As I’ve become more “lightroom savvy” I’ve found the easiest way to organize my personal catalogs and gallery catalogs is by year. So, this morning I created my newest Lightroom catalog at the gallery.
As you can see, for the sake of speed I keep my catalogs on my Mac’s hard drive. The catalog is the database of your images, but your images don’t necessarily go to the same place. For my purposes all images imported go to an external hard drive which is backed up to a second external hard drive. So, catalog on the Mac, actual images on the external drives. It’s a system that’s worked for 3 years now. And it’s a system that I’ll continue to use.