How Many Photos Can Lightroom Store?

[wideangle]

How many photographs (links to photos) can LR store on it's database? Can it deal with 50,000,100,000+ photos being thrown at it, or are there going to be severe slowdown issues when it get's to a certain number, apart from being on the fastest machines?

[Allann]

I have 4 years worth, 86245 images, 1.8Tb in size. I have no slowdowns, issues and don't foresee any, that is not how LR works. I haven't read of any limits on storage.

[wideangle]

I have 4 years worth, 86245 images, 1.8Tb in size. I have no slowdowns, issues and don't foresee any, that is not how LR works. I haven't read of any limits on storage.

Thanks for your feedback Alan, if Lightroom is merely linking your photographs to the main hard drive, and not opening the originals then I would have thought at simply opening them in LR and adding keywords etc isn't going to add any strain once a massive load of images are imported - do you mind me asking if your computer is high specification?

[Kym]

LR uses Sqlite internally and signed integer primary keys, thus 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 maximum number of images subject to storage size

[kiwi]

I have about 200,000 images in my archive LR catalogue. No problem.

[wideangle]

LR uses Sqlite internally and signed integer primary keys, thus 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 maximum number of images subject to storage size

That went right over my head Kym, but if one can store "9,223,372,036,854,775,807" images than I don't think anyone should be worried too soon!

[Kym]

Maybe I should have said more than one can shoot in a lifetime, or a blinking lot, or gazillion

[Allann]

do you mind me asking if your computer is high specification?

It's reasonable, but not for storage, or even LR editing. I have a decent speced PC for PP in CS5 (and the occasional game).

[wideangle]

Maybe I should have said more than one can shoot in a lifetime, or a blinking lot, or gazillion

Have you noticed any slowdown issues in regards to having more photos added over the years? I take it because LR is linking photos, not viewing them as "original files", then minimal strain is being put on the computer in terms of searching, and sorting through stuff within a massive LR database. Do you just have 1 single catalogue or several? (I wonder how long it would take to search through 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 photos?!)

[wideangle]

This offical reference isn't quite clear (seems very broad), but I found this quote saying "There is no specific maximum number of photos you can store in a Lightroom catalog. Your computer could run out of address space for your photos anywhere from 100,000 through 1,000,000 photos" Seems such a broad number, and not really that many.

[ricktas]

I think you should be more worried about hard-drive space than actual number of photos, I reckon your TB's will run out before your LR catalogue does

[wideangle]

I think you should be more worried about hard-drive space than actual number of photos, I reckon your TB's will run out before your LR catalogue does

100,000 that they quote isn't very much, and you can fill 100,000 photos easy and under on a 1tb drive.

[ricktas]

100,000 that they quote isn't very much, and you can fill 100,000 photos easy and under on a 1tb drive.

Just create new catalogues. I have a new LR catalogue for each year. My catalogues are called simply 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011

[wideangle]

Just create new catalogues. I have a new LR catalogue for each year. My catalogues are called simply 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011

Can you search across all catalogues in 1 simple search (say for keywords), or would need to manually open each catalogue and search each catalogue (2008/2009/2010 etc) individually? At the end of the day it's what works best for you, but I reckon it would be a real pain if you were say shooting places that you went back to at different times of the month or years and some were in 2011 whilst others were in 2008.

[ricktas]

Nah you cannot search across catalogue's. So far I have found it ok to open and close catalogues, most of the time I have a fairly good idea which year i took things

[bjholton]

I do it the same as Rick but in a different way ... i have my years in folders, in one catalogue ( one of Matt K's from Kelby Training's tip ) and that allows me to search across all my shots ... needs be I can add a "local storage server" into it and keep going with more disk space once I fill my current local 2nd hard drive which has my .dng files on it.