I've been a pretty strong opponent to using multiple catalogs. I've presented in past meetings about it, suggesting that the only logical break for another catalog is really around namespace. If you wish to have a separate namespace, by all means make another catalog. However, I've recently started using another catalog for a different purpose and I think it's working well.
I've been working a lot on getting my metadata nice and clean for all of my photos. Over the years though I've also gotten some photos in my catalog from other sources. For example, my mother took a trip to Alaska and I have a copy of her photos. I've always put that in the same catalog, but this presents a problem since I don't even know the details of those photos, I didn't take them, and cannot complete the metadata (ie., I cannot fill in IPTC Location since I don't know where it was taken).
Enter the Shoebox.
I decided to create another catalog and call it Shoebox. As the name implies, this is a digital version of the classic shoebox full of photos. I then exported all the random photos out of my main catalog and put them into the Shoebox collection. This is perfect since it allows me to focus my workflow on the photos that I can deal with, and get images that I may want to keep around just for fun somewhere else.
Really helped me out...
