Been considering this since my current catalog contains almost 10 years of photos....so great timing to post this along with a bunch of performance tips. Off to create my 2024 catalog before I need to import anything. Thanks Sam!
haha, the 8tb option was actually some of the best money i’ve spent in years. WAY over priced, but to not have to ever shuffle stuff from internet to external all year is a huge relief
thank you very much. I don't need to copy my sessions as I have them already on an external hard-drive, mostly because my mac is rather old and the disk is just 2 tb. Do you have any other video explaining how to use the "Smart" stuff (catalogs etc) ? Thanks again and best wishes from Uruguay.
Sam you are the best! Thank you for this information. Can you tell me why, when importing, you chose to COPY rather than ADD option? what would be the difference? I had mine set to ADD, so thinking that I may have missed some important options available. Happy New Year!
because I want a new copy from my memory cards and into my destination folder. I believe add just imports your images at their currently location. for me, that current location is usually my memory card so that's not helpful after I eject and format the card!
Yesterday I purchased a new Mac Mini because my iMac HD failed. It's a 2016 iMac so not worth fixing. I use LR Classic. After restoring apps from Time Machine, I can't find my catalog on Lightroom. I use an external drive for all of my image downloads. It's Saturday and Adobe does not provide tech support after regular hours. Very disappointing! So I thought I would ask for support elsewhere. Wouldn't the catalog that I've been using transfer over in LR from Time Machine?
oh no! that is very stressful, but i can certainly try to help. yes, depending on your Time Machine configuration your lightroom catalog shoudl have transferred. a few questions 1) do you still have physical access to the hard drive from your OG iMac? 2) do you know with 100% certainty where your lightroom catalog was saved in your file system (pictures folder, desktop, some other place)?
@@iamsamhurdphotography I don't have access to the iMac. The HD failed. It's 2nd time. Happened a couple years ago. I replaced the HD myself and it went very well. I didn't have this issue with LR that time. I restored everything exactly the same way. Well, almost. I only restored the apps onto the new Mini. I have no idea where the LR catalog was saved but I know that it is. I did do a search for lrcat and it did bring up a catalog but not the one I had been using. Plus that catalog doesn't have anything in it. Wouldn't the catalog be saved within LR?
if you’re using lr classic then the catalog file is saved in a folder somewhere. The default location for the Lightroom Classic catalog is: /Users/[Your Username]/Pictures/Lightroom/ If you’ve moved it or created custom catalogs, you can find the current catalog’s location by going to Lightroom Classic > Catalog Settings (macOS), then checking the location under the General tab.
@@iamsamhurdphotography That's exactly what it says but it's not the correct catalog and I can't find the correct catalog anywhere. I went through this a couple years ago when the HD in my iMac failed and I replaced it. Restored everything with Time Machine with no problems. The only thing different this time is I only restored the apps on the Mini because of storage space. The rest will go onto a new external SSD as soon as it's delivered to my house. I performed the search *lrcat and nothing comes up on any HD. Very strange...and frustrating!
Hey bud. Great vid. Just wondering why you use srgb with PS but not with Topaz Denoise. I'm a total noob but I'm guessing that you denoise first, then work in Adobe rgb (in LR) and then send out to PS last, at which time you convert to srgb for screen use for your clinets? I'm starting out using LR, PS and Luminar Neo for real estate photography. LR and Neo will be used to edit RAW. Neo will be used to stack exposures for HDR. PS will be used to edite anything physical in the images e.g. moving furniture for better compositions. Would you recommend using ProPhoto RGB for Neo or will that create the issues that you mention? I intend to export RAW from LR to NEO. Following edits I will send back into LR as a TIFF. Then finally I wil send out to PS if I need to make any final edits.
Just realised a mistake in my thinking. If I export from LR to Neo as RAW then the colour gamut has not been added so is inconsequential. I guess however, if I do some editing in LR before exporting to Neo, then I will need to decide on a gamut and at that stage, as LR uses Adobe rgb, it would make sense to retain that. Does that sound correct?
I am officially confused as hell over this catalog business. I have heard people say they create a catalog for every project, or one for the year or just 6 main catalogs covering various projects. I have no idea who to listen to and what to do. if you have a catalog for every year, then why do you merge that into another one for the new year?? PLEAE EXPLAIN. THANK YOU
I do it basically the way he is describing. I have an archive catalog that is all of my photos from previous years. I then have a working catalog for the current year. The reason I do this is because I keep the working catalog and images on my laptop. This is where I do all of my reviewing and editing for the year. Moving it into the archive catalog, which I keep on to separate external drive acts as an archive and helps improve the performance of my working catalog. If I had every one of my photos from all previous years always in my catalog, I would always have to have an external drive connected to my laptop. It can also slow down the performance of Lightroom if you work with a catalog that huge all the time. The reality is, I rarely go back to previous years so it is really more of an archive. As for individual project catalogs, sometimes I will quickly create a new catalog to work on smaller project. It’s not necessary and probably more of an ADD thing, but once I am done, I can import that catalog into my current catalog and all of the edits, etc., come with it.
@@JFitzsimmons thanks for the explanation! you say with one big catalog you would need to have an external drive connected - as far as i understand it you only need to have the files accessible, when you access them. otherwise they just would show up missing - but once the drive is connected, would work again. i think the missing marked files don't harm anything, thus one big catalog should still work well?
Watching this January 6, 2025, trying to figure out how to make a LR catalog so I can import it into aftershoot. Thanks for the tutorial; much appreciated.
This is probably an obvious question, but by using LrC with catalogs instead of LrCC means I can work off of my external hard drive instead of having to download a ton of photos onto my local drive right? When I use LrCC I can only have like 1000 photos on the software at a time before my storage fills up.
@@iamsamhurdphotography so would it be more beneficial to create a Lightroom catalog on my SSD, then store everything else on hard drives when it’s not being worked on? Or is deleting files from a catalog a bad idea even if I have backups stored somewhere else?
Cool I’m curious how this works when using Imagen can you select the dates folder within Imagen? Definitely interested in making a singular calendar for this year.
Why when you import do you not "Copy as DNG" but rather "Copy" and seemingly keep the CR3 RAWs out of camera? What about the future compatibility of CR3 files and increased storage space when not converting to DNG?
I just use Lightroom to cull and edit photos, when im fine with edits im just exporting and then removing the session from LR Could you xplain how smart previews make postprocess faster? I stopped generating them because I heard that they only help to work on files without having ssd with working-files connected and I did not see any change in speed when I’m not using them
they’re about half the size of the full res raw so when you’re working in the develop module you should notice a performance boost both switching between images, and more computationally complex edits
Hmmm I don't understand why people don't commit a separate catalogue for each shoot? That way it's also in the same folder as the shoot, and allows for speed. Thoughts?
it’s not necessary for speed, and it makes it very difficult to sort and organize archived images later on. as someone that just redid my entire website it was really great to be able to pull up every image i’ve taken in one catalog and sort by stars to easily export at proper resolutions and tweak editing etc.
@@iamsamhurdphotography I find it so easily accessible to each shoot, to create a new catalog for each and keep the catalog in the same folder as the shoot. Hmmmmm
Im really curious how you deal with the file naming when you have such large amount of files? I have the issue that for every 10k photos the file naming is reset to the same, and thus I cant just keep on adding to the same folder, but have ended up instead basically making 10k 1 folder, 10k2 and so forth. I am guessing I am missing something really important? Any tips for me?
yeah, that’s a good question! I rename every photo to be the year month date our minute second that it was taken. I can’t tell you how important and critical this is and i highly recommend it
good questions. so, the master catalog (epic) in theory is done with edits because its previous years work, but that’s also the one i have sync’d to lightroom cloud, so i can access those images (and edit) anytime. the current year’s catalog (now 2024) i use and edit separately until the end of the year when ill merge it with Epic. hope that makes sense!
@@iamsamhurdphotography I'm having trouble with running out of storage in the cloud. Can I ask what tier (size) you are using with Dropbox and lightroom cloud?
mostly for organizing and optimized cloud backup - i keep a giant catalog with millions of photos for all my previous years work and that gets synced to adobe’s cloud for quick access over lightroom app etx
The thing about the histogram, you dont turn it off just because you minimize it. It still runs in the background, so minimizing that does not do anything. There is no difference in the performance what so ever
Adobe highly recommends for the vast majority of users to only use 1 catalog. The speed issues have been fixed over the years. ruclips.net/video/-YwPj1uxxTg/видео.html
that’s great! it would be impossible for me to use literally one catalog as i don’t have enough internal storage to deal with it, but if you don’t shoot 250k images a year then it’s probably a fine idea!! multiple catalogs is a nightmare for all kinds of reasons
Wow some great tips here! Will re-watch and make some adjustments. Thanks Sam!
Glad it was helpful!
Been considering this since my current catalog contains almost 10 years of photos....so great timing to post this along with a bunch of performance tips. Off to create my 2024 catalog before I need to import anything. Thanks Sam!
Happy New Year Sam!
Happy new year!
ok, wait, let me buy a 8 tb macbook pro M3 max first, then i come back here to see the rest of the video. See you soon! ;)
haha, the 8tb option was actually some of the best money i’ve spent in years. WAY over priced, but to not have to ever shuffle stuff from internet to external all year is a huge relief
thank you very much. I don't need to copy my sessions as I have them already on an external hard-drive, mostly because my mac is rather old and the disk is just 2 tb. Do you have any other video explaining how to use the "Smart" stuff (catalogs etc) ? Thanks again and best wishes from Uruguay.
Hi Sam! Do you also gonna do review about new godox Lux cadet with Nikon cameras DSLR and Mirror less ? Just came up on mind thou 🙏🏼 cheers
maybe! i’m aware of the product but haven’t had a chance to try it out yet
Great video Sam !
Thanks!
Just the video I needed. Thank you!
glad it helped!
Rad. Thanks for the tips.
hope it helps!
Do collections and collection sets span multiple catalogs, or need I set up new ones for the new catalog? Thanks.
unless you’re importing from a previous catalog I’m pretty sure you’d have to set up new collections with every new catalog
Sam you are the best! Thank you for this information. Can you tell me why, when importing, you chose to COPY rather than ADD option? what would be the difference? I had mine set to ADD, so thinking that I may have missed some important options available. Happy New Year!
because I want a new copy from my memory cards and into my destination folder. I believe add just imports your images at their currently location. for me, that current location is usually my memory card so that's not helpful after I eject and format the card!
When you have been doing it long enough you will not remember which year you took a photo.
well, ai tools now make it easy to just search by keyword and subject matter etc
Yesterday I purchased a new Mac Mini because my iMac HD failed. It's a 2016 iMac so not worth fixing. I use LR Classic. After restoring apps from Time Machine, I can't find my catalog on Lightroom. I use an external drive for all of my image downloads. It's Saturday and Adobe does not provide tech support after regular hours. Very disappointing! So I thought I would ask for support elsewhere. Wouldn't the catalog that I've been using transfer over in LR from Time Machine?
oh no! that is very stressful, but i can certainly try to help. yes, depending on your Time Machine configuration your lightroom catalog shoudl have transferred. a few questions 1) do you still have physical access to the hard drive from your OG iMac? 2) do you know with 100% certainty where your lightroom catalog was saved in your file system (pictures folder, desktop, some other place)?
@@iamsamhurdphotography I don't have access to the iMac. The HD failed. It's 2nd time. Happened a couple years ago. I replaced the HD myself and it went very well. I didn't have this issue with LR that time. I restored everything exactly the same way. Well, almost. I only restored the apps onto the new Mini. I have no idea where the LR catalog was saved but I know that it is. I did do a search for lrcat and it did bring up a catalog but not the one I had been using. Plus that catalog doesn't have anything in it. Wouldn't the catalog be saved within LR?
if you’re using lr classic then the catalog file is saved in a folder somewhere. The default location for the Lightroom Classic catalog is:
/Users/[Your Username]/Pictures/Lightroom/
If you’ve moved it or created custom catalogs, you can find the current catalog’s location by going to Lightroom Classic > Catalog Settings (macOS), then checking the location under the General tab.
@@iamsamhurdphotography That's exactly what it says but it's not the correct catalog and I can't find the correct catalog anywhere. I went through this a couple years ago when the HD in my iMac failed and I replaced it. Restored everything with Time Machine with no problems. The only thing different this time is I only restored the apps on the Mini because of storage space. The rest will go onto a new external SSD as soon as it's delivered to my house.
I performed the search *lrcat and nothing comes up on any HD. Very strange...and frustrating!
i’m so sorry! not sure if there’s much more I can do remotely in a comment section, but I hope it works out for you
Hey bud. Great vid. Just wondering why you use srgb with PS but not with Topaz Denoise. I'm a total noob but I'm guessing that you denoise first, then work in Adobe rgb (in LR) and then send out to PS last, at which time you convert to srgb for screen use for your clinets?
I'm starting out using LR, PS and Luminar Neo for real estate photography. LR and Neo will be used to edit RAW. Neo will be used to stack exposures for HDR. PS will be used to edite anything physical in the images e.g. moving furniture for better compositions. Would you recommend using ProPhoto RGB for Neo or will that create the issues that you mention? I intend to export RAW from LR to NEO. Following edits I will send back into LR as a TIFF. Then finally I wil send out to PS if I need to make any final edits.
Just realised a mistake in my thinking. If I export from LR to Neo as RAW then the colour gamut has not been added so is inconsequential. I guess however, if I do some editing in LR before exporting to Neo, then I will need to decide on a gamut and at that stage, as LR uses Adobe rgb, it would make sense to retain that. Does that sound correct?
hmmm, for what i do i typically stay in sRGB, always!
I am officially confused as hell over this catalog business. I have heard people say they create a catalog for every project, or one for the year or just 6 main catalogs covering various projects. I have no idea who to listen to and what to do. if you have a catalog for every year, then why do you merge that into another one for the new year?? PLEAE EXPLAIN. THANK YOU
I do it basically the way he is describing. I have an archive catalog that is all of my photos from previous years. I then have a working catalog for the current year. The reason I do this is because I keep the working catalog and images on my laptop. This is where I do all of my reviewing and editing for the year. Moving it into the archive catalog, which I keep on to separate external drive acts as an archive and helps improve the performance of my working catalog. If I had every one of my photos from all previous years always in my catalog, I would always have to have an external drive connected to my laptop. It can also slow down the performance of Lightroom if you work with a catalog that huge all the time. The reality is, I rarely go back to previous years so it is really more of an archive. As for individual project catalogs, sometimes I will quickly create a new catalog to work on smaller project. It’s not necessary and probably more of an ADD thing, but once I am done, I can import that catalog into my current catalog and all of the edits, etc., come with it.
yup, this is the way! I also sync my favorite photos in my "archive" catalog with Lightroom cloud so everything is in the Lightroom mobile app
@@JFitzsimmons thanks for the explanation! you say with one big catalog you would need to have an external drive connected - as far as i understand it you only need to have the files accessible, when you access them. otherwise they just would show up missing - but once the drive is connected, would work again. i think the missing marked files don't harm anything, thus one big catalog should still work well?
Do you still export to you client gallery with that settings you do in this video?
85% quality
resize to fit longe edge 5000pixels, Resolution 240?
yup!
@ you don’t get 100% quality images to them through USB or so?
Watching this January 6, 2025, trying to figure out how to make a LR catalog so I can import it into aftershoot. Thanks for the tutorial; much appreciated.
This is probably an obvious question, but by using LrC with catalogs instead of LrCC means I can work off of my external hard drive instead of having to download a ton of photos onto my local drive right? When I use LrCC I can only have like 1000 photos on the software at a time before my storage fills up.
this is an obviously misinformed question, yes
@@iamsamhurdphotography so would it be more beneficial to create a Lightroom catalog on my SSD, then store everything else on hard drives when it’s not being worked on? Or is deleting files from a catalog a bad idea even if I have backups stored somewhere else?
@@noahsedillo5470 yes
I can not find the Destination module in my Lightroom CC 2024 13.3.1 nor the Apply During Import.
hmmm - don’t think they changed anytime soon
Great video. My photos are stored on an ext. drive in specified folders. How do I integrate them with Lightroom?
complex question. my patreon has the answer
Cool I’m curious how this works when using Imagen can you select the dates folder within Imagen? Definitely interested in making a singular calendar for this year.
yes, you can see the entire directory tree of your lightroom catalog within the imagen app and select from there!
@@iamsamhurdphotography awesome!!! As a new Imagen Ambassador this is great news haha thanks Sam.
I’m curious when importing new images from other weddings do you put them in folders? Within the catalog?
yes! they go to a dated folder that Lightroom creates on import that set up in the destination tab of the import dialog box
Why when you import do you not "Copy as DNG" but rather "Copy" and seemingly keep the CR3 RAWs out of camera? What about the future compatibility of CR3 files and increased storage space when not converting to DNG?
i can always convert to dng later if i need… why bother with the added processing time if my files are supported?
@@iamsamhurdphotography Fair point. Thanks for the great content!
I just use Lightroom to cull and edit photos, when im fine with edits im just exporting and then removing the session from LR
Could you xplain how smart previews make postprocess faster? I stopped generating them because I heard that they only help to work on files without having ssd with working-files connected and I did not see any change in speed when I’m not using them
they’re about half the size of the full res raw so when you’re working in the develop module you should notice a performance boost both switching between images, and more computationally complex edits
What is the size of the catalog file for an average year and what is the size of your epic catalog, thanks
Depends
Hmmm I don't understand why people don't commit a separate catalogue for each shoot? That way it's also in the same folder as the shoot, and allows for speed. Thoughts?
it’s not necessary for speed, and it makes it very difficult to sort and organize archived images later on. as someone that just redid my entire website it was really great to be able to pull up every image i’ve taken in one catalog and sort by stars to easily export at proper resolutions and tweak editing etc.
@@iamsamhurdphotography I find it so easily accessible to each shoot, to create a new catalog for each and keep the catalog in the same folder as the shoot. Hmmmmm
Im really curious how you deal with the file naming when you have such large amount of files? I have the issue that for every 10k photos the file naming is reset to the same, and thus I cant just keep on adding to the same folder, but have ended up instead basically making 10k 1 folder, 10k2 and so forth. I am guessing I am missing something really important? Any tips for me?
yeah, that’s a good question! I rename every photo to be the year month date our minute second that it was taken. I can’t tell you how important and critical this is and i highly recommend it
Now since you have double cat (EPIC & 2023), on which one you do the edits? And how you update the other on then, or is ir then outdated?
good questions. so, the master catalog (epic) in theory is done with edits because its previous years work, but that’s also the one i have sync’d to lightroom cloud, so i can access those images (and edit) anytime. the current year’s catalog (now 2024) i use and edit separately until the end of the year when ill merge it with Epic. hope that makes sense!
@@iamsamhurdphotography I'm having trouble with running out of storage in the cloud. Can I ask what tier (size) you are using with Dropbox and lightroom cloud?
@@mstephensphoto i almost certainly have whatever is largest
How does this work for windows
probably very similar, but i stopped using windows a while ago
Whats the thing on the top.of your macbook?
magsafe mount for iphone
New Catalog really recommended for speed?
mostly for organizing and optimized cloud backup - i keep a giant catalog with millions of photos for all my previous years work and that gets synced to adobe’s cloud for quick access over lightroom app etx
also great for gathering data on your most used lenses of the year!
100000%@@BrianPhoto
Un gros Merci
The thing about the histogram, you dont turn it off just because you minimize it. It still runs in the background, so minimizing that does not do anything. There is no difference in the performance what so ever
i would agree with you except that i absolutely see and feel a performance difference
Interesting video, but I'd rather stay with one catalog. Why? It is easy to find everything in one place.
i shoot 250k images a year so one catalog for the current year and one master catalog for all previous years is a better solution for me
3 million photos, i hove 60.000 and i allready think it is a lot.
since 2012 or so
White Jeffrey Taylor Paul Thomas Jose
Adobe highly recommends for the vast majority of users to only use 1 catalog. The speed issues have been fixed over the years. ruclips.net/video/-YwPj1uxxTg/видео.html
that’s great! it would be impossible for me to use literally one catalog as i don’t have enough internal storage to deal with it, but if you don’t shoot 250k images a year then it’s probably a fine idea!! multiple catalogs is a nightmare for all kinds of reasons