Best practices for working with lightroom catalogs, Creating and using catalogs, Create a catalog – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC User Manual
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Managing catalogs and files
Last updated 4/20/2015
Best practices for working with Lightroom catalogs
It’s wise to approach your work in Lightroom with some forethought. You can move catalogs and photos, put photos in
multiple catalogs, and combine or merge catalogs, but doing so can be confusing. In addition, links between your
catalog and your photos may break. Follow these steps to plan your catalog setup and to minimize having to shuffle
catalogs and photos around between computers and drives.
1
Decide in advance where you want to store your Lightroom catalog. You can’t store it on a network. You’ll probably
store it on your computer’s hard drive or an external disk. After you decide where you’ll save the catalog, consider
the specific folder or path where you’ll put it.
2
Determine where you want to keep your photos. How much disk space is on your hard drive? Will it be enough? If
you’re working on multiple computers, consider keeping your catalog and photos on an external drive that you can
plug into either system. Copy or move your photos to that location before you import them into Lightroom.
3
Finally, start Lightroom and import photos into the catalog by adding them in place.
Two final recommendations:
• Although you can have multiple Lightroom catalogs, try to work with just one. There’s no upper limit to the number
of photos you can have in a catalog, and Lightroom offers myriad ways to sort, filter, and otherwise organize and
find photos within a catalog. For example, you can use folders, collections, keywords, labels, and ratings. With a little
thought and practice, you can probably find ways to organize and manage all of your photos successfully in one
catalog.
• After you start working in Lightroom, if you need to move or rename photos — say that your hard drive fills up and
you have to switch to an external drive — perform those tasks from within Lightroom. Do not use the Explorer
(Windows) or Finder (Mac OS) to move photos. If you do, you’ll likely encounter the dreaded “photos are missing”
error and you’ll have to relink everything.
More Help topics
Creating and using catalogs
Create a catalog
When you create a catalog, you actually create a folder for it, too. The name of folder is the same as the name of the
catalog, without the catalog suffix. For example, if you name the folder “Wedding Photos,” then catalog file will be
“Wedding Photos.lrcat”. When you add photos to the catalog, Lightroom creates a preview cache file, such as “Wedding
Photos Previews.lrdata,” and puts it in the folder with the catalog.
1
Choose File > New Catalog.
2
Specify the name and location of the new catalog folder, and then click Save (Windows) or Create (Mac OS).
Lightroom resets and displays an empty Library module, ready for you to import photos.