carolebonita wrote:
The goal is to have each customer's photos and its LR catalog together on one external hard drive (I have 13 of them), so that job is completely separate and independent (regardless of storage space).
That's a fine goal. How about the following folder hierarchy, for each customer one master folder, and then a sub-folder for Catalog File and previews, and another subfolder for Photos
Customer 1
Catalog
Photos
Now everything is together, and this avoids the potential issue I mention in reply 8, if you want to synchronize, you would synchronize the folder named Photos instead of synchronizing the folder named Customer 1.
It would be easy to move to other computers or hard drives. And the link between the catalog and its photos would always remain the same.
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I just want to have that link set up originally to go to the images within that same folder, so there's never a future problem when moving a photo job to another computer or hard drive.
If only Lightroom worked that way, but it does not. If you move the photos to another computer/disk/location, regardless of whether or not the catalog moves with it, you will have to re-link the photos in Lightroom.
How do I set up "one" independent folder that contains the entire photo job (or my own vacation, for example)? Do I rename the catalog folder and put the actual images inside? Or do I put the catalog folder within the images' folder? Or what? Looking not only for suggestions but for the way a photography business keeps track of each job independently of one specific hard drive where the images were originally worked on.
So originally, you were discussing customers, and many professional photographers keep different customer's photos in different catalogs and different folders. I see nothing wrong with that, as long as you never want to make a collection of your best all-time photos to present to prospective future customers; and if that's something you might want to do, then that's the reason that other professional photographers keep things in a single catalog. You cannot create such a collection using multiple catalogs.
But now you mention vacation photos. And at this point, I strongly recommend that all of your non-business photos go into a single catalog. The are many advantages to doing so, and furthermore there are almost no drawbacks that I know of. The alternative, a catalog for each major activity in your non-business life makes no sense to me, there are many many drawbacks. The idea that one folder contains the "entire photo job", meaning both catalog and photos, is an organizing idea for non-business photos that I have never heard of before, and quite honestly, I think is not a good idea at all. You lose the organizing benefits of the Lightroom catalog, and you gain nothing by doing this, in my opinion.
You are looking for suggestions ... my suggestion is one catalog for all of your business related photos, and one other catalog for all of your personal photos. Photos and catalogs go in separate folders. Used properly, you will have no trouble segregating the photos and catalog from any particular job if you need to transfer those to another computer. This is one of Lightroom's strengths, and I believe you ought to use Lightroom's strengths, rather than using an operating system device which effectively eliminates Lightroom's strengths.