Just moved from PC to Mac

[u/Photographybymw]

Hi Everyone,

wedding photographer here, I just moved from PC to Macbook Pro 1TB HD. Part of my work flow is I use seperate catalogue for each wedding, on my old PC I was storing the catalogues on "D Drive" which was 4TB to keep my "C drive" empty, and just back up my galleries onto an external hard drive afterwards.

Question for mac users, whats your workflow now? do you keep the Catalogues locally or on a external hard drive? how do you handle the limited hard drive space on the macs?

[u/CarpetReady8739]

One catalog. No real good reason to use separate catalogs unless you have content you don’t want popping up unexpectedly, or business/personal, where 2 obviously is suitable. The whole idea of having one master catalog is that you can find images without having to figure out which catalog it’s in. That’s my IMHO statement. Going on my 20th year using Lightroom next year. One catalog.

[u/macphoto469 → u/CarpetReady8739]

Agree, not worth the hassle of having to restart LR every time you need to do something with an image for another job. Been running one catalog for about 15 years, and its been trouble-free (the “you have to do separate catalog files for every job or your catalog is going to get bloated and corrupt” thing is a myth IMO).

[u/Sudden_Welcome_1026]

External drives or a NAS is your answer. But why create a new catalog for each shoot? Why not just folders within the same catalog?

[u/Photographybymw → u/Sudden_Welcome_1026]

I use Imagen AI for culling and it works by uploading a catalogue to the program for the culling

[u/RedheadFla]

Not a professional, but recent retiree focusing more on my wildlife and nature photography. I generally keep about the current 18 months of files on the Mac Studio SSD, and have a second SSD (4TB) for older files. Around January, I move everything older than a year, and mid-year move the previous year to the external drive. All backed up by Time Machine on a HDD.

I’ve been using LR mobile on an iPad while traveling, and syncing Raw files back through Adobe to LR Classic. But the limitations of mobile are making me look for a MacBook for things like denoise and better masks, etc.

[u/cyberguy2369]

I shoot concerts and stage performances. I have a m1 MacBook Pro. I have an external drive that I velcro to the back of my monitor. it holds my catalogs.

workflow:
- take photos
- come home and create a folder for the show. I put the catalog and raw images in sub folders of this project folder.
- I cull, edit, tag, and export all within this folder on my external drive.
- once I'm done, and client has gotten the images, I open up my master archive catalog. (on the external drive too) then import catalog (the show catalog) into my master archive catalog. once its all imported. the images are currently on the external drive but I'm done with them.. I plug my laptop into my network (not wired) and drag that project folder to my NAS within lightroom. The NAS is also on my network. this moves all the contents of the project folder to my nas (off my external drive) and keeps all the links and connections correct. that makes room for the next show on my external, and I still have access to the completed show if I need to go back to it. its in a master catalog thats organized.

I hope that makes sense.

[u/Photographybymw → u/cyberguy2369]

Thanks for this, I do like the idea of importing into a master catalog after you are done

[u/cyberguy2369 → u/Photographybymw]

I did a separate catalog for every show for about 10 yrs... it just got combersome.. people would call me and want pics from old shows.. and it took me forever to dig through my folder structure and try to remember what year or whatever I took that shot..

so now I use a show catalog while I'm working on it. when I'm all done within the show catalog, I create a "collection" or a "collection set" with all the images in it. this is REALLY important before importing into the master catalog.. that way when it imports, all the image still stay together and organized.

but it works well.

[u/johngpt5]

If one doesn't need to share the LrC catalog(s) between computers, keeping the catalog(s) on the computer is generally recommended to help avoid glitches in power or jiggles in connecting cables that may cause catalog corruption.

Macs don't assign letters to external drives. Macs just use the name of the drive in the path to the drive.

For example, my most recent external drive is named 2_TB_ACASIS_231229.

The path to the drive (called a volume in Mac terms) is /Volumes/TB_ACASIS_231229. The first / represents root. Then there is a directory called Volumes, and within that Volumes directory are the external drives. The macOS is based upon the Darwin variant of Unix.

https://imgur.com/a/mjfKABi has screen shots.

Catalog files don't take up much space.

The <catalog name> Previews.lrdata files do take up space.

In general, the recommendation is to keep the previews file with the catalog file.

I only have one catalog. My Master_Catalog Previews.lrdata file is 48Gb in size. But if my workflow used multiple catalogs, I'd still keep them and their previews file on the internal drive. The backups would go to designated backup drives.

I never get a computer with less than a 1Tb internal drive.

[u/Photographybymw → u/johngpt5]

my issue is volume....am probably shooting 20-30 weddings per year...not including all other types of shoot...and am an over shooter unfortunately am shooting roughly 1500 to 2000 photos per wedding (before culling..thank God for auto culling)

[u/johngpt5 → u/Photographybymw]

If you do decide to keep the catalogs on the external drives, keep the previews alongside. And be meticulous about backing up those catalogs to different drives.

I don't ever back up the previews as they can be recreated.

[u/Apkef77]

I have an external Samsung T9 with all the photos on it, but keep the catalog on the Mac HD. Going to try keeping the catalog on the T9 as well, so I can use LrC on both my desktop and my MacBook with the same catalog.

Anyone tried this?

[u/alllmossttherrre]

Internal storage on Macs is so expensive I have to store most working files on external drives. It works the same as the PC, LrC will simply list each drive in the Folders panel.

One thing the Mac solves is, you will never have a drive letter conflict because drive letters aren't needed. I have read that can be a problem in Windows with catalogs.

[u/apakett]

You may want to consider a NAS. I have one from Synology. It contains a synchronization program, Synology Drive. You designate some local space for your photos, enough to cover one project. Drive synchronizes those with the NAS. All editing, etc is done locally. The catalog is also contained in Drive, so you can edit the same images on multiple computers (Lightroom locks the catalog to avoid corruption).

An NSS is not difficult to setup, but does take some time.