I just started phase II of my photo archive reorganization. I’ve been putting this off for quite some time now.
Over the years I’ve made close to half a million photographs. Most of those photos were organized into one Adobe Lightroom catalog, but let me tell you, it’s enormous and a serious drag when it comes time to process images. I need to clean this up and make my Lightroom catalogs smaller and run more efficiently.
Phase one of the reorganization occurred last year when I created backups for all of my images based on the year they were made. Those backups were copied to external hard drives, so I have everything backed up nicely by year.
Phase two will involve my simplifying my hard drives into one working drive. It’s a 8 terabyte Seagate drive installed in an external USB-C, 5 bay disk array. This will leave me with four open slots in the disk array for quickly installing backup drives when I need to.
I came to the realization last year that I don’t need to have all the photos I’ve ever taken instantly available to me when I open Lightroom. It’s just too much to keep track of, creates extra wear and tear on the hard drives and quite honestly, most of the photos I need access to are my stock photos and my most recent two years of images (2024 & 2025.) Those are easily stored on my 8TB drive along with all my other computer files, leaving me with roughly 5 terabytes of empty space to fill as I move into the future.
The wife is leaving town to visit family tomorrow, so I have a full week of just me and the dog, sitting at home with nothing to do. What better time than now to tackle this project?
I think I’ll pick up one more 8TB hard drive for future expansion, just to make sure I have plenty of hard disk space for a while.
The real work will be creating new Lightroom Catalogs for the archived images, so I can load a hard drive into the bay and just open the catalog associated with that year. Lots of tediousness, but I won’t have anything else to do, so time to get working.
This should also speed up my computer, which is pretty fast now, but reduce all the constant drive access and indexing. I’m already noticing how much faster Lightroom runs on image catalogs that are smaller.
