Lightroom catalogue management

[GSXRMovistar]

Hey all, in the process of setting up a new mac so thought I’d take the opportunity to review how I’m managing my Lightroom catalogue.

Previously I used to have a single catalogue on my iMac that I just kept adding projects/content to. This is then backed up to my home server by scheduled backup jobs. However over the last year or so I’ve also been doing a lot of editing on my macbook which means a separate catalogue and then having to export projects from one catalogue into another or backup separately.

So how do you guys all manage your Lightroom stuff? Is there an easy way to sync catalogues across two machines? do you make use of the Abobe cloud in any way?

Any insight appreciated.

 

[Minstadave]

I'm lazy, just have a catalogue for each year and collections within it. No idea why but works ok. Haven't bothered with the cloud functionality.

I use synctoy to copy my catalogues into my onedrive folder, they then get uploaded automatically.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

I never found a simple way of doing it. I was in a similar position as yourself before I ditched Adobe ( although I do miss LR a bit ). The way you are doing it just now is likely the easiest way possible.


I had thought about having a single catalogue file which was held on the server/nas, and I would pull it to the machine I wanted to use each time. Edit the pics as normal, then copy the cat file back to the server. Then it would just be a case of merging the photofiles into a single respository and re-pointing LR to the new locations as required.