Stop Making One Lightroom Catalog Per Session

How many Lightroom catalogs do you actually need?

Wedding photographer John Branch IV has shot weddings for about twelve years, and he has a strong opinion about something most photographers set once and never revisit: how many Lightroom Classic catalogs you need. The common advice says one catalog per session, so a corrupted file cannot take everything down.

The per-session method is the safest on paper and the most annoying in practice. Every time you want to look at older work, you are opening the File menu and switching catalogs. The per-genre method is tidier but you still live in the File menu. Branch's actual system — a single catalog per year — keeps everything in one searchable place.

How does the yearly catalog system work?

Branch's system is simple on purpose. The yearly catalog files live on his computer in a Lightroom folder sorted by year; the raw files sit on an external drive, organized from raw imports down to year, session type, and the individual couple. Old years can move to a NAS or backup drives when you are done with them.

The payoff comes from collections and labels. He sorts each wedding's delivered images into collections for parts of the day — getting ready, group portraits, ceremony, reception — with a matching label on each photo. Because every wedding from the year lives in one catalog, filtering by the reception label pulls up roughly 2,800 reception photos from every couple at once.

Why it matters for you

Your catalog choice is an early decision with late consequences. Set up one catalog per year now, mirror it with a clean folder structure, and learn the relink workflow for when folders show question marks after a drive move. Your future self, searching ten thousand images for one ceremony, will thank you.