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Do you have one huge Lightroom catalog with all of your images or do you have several? How do you divide them up if you have more than one? I thought this would be an interesting discussion and I also could use some advice. I have one huge catalog. Organization is tricky for me, thanks to ADD, so I like having everything in one place, but with over 100K images, it is just so large I'm not sure that one catalog makes sense anymore. Back in 2011, I organized all of my photographs going back to 2005 from various backup drives and CDs/DVDs (remember them?), into one giant LR catalog. It took me over a year to get through a slew of disorganized drives and discs and determined which was the most current version. But the hard work paid off and I was really happy with how it turned out. But now it is getting unmanageable. The current catalog is backed up to two duplicate drives - a 4TB LaCie and a 6TB G-Tech - and most of it is also on a WD RAID array that got too small for the entire thing, so I split it into one for Europe and one for the US, leaving only my US photos on the RAID and backing up the Europe catalog (much smaller) onto another drive. I also have several smaller backup drives - mostly 1-2TB - with smaller "working" catalogs of various sizes - which I find to be far less organized than the two large ones. Since I often rework images or have shoots where I've only developed a handful of images (I used to use the Nik Capture software which was so slow compared to LR where I can process a slew of images at once), I find that having everything in one place is helpful, but the catalogs have gotten so huge now that I'm considering going back to a smaller catalog system, but could use some organizing tips. I'm considering using the two huge catalogs primarily as archives - and starting a new large "working catalog" for each year, then backing them up as I go to the large archive, so that I'd work on older images from the backup drives, while keeping everything current - the last two years - on my laptop (with 2 backups). I also back up everything to Sync and Photoshelter on the cloud, but neither of these back up the catalogs - just the photos - which means extensive edits in Lightroom, stars, colors, organization, are only on the hard drives. Is there any online backup solution for catalogs? Please discuss. Thanks!

Does anyone know if it's possible to append metadata text in multiple files? I want to remove the 'live news' text element from my image caption/title fields but leave the rest.

Is anyone else frustrated with the lack of development in Lightroom when it comes to keywording? LR has been out for ten years and there has been next to no development in the area of keywording in that time. I have written an open letter to Adobe outlining just ten things that would make a huge difference to us as professional or stock photographers - you can read it here: https://www.ians-studio.co.uk/2017/10/an-open-letter-to-adobe-lightroom-keywording-ten-years-of-neglect/ I'd love to get this open letter in front of the powers that be at Adobe - if you agree why not tweet or share in social media tagging adobe and lightroom. Thanks Ian.

Does anyone know what the compatible fields are for the new IM in LR, ie number of people, caption, place, etc?

The keywords themselves I don't have an issue with, but I find I'm wasting too much time with redundancy. I put all the effort into keywording in Lightroom, yet when brought into Alamy, I have to redo it. I downloaded the Lr plug in for Alamy in the hopes to alleviate some of the wasted time and monotony. But before using it I have some questions to be sure I do it correctly and don't mess up anything I've already done or have in Lr catalogs. At present I have both Lr 3.5 and 4.4, with 4 different catalogs; 1 exclusively for Alamy. I use Collections to keep track of those I've used in Almay and other sites by using their Name and label color. I have a separate folder for each of the stock sites I use with a copy of the JPEG sent within them. All my original/sent images are on 4 external hard drives (use 1, 3 as backups of which 1 is offsite) and have backups of catalogs on 3 different external drives (1 flash drive to transfer to offsite external). Yes I'm paranoid, but if anything goes wrong, I will lose very little. If needed to know: I use a 27" iMac with 12GB RAM, 3.3GHz duo core CPU, calibrated with Spyder Elite 4 and have only necessary things on the internal drive; 930GB free of 1TB. So the questions: 1. When using the plug in, I first should just upload the images w/o keywords. Correct? 2. After images are accepted, then use it to put in the keywords in the perspective places and shoot it back to Alamy. Yes? When I do this they will be where they should and all I need to do is license, etc. if I choose to do that within Alamy. 3. Using this plug in will not effect the images that are used on other sites. Right? Meaning if either I use a Virtual Copy for Alamy and original on another or visa versa, the plug in won't affect the other. Or if I use different catalogs for stock sites it won't interfere with any of them. 4. I've always preferred not using plug ins; i.e. for Flickr, etc., but hope I can get detailed info on how to use this the best way w/o any chance of corruptions, etc. Thanks in advance for any assistance! Charly

This may have been covered before, if so Sorry' for boring you! I have noticed when using LR default sharpening 25 the final image has some kind of noise texture, especially noticeable in the sky. Can anybody recommend LR sharpening settings where it sharpens without what i call noise texture. Alamy has passed some of these images, however i think it must be on the edge of a fail. Comments will be welcomed. Paul.

I need to interpolate a few hundred images from approx 36mb to 50mb (from DNG to JPEG). When I tried one image in LR by using 'Export', it seemed OK in terms of the file size increase. But my question is when you 'Export' a file to a bigger size in LR this way, does LR use the same method as PS Bicubic Automatic or Smoother? I would like it to be least labour intensive. All the images I want to interpolate are in DNG format. I suppose I can use Action, Batch Processing and/or Droplet, etc, but it seems a lot more complicated than changing a few settings in Export in LR. Advice would be much appreciated. Thanks