2 catalogs, photos on 2 disks

Question

I am hoping some of the people here who have lots of LR experience can give me some advice.  I have recently started using LR 4.1 RC2 and yesterday I upgraded my PSE Organizer 9 catalog that had all my photos along with keywords and star ratings.  My question conserns what I do now that I am using LR and how do I not lose anything.  Below you will read how things are set up and what I hope to accomplish.  It concerns catalogs and importing from a catalog.  By the way, I have read the LR documentation about that here, but I am not clear if it will do what I hope to do:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/lightroom/using/WS9616DD60-0C3A-484b-8413-053347F21456.html
I have about 50k original out-of-camera photos (mostly raw since 2006, mostly jpegs before that).  I also have several thousand high-resolution film scan TIFF files.  For all the files I have them organized with one folder per month going back to 2001 (the film scans are in separate folders) and all those monthly folders are inside another folder.
I have all of my photos stored on a USB external hd (ehd) with the LR catalog on my internal hd.  The LR catalog is the one made yesterday when I upgraded my Organizer catalog.  I keep duplicate copies of the most recent 12-24 months of photo folders on my internal hd (ihd) to make it easy and fast to work on them and because the ehd is not always connected to the computer.  There is not enough space to put all photos on my ihd.  All the photos on my ihd are in a different LR catalog of recent photos and this is where I do all my editing, adding keywords, star rating, etc.  My backup software copies new/changed files to the ehd so it always has a current copy of all photo files.
I am sorry that all of the above is so long, but I thought I would need to explain it so that now that I am ready to say what I want to accomplish you can understand the background.  From time to time, maybe at the end of each month, I would like to somehow merge the info LR has in my catalog that contains the recent subset of photos (editing settings, history, keywords, stars, etc.) with the same photos in the LR catalog that has all my photos.  Probably at the same time I would delete the oldest month photo folder from my ihd and remove it from the recent photos catalog.  In other words, for recent photos they are in two catalogs:  the recent photo catalog and the total photo catalog.  From time to time I must delete older photo folders from my ihd and, of course, remove them from my recent photo catalog, but the photos are still on the ehd and in the total photo catalog.
I want to see if this seems workable to you.  Any downsides I should be aware of?  Any gotchas?  Other ideas?  Thanks for your ideas and advice!

Answer 1

bakubo wrote:
After more thinking about this I hope I understand better what jim01403 and dj_paige are trying to tell me.  I should have only one catalog that has photos from ehd folders 2001-01 to 2010-04 and ihd folders 2010-05 to 2012-05.
1.  As I take new photos this month I put them in ihd folder 2012-05 and import them from there into LR (a backup folder named 2012-05 is on my ehd).
2.  Also month I delete folder 2010-05 from my ihd and I tell LR that those photos are in ehd folder 2010-05.  I'm not sure how to do this, but I will check the LR manual.
3.  As I take new photos next month I put them in ihd folder 2012-06 and import them from there into LR (a backup folder named 2012-06 is on my ehd).
4.  Also next month I delete folder 2010-06 from my ihd and I tell LR that those photos are in ehd folder 2010-06.
5.  And so on.
I hope I understand it now.
No, I'm afraid that really isn't what I was proposing, so let's start again:
Forget for a moment the fact that you have duplicated part of your library across two drives, that is just a small complication that we'll have to deal with. Look at the longer term picture, because that's what you should be aiming for. For a start there will be NO duplication of folders and/or images across the two drives, they will just each contain a part of the total library....the newest year or two of images will be on the IHD, anything older than that will be on the EHD.
Thus your workflow would be:
1. Import new images into the IHD. You can use one of Lightroom's standard date-based templates to automatically import new images directly into the folder structure that you want. No need to manually create month folders, and no need to copy into those for subsequent import into Lightroom.
2. Thus anything you import today would be placed directly into your 2012/05 folder (assuming the images were shot in May)....Lightroom imports into the date-based folder structure based on capture time, so if your card contains pictures taken in different months that is all handled automatically by Lightroom.
3. Once a month (or whenever you remember) you can 'archive' older month folders simply by dragging and dropping into the appropriate place in the structure on the EHD and Lightroom will move the images and update itself accordingly.
4. So going forward you might end up with a structure on your IHD which looks something like:
>IHD Photos
     >2010
          >05
          >06
          >etc
          >12
     >2011
          >01
          >etc
          >12
     >2012
          >01
          >etc
          >05
On the EHD the structure would be:
>EHD Photos
     >2001
          Month Folders
     >2002
          Month Folders
     etc
     >2010
          >01
          >02
          >03
          >04
So when it's 'archive' time, you would drag the 05 sub-folder from under the 2010 folder on the IHD, and drop it onto the 2010 folder on the EHD. And so on each month. With this method the only folder you ever have to create is the 'year' folders on the EHD (but you can do that in LR as well).
Does that now make sense?
I see the conversation has now moved on to just using the EHD, which is again a possibility. As Paige says, many people do it that way....but either way works with little effort once you have it setup properly. Your choice really.