rscheffler
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Tom_W wrote:
I really need a new system (a new way of storing stuff), given that adding storage is near impossible on a Mac, and that's where LR looks for the files. That's the downside of having a program with its own catalog system.
You can put the Lightroom catalog wherever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be in the default location on your Mac, which I now can't even remember where that was.
I don't use LR to manage all of my photos, just to process them. For this reason, I create a LR catalog within a project folder on an external NVMe SSD 'working drive' that includes all the keepers, outtakes, processed files, etc. This way, as I archive a project to various backup drives, the catalog travels with the files rather than being part of a massive central catalog (though it is possible to create and split off individual project-specific catalogs from a larger master catalog). By starting on an external SSD, it keeps the likelihood of a ballooning LR catalog from consuming all of the available storage on my system.
As you may or may not know, with all the new AI features such as masks and Denoise, the current version of LR's catalog can quickly inflate to massive proportions. I have recently been purging outtakes from old jobs to recover valuable HDD storage by first running them through Denoise and exporting as jpegs before deleting the RAW outtakes. Some of these projects have ~5000+ outtakes. I made a LR catalog dedicated specifically to this task, and when 5-10k files have had Denoise applied, the catalog can balloon into the 50+ GB range. Now imagine years worth of images in a single catalog, many with AI edits applied, and you can extrapolate how a boot drive can quickly run out of available storage when loaded with all the photos from a few large projects, plus the supporting LR catalog.
For knowing where all my files are located across way too many hard drives, I use a digital asset management app called NeoFinder. It's inexpensive and very well supported by its developer, receiving very frequent updates and improvements. For culling shoots, adding metadata, custom renaming based on metadata, etc., I use Photo Mechanic, in part because when I did a lot more on-deadline editorial work, it was the industry standard. It's very powerful for what it does, but also very niche and has recently become a fairly expensive app. These three apps - LR, NeoFinder and Photo Mechanic all overlap to some degree, yet each has certain strengths that make it worthwhile for me to use. There are probably a bunch of other photo/video management apps out there with similar capabilities...
Edited on Jul 22, 2026 at 02:06 PM · View previous versions
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