Catalogs for local and network stored photos.

[reburns]

I’m retiring an aged computer that previously housed most of my photos and instead using a laptop (with a good external monitor) and a NAS.  I’ll attempt to keep the catalog previews sized so they can reside on the laptop’s SSD.   The most current year’s photos can store on the laptop’s HDD, and the rest on the NAS.  At the moment I have one catalog for the laptop photos and another catalog for the NAS photos.  Is there any reason to keep them that way or better to combine them into a single catalog?

Right now I have 1:1 previews for the locally stored photos, and deleted the NAS photo previews in order to fit both catalogs on the SSD.

[johnbeardy]

Just open one catalogue and do File > import from Catalog. This merges the other catalogue into the one that's currently open, and would mean all your work is controlled in a single place.

I'm a little concerned that you're struggling to keep both catalogues on the SSD. Although the previews folders can grow quite big, they're not usually big by comparison to the pictures. Are you sure LR's catalogues are causing the problem?

[reburns]

A single catalog does make sense, thanks for the sanity check reply.

I can allot 75GB of SSD storage space to catalogs.  The current laptop catalog previews are 12GB and the old workstation previews are 70GB, but if memory serves correct, I had selected "never" for "automatically discard 1:1 previews".  For the new catalog I intend to set file handling to: 1680 pixels / medium / discard 1:1 after 30 days.  My monitors are 1920x1200, so I figure that 1680 is larger than viewed images after subtracting for the usual menu size.

The SSD is 256GB but the rest of the space is used for boot and engineering working files.  I'm figuring on replacing the existing 7200rpm 500GB HDD with a 1TB, and considering a new Western Digital AV-25 WD10JUCT drive.  That's where current year photos will store.

Ralph