One Catalog, Better Lightroom Workflow

    When the engineers at Adobe created Lightroom Classic, they designed it to support many different professional workflows. While that philosophy is appreciated, when it comes to the question of whether it’s better to build one massive Catalog that indexes all your images or to build lots of smaller ones, I am one hundred percent convinced that most Lightroom Classic users should never create more than one Catalog.

What Your Lightroom Classic Catalog Does

Your Lightroom Catalog (the .lrcat file) is a powerful database that stores information about your photographs. It acts as a central hub where you can organize, search, and manage all your editing adjustments.

It is crucial to understand what the Catalog is and what it isn’t.

• IT IS: A searchable index that stores all of your image metadata (keywords, star ratings, flags), organizational data (Collections, Smart Collections), and every editing adjustment you have ever applied in Lightroom Classic.
• IT IS NOT: A storage container for your photos. Your actual images—the raw files, JPEGs, and TIFFs—remain on your hard drive. When you import photos, the software simply creates a reference point (a file path) to locate that image on your computer.

  Think of your Catalog file as a library’s card catalog. It doesn’t hold the physical books, but it holds all the information you need to find, use, and track them.

  

  The Benefits of a Single Lightroom Classic Catalog

  Using a single, all-inclusive Catalog streamlines your workflow and drastically simplifies your management tasks. If you only have one Catalog, there is only one place you’ll ever need to search for your photos, immediately boosting your productivity.

  Here are the key benefits of this approach:

  • Faster, Global Searches: When all of your images indexed in one Catalog then finding specific photos is instantaneous. You can easily search across years, genres, and client work without wasting time switching between different Catalog files.
  • Enhanced Organization Power: A single Catalog maximizes the utility of Collections and Smart Collections. You gain the flexibility to create cross-project groupings (e.g., a “Best of 2024” collection that pulls from commercial work, family photos, and personal landscapes).
  • Setup Simplicity: Every Catalog has its own independent settings, Preferences, and Presets. Using just one Catalog ensures you only have to set up your Preferences and Catalog Settings Menus once.
  • Easier Backups: Backing up one single Catalog is simple and reliable, whether you use a cloud service or an external hard drive. Every additional Catalog unnecessarily complicates your critical data protection workflow.

  
  

  When Multiple Catalogs are Justified

  Creating multiple Lightroom Classic Catalogs is only justifiable if there are clear, absolute, and non-overlapping boundaries between groups of images.

  For example, some professional wedding photographers choose to create a separate Catalog for each wedding. In this specific use case, each wedding is a unique event where there will never be any overlap in subjects or purpose. The files for “Client A’s Wedding” will never, ever be needed alongside the files for “Client B’s Wedding,” making this a viable tactic for that small segment of working photographers.

  However, for most photographers I’ve taught, the multi-catalog approach has far more downsides than benefits.

  The Problem with Overlap

  

  I might shoot some family photos, a creative sunrise landscape, and a commercial portrait session all in the same day. With my varied work, there are no clear boundaries between projects. When I pull together a portfolio or create a new web gallery, I frequently combine portraits, landscapes, and architectural images.

  Projects like this are easy for me because I have one all-inclusive index. With only one Catalog, I can quickly and easily find all of my favorite images regardless of when or what I photographed on any particular day.

  A Warning: Overlapping Catalogs Are A Disaster

  No matter what your photography specialty is, I must warn you that multiple overlapping Catalogs is a recipe for disaster. Including the same images in more than one index will make your life miserable.

  The fundamental problem with overlap is a complete breakdown of data integrity. You will never know which Catalog holds the most current metadata—did you apply the final keywords or the correct star ratings to that specific image in Catalog A or Catalog B?

  More critically, you won’t know which Catalog contains the best editing settings or the final crop. Exporting the wrong version means wasted time and inconsistent results for your clients or your portfolio. This constant state of confusion is a guarantee of misery. Trust me, you do not want to do this!