So as we established in introduction to catalog structure, every time I quit Lightroom, and relaunch Lightroom, it returns back to my original catalog, it returns back to the original catalog every time, which makes perfect sense. It doesn't alert me to any other possibilities, it just diligently returns to the same catalog. And you could happily go on using Lightroom in that wife forever, really, and it's not a problem. You can work with one catalog or you like, but it is possible to work with multiple catalogs. And there are some benefits. If you've got quite a complex workflow.

Maybe you want to separate your professional work from your personal work or some certain projects you're working on, then you can certainly do that. And I'd like to show you how. So the first thing that's good to do is go up to your preferences here. So if you're on Windows that's under the Edit preferences, and on Mac, it's under like a Lightroom menu and preferences, and under General preferences, you'll see just here It says when starting up use this catalog for the default catalog. And it's set to load most recent. So what that means is it will just keep returning to the most recent catalog, which will only be the one if you never change that.

But if I change this to prompt me when starting Lightroom, we see a very different situation. So now, when I quit Lightroom and restart, you'll see I get prompted with the wrong icon there, I get prompted with the catalog pick I it says Would you like to pick a different catalog from some of your other catalogs we've got here now you can see I've got a bunch I've got studio bands travel, I could create a new catalog, I could choose a different one. I've actually got more catalogs than that. But this is just this is not my computer I'm on at the moment. So I've just copied a few things on to record these videos. And this is what I've got with me here.

So I just like to show you my studio catalog just as an example of a of a completely different catalog. So if we go in here, this is where I go Capel my studio work, I generally shoot tethered shooting directly into the computer at the time. And you can see I've got a quick collection here of some highlights of the various kind of models that I've worked with. And I'll just give you a quick little slideshow there with the fk and using my forward arrow to just cycle through a bunch of images and let you see some of the other stuff that we do. And GMA back out, so that's my studio catalog. That's a nice way to manage all these images separately, I don't want them mixed in with the travel photos, they're their own thing.

But you'll notice over here, there's 12,000 images in this catalog. And you can see the negatives are actually not present. They're off on a different hard drive, in this case, my Drobo. So my Drobo is my external hard drive. It's a big multi drive system, the Drobo and it's a very secure backup within itself. And I'll I'll talk about the driver a little bit more when I do a video specifically on backups.

But for now That's where all my negatives are often the driver and the driver is not currently connected. So that's an interesting thing to see. But even though the driver is not connected, it certainly doesn't stop me clicking on my images here and seeing my previews in all their glory. So I'm going to quit again, out of this catalog command queue. Lightroom says it's busy writing metadata, I think you'll be right, you can fix that up later. That was nothing to worry about.

And I'm going to relaunch Lightroom one more time and I'm going to go this time into my might actually I'll show you my travel catalog. My real travel catalog is actually huge. It's nothing like the one we've been looking at. My real travel catalog is made up of wait for it. 65,600 images spanning roll away back to 2003. And again, all these negatives are on my Drobo so we can't we don't have to type them in.

To be honest, all these negatives wouldn't even fit on this computer. So there's, you know, terabytes of data there. So it's all off on the dry boat very securely. You can say I organized my real catalogs by year and event is a good way to go about it. So 2006 went to China, Mexico, Vietnam, 2011 went to Cambodia, Spain, Vietnam and so forth. 2013, Morocco, Portugal, Prague, and so on.

So this is how I like to organize all my images right there. Now again, off on the Drobo got all my previews here, good to go. So lots of different catalogs for lots of different purposes works for me. Now I'm going to open yet another one. I'm just going to quit again and I'm going to relaunch Lightroom and this time, I'm going to go to my band's catalogue. So I click on bands just here and I open it up.

This is a catalogue of highlights of all the stuff I shot many years ago now a lot of this was shot on film, back in the pre digital days in the sort of early mid 90s. I shot a lot of this some of it in the early 2000s on digital but the the bulk of its film on was lucky enough to work for some different types of different publications in Melbourne and got to see a lot of great live music. So again, my rock and roll photos here are all on my external drive you can see over here, but this time they're on a drive called Elysee and I've got the C drive right here. It's a portable drive and the reason I've got them on there is so I can do this very demonstration. This is the demonstration I do all the time in class.

So what I want to show you is what happens when I connect to my C drive. So I'm just going to grab my blade, plug it into the drive and you'll see what happens is the drive will mount the green light will come on the question marks will go away as Lightroom gets nicely reconnected with the negatives. And there you go. There you have it. So that green light indicates that my drive is connected and healthy. Tells me I've got plenty of spice on it.

It actually goes orange if you drive starting to get a bit too full, it starts to go orange and then red. But for now, very healthy there in the green So they call that working remotely when the images are not connected or sorry, working offline, not remotely, they call it working offline when your images are not connected, then bringing the images online when you connect the hard drive, so lots of control with multiple catalogs very easy to manage. I'm just going to quit again. And I'm just going to show you that in my pictures folder. Down here in my pictures folder, Lightroom. I've created a folder of my own.

I've created this folder of my own that I call other catalogs. So you can see I've got the Lightroom My Pictures folder, I've got my Lightroom folder, I've got my main Lightroom catalog, which is the one I use in class just called Lightroom catalog. And then I've got this folder called other catalogs where I've got bands, lighting, workshops, studio and travel. So that's where I've made that folder to organize my other catalogs very easily. And you can see if I look in travel, I've got my catalog, my previews, my smart previews. I haven't talked about smart preview.

He's yet but we'll do I'll do a video specifically on those shortly as well. And the catalog backups and so forth, which we've also talked about a whole bunch of backups there from the travel again, all the all these other backups are not really necessary, you can see they're not huge if I go, just do a quick command I this is 133 megabytes. And this is the 65 sorry, 65,000 images in here and the catalog file is 130 megabytes. So not huge really is it by any stretch. So again, you only need the most recent backup. So I can just click on all those other backups, and I can just delete them, I can happily delete them, I need to keep that one most recent backup, should my catalog run into any problems.

So I'm going to launch Lightroom one more time. Now I'm going to show you how I can create a new catalog. If I click here and go create new. I'm just going to call it test. Normally I'd save it in my other catalogs folder, but I'll just put it on the desktop for now. To keep things simple and here A brand new catalog, no images in it all ready to roll and ready to import your images into so that easy to create a new catalog.

So I'm going to quit out of that. And I'm going to go in and show you the catalog file here that I just created on the desktop called test. You can see the test the catalog file, tiny, 1.5 megabytes, the preview data, even smaller on this occasion because there's no images in it 152 kilobytes. So I have this is helpful going through so many times seeing catalog structure, catalog file preview data, catalog, file preview data, you should always know where they are, you should always be on top of which is which I've seen people often unwittingly creating new catalogs and getting themselves into quite a mess. So try and get a little bit of a discipline structure here. As I say your computer creates the pictures folder Lightroom creates the Lightroom folder and your catalog should live in there.

And if You work with one catalog, then that's perfectly good, you can continue to do that. But if you want to work with multiple catalogs, it's probably a good idea to create a folder to keep all as multiple catalogs in, as I've done here. So finally, I'll just go back and launch Lightroom and go back to my original Lightroom catalog. So we can pick up where we left off with further demonstrations. And I just want to show you, obviously, I've got to restart Lightroom in order to open a new catalog, but I don't need to just do it quite so. overtly sort of quitting and relaunching down here, I can just go up to the file menu, and I can say open recent, and I can choose one of my other catalogs right here easily enough, and Lightroom.

But again, Lightroom will quit and restart all by itself. So we can only have one catalog open at a time. Now, occasionally people say so what if I want to see images from two catalogs like what if I want to see my studio images and my travel images side by side Well, if you want that, I would suggest you don't have multiple catalogs. Because the whole point of multiple catalogs is to separate images. So if you want to see them together, then you don't want them separated. So don't have multiple catalogs.

But if you want to just take some images from one catalog into another, that's even possible, we call that merging catalogs. And I'm going to do a separate video on that shortly where I'm going to look at splitting one catalog into two. And I'm going to look at merging two catalogs into one. Certainly what I do when I go on a trip overseas, I'm off to China in four weeks time. And I when I get there, I'll build a brand new empty catalog just for that China trip just so I can focus on that, that trip while I'm there. And then when I come home, I'll import it in to my big travel catalog into 2017.

Put all the negatives onto my Drobo and I'm good to go. So working with multiple catalogs, it's not something you have to do. If you're new to Lightroom I'd probably suggest you get comfortable with one catalog first. But by all means, if you've got separate projects you'd like to keep very separate or personal work and professional work and whatever, whatever it may be, then hopefully that's made it easy for you to create multiple catalogs.