just two. You still have to be disciplined about deciding when a job is closed and you can transfer it to the archive, and you still waste a chunk of time doing an Export as Catalog for the closed jobs. Without that discipline, you'll soon find pictures in both the current work catalogue and the one for the archive. 

A similar approach is "multiple inbox" where you have one catalogue per current job. This is more risky. Soon, unless you are disciplined and very intelligent, you'll find keywords start to be plural in one and singular in another, or a typo will creep in. before you know it you'll have dozens of current job catalogues because you never think a job is really closed and another order might, just might come in. So you're soon sailing along confidently thinking you don't need to have a master catalogue - you've effectively fragmented whatever control you had your picture library. 

There's a balance to be struck and there are some valid reasons for using permanent subsidiary catalogues - eg one might contain pics you don't want your partner or the kids to see. And there's often a need for temporary sub catalogues - eg when you want to take some pics over onto the laptop for display or processing while away from base. But for your long term cataloguing, there can only be one master. If you're disciplined (all this discipline and master stuff is getting worrying!), the "inbox & archive" approach is practical but still involves more hassle, discipline, and consistency than I think it's worth. Rather than break up control of your pictures, better to start looking at ways of coping with the bloat. For instance, you might put each job into a collection, and keep them in top level collections for current and archive jobs. You'd browse via the collections rather than via folders, and just drag the job from current to archive when it's closed.


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