What Photos Do You Really Need in Your Image Library?
After shooting digitally for many years, many photographers have amassed prodigious collections of digital photos, often surpassing 100,000 or 200,000 images. These photographers now find themselves struggling to organize, manage and backup this immense image library effectively.
Unless you’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in an enterprise-level asset management system and server system, you’re likely to find any database program slow, unwieldy and crash-prone. All-in-one applications like Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture begin to slow with large libraries above 40-50,000 images and even dedicated asset management systems like Extensis Porfolio or Canto Cumulus struggle with 100,000 images.
Rather than investing in more robust asset management applications, ask yourself “What photos do I really need access to?” Often, by saving older jobs and outtakes to external hard drives on a regular basis, you can slim your image library considerably. This saves you money on storage space, makes photos easier to find and your image database quicker to search.
4 Responses to 'What Photos Do You Really Need in Your Image Library?'
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Good post, Richard. Since I have no need to access images from my paying jobs, my solution has been to save my these images as 100K JPEG’s. The DNG originals are saved to DVD and off site external hard drives. My personal work on the other hand, the DNG’s are maintained on a second HD on my desktop computer with back ups made to an external.
Lightroom is nice, but what Adobe fails to tell you is that it is processor intensive. Without the new Intel chips, accessing a large image data base is painfully slow. G5 Dual w/ 2.5GHZ? Forget about it!
I agree, Lightroom can be slow with a large image library. For that reason, I recommend splitting large libraries once the image total exceeds 40-50K images. I don’t know whether that is a processing issue or a database access issue.
I’m glad you have your system so finely tuned!
- Jay
My LR image library is just over 50,000 images on a 2 yr. old MacPro desktop and I have no issues with speed. I can see how a G4/G5 Mac would be slow but my computer isn’t the latest or greatest. I optimize the library every two weeks or after making a large addition.
If LR begins to slow down or freezes optimize your catalog [image library]. Lightroom-Cataolg settings-Relaunch and Optimize
Scott
Scott,
Thanks for your email. I’m glad to hear you aren’t encountering any problems with your catalog. Your advice on optimizing the database regularly is a good one.
My recommendation of 40-50K images is strictly a guideline. A user’s experience will very greatly depending upon a large number of factors. My hope is with the continued development of Lightroom, the usable database size will continue to grow as the software becomes even more solid. Eliminating a major workflow hurdle for photographers is an immensely positive step.
Jay