Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic For Dummies. Rob Sylvan

entire Lightroom folder to a new location on your computer. The catalog works fine from any (non-network connected) location — you just have to help Lightroom Classic find the catalog in its new location the first time you access it. More on that in a bit.

      A couple of things to keep in mind regarding where a catalog can live happily:

       Local drive: The catalog has to be kept on a locally connected drive (external drives are fine). Lightroom Classic can’t access a catalog stored on a network drive (though it can access photos stored on a network drive).

       Free space: Be sure to place the catalog on a drive that has a large enough amount of free space to store your work (as in hundreds or more gigabytes free). The size of your database and its companion preview caches (more on preview caches in the section “Managing the preview cache files”) need room to grow as you import new images and process them.

      

Chapter 4 covers where on your drive to store your photos in the sections that cover importing files. For now, keep in mind that photos are not physically stored “inside” the catalog file; they are stored, rather, on a drive of your choosing outside of Lightroom Classic. The catalog refers, or points, to the actual storage location of each imported photo.

If you move your catalog, you have to help Lightroom Classic find that catalog the next time you want to open it. Here’s how that’s done:

      1 Launch Lightroom Classic.If Lightroom Classic can’t immediately locate the catalog, it displays the dialog shown in Figure 2-1.

      2 Click the Choose a Different Catalog button.The Select Catalog dialog appears (see Figure 2-2).

      3 Click the Choose a Different Catalog button in that dialog.

      4 In the new file browsing dialog that appears, navigate to the location you chose as the new home for your catalog, select the .lrcat file, and then click Choose.You return to the Select Catalog dialog, and the path to the catalog you selected appears prominently in the Catalog Location field.

      5 Click the Open (Select on Windows) button.Lightroom Classic launches with the catalog at this new location and will remember it in the future.

FIGURE 2-1: The Confirm dialog; the Lightroom Classic catalog was not found.

      Choosing which catalog to open

Lightroom Classic stores the location of the catalogs you use in its Preferences file. You can configure which catalog Lightroom Classic opens upon launch by going to Lightroom Classic ⇒ Preferences (Edit ⇒ Preferences for Windows) and clicking the General tab, as shown in Figure 2-3. Clicking the Default Catalog drop-down menu reveals the following choices:

       Load Most Recent Catalog: This is the default. Lightroom Classic simply opens the last catalog that was used.

       Prompt Me When Starting Lightroom: The Select Catalog dialog box (refer to Figure 2-2) appears when Lightroom Classic is launched. From here you can choose to open any catalog or even create a new one.

       Other: You can configure a specific catalog to always open when Lightroom Classic is launched.

      FIGURE 2-2: The Select Catalog dialog.

      FIGURE 2-3: The Default Catalog preference setting.

      

I recommend setting Lightroom Classic to use a specific catalog when starting up so that it opens the same catalog every time you launch the program — even if you only have one catalog now (which is the best option for most people, as I recommend earlier). This will make your life simpler down the road because you will know that opening Lightroom Classic always means opening that specific catalog. It’s easy enough to switch to another catalog using the File ⇒ Open Catalog or File ⇒ Open Recent command. In fact, you can even force the Select Catalog dialog to open by holding Option (Ctrl for Windows) and launching Lightroom Classic.

Caring for the Catalog

      You initially enter information about your photos into the catalog with the help of Lightroom Classic’s Import function. As each photo is imported, Lightroom Classic writes its metadata and its location on your hard drive into the catalog. While you continue to work in Lightroom Classic, everything you do with your photos is automatically saved in the catalog in real time (there is no “Save” command in Lightroom Classic). When I say everything, I mean everything — from keywords and ratings to exposure adjustments to collection membership and virtual copies.

      

Because of this design feature, Lightroom Classic is referred to as a metadata editor, meaning that when you edit your photos with Lightroom Classic, you don’t edit the pixels in your source photos. This feature is also referred to as nondestructive editing because all the adjustments you perform in Lightroom Classic are only stored as a set of metadata instructions — in the catalog, of course — that Lightroom Classic uses to create its internal preview files and to create copies of your original files during output (such as when exporting copies, books, slideshows, and prints). People who shoot raw might be more familiar with this concept, but it’s a huge paradigm shift for those who shoot JPG, or who are used to editing JPG, TIF, and PSD files in an image editor such as Photoshop. Take a moment to let that sink in because it will make your life much easier moving forward. In light of this, it’s vitally important that the catalog is well cared for and protected.

Lightroom Classic has a catalog control panel (of sorts) that displays important information and provides tools for its care. It’s called the Catalog Settings dialog, and you can see it in Figure 2-4. Choosing Lightroom Classic ⇒ Catalog Settings (Edit ⇒ Catalog Settings for Windows) from the main menu gets you there.

      FIGURE 2-4: The Catalog Settings dialog with the General tab active.

The General tab allows you to control the following:

       Information: Displays the catalog’s location, name, creation date, last backup date, last optimized date, and file size. Click the Show button to open the folder containing the catalog in the Mac’s Finder or the Windows File Explorer.

       Backup: Configures the frequency with which the catalog backup function is run.

      

Any long-time user might remember there was an optimize option on that panel. It has since moved to the menu under File ⇒ Optimize Catalog. Clicking Optimize Catalog performs a little database housekeeping on the catalog to reduce its size and improve performance, which is generally most helpful on very large catalogs (more on this in the section,