Lightroom Secrets

Rule 5 and the Play Catalog

The first time you installed Lightroom you were presented with The Five Rules. They were there in Lightroom 1, are still there in Lightroom 2, and can even be seen in the help menu of Lightroom 3 Beta. If you remember anything you should remember Rule 5.

What is Rule 5? The simple and elegant reminder to ENJOY. That’s right! Enjoy. We spend a lot of time practicing our art. Reading blogs and books to learn more about how to hone that craft. Laboring over our images. Striving for artistic perfection. And on and on and on…

Sometimes we lose sight of why we started down this path. Our passion can turn into drudgery if we’re not careful. Hence, the ever present reminder of Rule 5. Enjoy. So to that end I suggest you create what I call a play catalog.

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Single Catalog or Multiple Catalogs?

Underneath all of the features and tools, Lightroom is, at its heart, a database program. One of the things that make Lightroom such a powerful and flexible application is its ability to help us find our images. As our collection of images grows it can become more and more difficult to locate that image of the puppy in the basket by the red flowers. But the keywords, metadata, collections, folders, and so on are all hooks Lightroom can use to search and find that puppy!

There is nothing in Lightroom to prevent you from creating more than one catalog to store your images. But should you? Let’s take a look at the reasons you might decide on one approach versus the other.

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