I was doing my nightly internet photography Websites reading last night while watching reruns on television. I like reading Scott Kelby’s writings, he often has something interesting or informative to say when it comes to Photoshop and Lightroom. I came across Kelby’s January 10th “killer tip”, an article titled “Time To Combine All Your Lightroom Classic Catalogs Into Just One”

When I first started using Adobe Lightroom, I did manage my images in one Lightroom Catalog. I soon found out that Adobe Lightroom ran fairly well until the image count got up to around 10,000 photographs, at which point it would start bogging down and run like a sick pig. I gave up on that approach and created individual catalogs for different subjects and purposes. That was 10 years ago. I’ve been doing individual catalogs since and never really looked back.

Mr. Kelby now informs us that Lightroom Classic is much better at handling large image catalogs and he gives his reasons for doing everything from one catalog in lieu of jumping from catalog to catalog to maintain your portfolios of images.

So today, I’m boldly going where I have gone before. I’m creating one master catalog and importing all of my catalogs into the master catalog. I think his reasoning for doing this is sound, I started off this way in the first place, but poor software design back in the day has kept me from revisiting the idea. And, it’s not exactly a quick process when one has a butt-load of image catalogs.

I’m not a big fan of putting all my eggs in one basket, but honestly, I still have the original catalogs I can work from, so what the heck.

I think I can get this conversion process done in one day, today, hopefully. I’m in the process as I write this as a matter of fact and I have about 11,500 images already imported into the new “Master Catalog.” So far, Lightroom seems to be running well at this point, whereas, from previous experience, it would typically be bogging down by now. I’m encouraged. I shall move forward towards true north, leveraging my paradigms, with fidelity, zeal and obedience to the process.

Or at least until such time as Lightroom explodes and ends up wasting my day. What the hell, the only other thing I had to do today was get the trash out to the curb for pickup. That’s done. In the meantime, I’ll flip on the television in the office and watch car show reruns while the catalogs import.

Stay tuned, I’ll report back with the exciting results when the process is complete.