As you progress in photography and accumulate more images in your library of work, you will probably end up with tens or even hundreds of thousands of photos, and keeping them organized can be quite a task. Part of that will sometimes mean working with multiple catalogs that you might want to combine down the line. This excellent video tutorial will show you everything you need to know to merge multiple catalogs in Lightroom.
Coming to you from Anthony Morganti, this fantastic video tutorial will show you everything you need to know to combine multiple catalogs in Lightroom. Working with multiple catalogs can be quite useful depending on your workflow. For example, I keep my current year of work on a solid state drive, as it is far faster and makes the editing process more efficient and smoother. On the other hand, solid state drives are significantly more expensive and often top out at lower capacities than traditional spinning drives, so at the end of every year, I move the catalog on the solid state drive to an archival drive, which includes combining it into one big catalog. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Morganti.
Alex, have you ever looked into Mylio? It eliminates the need to create multiple catalogs in the first place. I currently use Mylio to manage/keep track of my 1.3 million image library across eight devices. That includes my 256gig iPhone that also has my entire 1.3 million images on it. For those who want to eliminate the issues of multiple catalogs, there is nothing like Mylio. If you're interested here is more info in a video I recently did for the North American Nature Photographers Association. https://youtu.be/6dQr9fHziX8. I gave up on Lightroom at about 500,000 images due to the spinning beachball of death when trying to scroll through my catalog. And that was on a brand new Mac Pro back somewhere around 2015. Admitedly Mylio does not have the RAW conversion tools but it's supper simple to take any image out to my RAW converter of choice, DXO PhotoLab. Save it as a Tif and it drops right back into Mylio next to the oringal RAW. All of that automatically. Even though Mylio isn't the powerhouse Lightroom is for RAW processing I still do 80% of my edits with it. The reaming 20% go out to DXO. Just one more idea for your readers.