I will presume that you're talking about Lightroom Classic (or LR 6.14, the last perpetual license version) as they are local-storage based versions of Lightroom, unlike the later Lightroom CC which is Adobe cloud-storage based. Whenever I say LR, I mean Lightroom Classic. :)
As context regards the size question: I divide my work in LR Classic into two main catalogs: "InProgress" and "CompletedWorks". - InProgress contains all the original files … raw, JPEG, TIFF, whatever the camera or device that made them used as an original file format … along with all the derivative products on the way to whatever I called "finished" or "completed". Whenever I complete a photo, I export it as a 16bit per component TIFF file at full resolution for archiving as well as at least two different JPEG renderings (one high resolution and one medium resolution) for my standard image posting operations. - CompletedWorks contains all the output products that I have deemed completed … in essence, the archived TIFF masters as well as the various sizes of JPEG output files. My InProgress catalog at this point in time contains 197,000+ image entities (originals, derivatives, and virtual copies) spanning all the time I've been using LR (since early 2004, with files imported from as far back as 1995). I use this catalog every day and LR Classic seems to have no issues with it. That's not the largest catalog I've worked with. I had a job some years back to sort and manage another professional photographer's 50 years worth of combined film image scans and digital captures. That catalog ended up having more than a half million image entities in it, and again had no operational issues. The base technology of the LR catalog is SQL Lite, which at its inception was intended to be able to contain an arbitrarily large number of records. Since then, SQL Lite by definition has acquired some limits but all of those limits are much much larger than an LR Classic catalog with a million records in it would ever achieve. The real key to how big a catalog can get and how useful it can be has much more to do with how much and how fast the storage that it is contained on is. Big catalogs build big libraries of previews and access them frequently in use, so a large catalog should be sited on a large, fast volume with LOTS of free space for quick and useful access. BTW: I saw someone posted that they store metadata back into the DNG files and therefore felt safe that they can reconstruct an LR catalog should the catalog crash. Be aware that the metadata that is stored into the DNG files is the editing and annotation data, but not anything about virtual copies or the organization of collections you might be using inside LR when editing. So, while you can reconstruct most of the editing that your original files contain that way, you cannot, for instance, reconstruct the five virtual copies of the same original with all of the different rendering efforts you put into them. You'll only get the one file with the rendering associated with the master file in that instance. The reason for my CompletedWorks catalog is that it contains exclusively completed works that take all the rendering and metadata associated with the original files and writes the pixels and metadata together, complete, as finished items. I can move those archive files to any editing system at all and have at my disposal the work that reflects all the editing time and annotations that I put into the originals, complete, independent of LR entirely. Backup frequently, and use LR's facility to optimize the catalog file when you do. You should have no problems with catalogs with a quarter million or more image entities in them. G > On Jan 11, 2023, at 2:50 PM, Rick Womer <[email protected]> wrote: > > …for a Lightroom catalog? > > Mine has 54,590 images on it today. It seems to work fine (knocking wood); > the only problem is that the list of folders along the left side is getting > rather long (one folder per year, since 2005). It is backed up to external > drives and the cloud. > > Am I tempting fate in some way, or should I just roll along happily? > > Rick -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
