Where should you store your photos? And why does it matter? Because Lightroom doesn’t hide your photos away from you, they’re kept as normal image files in folders on your hard drive. It's one of the common misunderstandings we discussed here. The … Click to continue
Lightroom Classic Catalogs – Top 10 Misunderstandings
Lightroom Classic has two primary functions - organizing your photos and editing them. Although its organizational tools are powerful, they're also the most misunderstood. These are some of the most common catalog-related misunderstandings. #1 - … Click to continue
Lightroom thinks my photos are missing—how do I fix it?
At some stage, most people run into worrying exclamation points or question marks denoting missing files. These warnings appear when Lightroom can no longer find the photos at their last known location. But if Lightroom thinks my photos are … Click to continue
How do I move only my photos to another hard drive, leaving the catalog where it is?
If you need to move photos to another hard drive, perhaps because you’ve outgrown your existing hard drive, there are two main options. As a rule of thumb, you can use option one for moving a few photos/folders, but option two is safer when moving … Click to continue
How do I find and move or rename my catalog?
When you opened Lightroom the very first time, Lightroom created a catalog to store the information about your photos. Whether you're tidying up, moving to a new hard drive, or even just checking your backups, you'll need to know where to find … Click to continue
Why doesn’t my Lightroom version support my new camera?
You buy a lovely new camera, the latest released, shoot some photos and excitedly connect your SD card to import your photos into Lightroom - and Lightroom says your raw files are an unsupported raw file type. Yet the file extension is the same as … Click to continue
Which Lightroom files do I need to back up?
Whether you're backing up Lightroom ready to move to a new computer, upgrade your operating system, or you're just double checking your main backups, you'll need to know which Lightroom files to include in your backups. There's a fair number of … Click to continue
How do I clean up duplicate photos?
Over time, you may have ended up with a load of duplicated photos that you need to clean up. Merging catalogs can introduce duplicates, but so can importing photos with Don't import suspected duplicates unchecked, importing exported photos or using … Click to continue
How do I copy metadata or edits between photos?
It's easy to end up with duplicate photos in your catalog that need cleaning up. These may be real files on the hard drive or virtual copies. Either way, some will have edits you don't want to lose. For example, you may have edited one copy of the … Click to continue
My rating workflow
In the previous post in the series, we discussed how to apply flags and star ratings to your photos, and how to filter them... but when you're faced with thousands of photos, where do you start? How do you decide which photos deserve which ratings... … Click to continue
How do I use flags and star ratings with Lightroom Classic to identify my favorite photos?
In the last post, we discussed using collections to group photos. You don't need to create additional collections for your best photos, because you can use flags/stars and filter them. Flags vs. Stars Lightroom offers multiple ways of … Click to continue
How do I create and manage collections?
In the "Why use collections to organize photos?" post, we learned why you might want to use collections to group photos. Now let's learn how… How to create a collection To create a collection, scroll down to the Collections panel, which you’ll find … Click to continue
Why use collections to organize photos?
In previous posts, we've learned how store photos and videos in folders on your hard drive, but now let's start organizing them into virtual collections based on their content. Collections are designed to group photos and videos for a specific … Click to continue
How do I organize photos into folders?
Once you’ve decided where to store the photos on the hard drive, you then need to decide how to organize them. There’s no right or wrong way of organizing photos on your hard drive, but there are some basic principles that can help you avoid … Click to continue
The Dangers of Synchronize Folder
"Synchronize Folder." Sounds safe enough, doesn't it. And it IS safe enough... as long as you read and understand the dialog. But how many of us hit OK on dialogs without first stopping to read them? I'll admit, I've done it too. If you do that with … Click to continue