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 – Your photos are not “in” Lightroom
When you import photos into Lightroom Classic, they’re not really “in” Lightroom. The metadata describing the photos is added to a database (called the catalog) as text records, along with a link to that file on the hard drive. Small JPEG previews are also stored next to the catalog, so you can view the photos when the original files are offline.
Imagine an index of the books in a library. The library catalog tells you a little about the book and which shelf it’s stored on, and maybe even gives you a preview of the cover, but it doesn’t contain the book itself. The Lightroom catalog works in the same way.
We look more at the catalog concept here, but for now, remember one thing: don’t delete your original photos thinking that they’re safely stored in Lightroom. They’re not.
#2 – Your photos are not hidden away by Lightroom
The photos are not stored in some magical location, hidden away from your view. They’re just normal image files stored in folders on your hard drive. You choose where they’re stored when you import them. This means you’re not locked into just using Lightroom, but it also means YOU are responsible for looking after the photos. If you move, rename or delete photos outside of Lightroom, you’ll create a mess.
#3 – Your photos are not “in the cloud” either
Even if you have a Creative Cloud subscription, and you’ve set all of your photos to sync, Lightroom Classic only syncs low resolution previews to the cloud. The original photos are still stored on your computer, and you still need to back them up. You’re still responsible.
#4 – Lightroom’s Catalog Backup does not back up your photos
When you quit Lightroom, it’s probably asked you to back up, and you may have hit ok without reading the rest of the dialog. In doing so, you’d have missed a very important warning: Lightroom’s catalog backup only backs up the catalog. It does not back up your photos.
You need a solid backup system, and ideally something that’s automated. Copying and pasting files onto another drive when you happen to remember does not constitute a reliable backup system. Neither does RAID. And if you’ve ever tried restoring from backups created using the Make a Second Copy option in the Import dialog, you’ll have the grey hairs to prove it.
The easiest way to back up your photos is to include them in your main system backups. Windows comes with its own Backup and Restore tool, and Mac OSX comes with Time Machine, both of which can back up your computer files to an external drive. For the more technically minded user, programs such as Vice Versa (Windows) and Chronosync (Mac) allow even more control over your local backups.
#5 – You still need Lightroom’s catalog backup even if you run your own backups
Even if you have your own backup system, you may still need to run Lightroom’s own catalog backups too. Why? There are two main reasons:
1. Many backup systems overwrite the previous backup with the latest one. If your catalog becomes corrupted (relatively rare) or you make a mistake that you don’t spot immediately (incredibly common!), your normal backup system will overwrite your last “good” backup with the corrupted/incorrect catalog. Lightroom’s catalog backup, on the other hand, is versioned, which means that it keeps each of the backups, so you can go back to an earlier version at any time.
2. Backup systems that create versioned backups, for example, Time Machine, may run at a time while Lightroom is open. As a result, the backup can be corrupted. Lightroom’s catalog backup, however, runs when Lightroom quits.
If in doubt, let your backup system back up Lightroom’s own catalog backups.
#6 – Keep the photos in Lightroom even when you’ve finished editing them
If you remove photos from Lightroom when you’ve finished editing them, or only add specific photos in the first place, you’re kind of missing the point of Lightroom. It’s designed to help you search and work with ALL of your photos now and in the future, and it can’t do that if you’ve removed them from the catalog.
Some people remove finished photos because they’re concerned that their catalog will get too big. That’s unlikely, the largest known catalogs number into millions of photos.
While we’re on the subject, let’s state the obvious. Don’t delete your original photos from the hard drive when you’ve finished editing them. That would be like throwing away the film negatives when you’ve made a print, or throwing away the recipe when you’ve finished making a cake.
Unless you’re completely deleting the photos from your archives, add them all to your Lightroom catalog and leave them there.
#7 – Adding all your photos to Lightroom doesn’t mean using masses of hard drive space
If your photos are already on the hard drive, you don’t have to duplicate them when adding them to your Lightroom catalog. In the Import dialog, you can select Add to leave them in their current location, or Move if you want to rearrange them into a new folder structure.
Once the photos are added to your Lightroom catalog, you still have plenty of options. You can move all of the photos to another hard drive if you start to run out of space, or you can split them over multiple hard drives. Archive hard drives can be disconnected. Even if you split over multiple hard drives, Lightroom can manage all of this in a single catalog.
#8 – Sometimes moving photos in Lightroom can be a bad idea
You’ll often hear Lightroom experts (including me) tell you only to rename, move or delete photos inside of Lightroom, because otherwise you’ll break the links. There is one exception. If you’re moving entire folders containing large amounts of data, for example, you’re archiving old photos off to another hard drive, it’s actually quicker and safer to move them in Explorer/Finder and then immediately update Lightroom’s links.
#9 – You don’t have to “Save” when you’ve finished editing
In most conventional photo editors, you must save the changes to each file when you finish editing. Lightroom is different. The database is automatically updated whenever you move a slider or update the metadata. You don’t have to do a thing.
There is a Save command in the Metadata menu, but this isn’t a conventional save either. It writes the metadata to the header of the file (or a sidecar XMP file for proprietary raw files). For more details, see pages 345-347 in my Lightroom Classic – the Missing FAQ book). Saving the metadata to the files doesn’t touch the image data, so your Lightroom Develop changes still won’t show up in other photo editors. To do that, you have to export the photos, which is like a Save As.
#10 – You don’t have to keep your exported photos
To see your Lightroom edits in other software, or send your edited photo to someone else, you must export the photos out of Lightroom as a JPEG, TIFF or PSD file. This creates a copy of the image with your Develop settings applied, so the original isn’t touched in the process.
You don’t need to keep these copies once they’ve served their purpose. Why not? Because as long as you have the original photos and the records in the catalog, you can export another identical copy when you need it, in exactly the size and format you need.
In this Blog post, we discuss the concept of a catalog and how it relates to your photos in more detail.
For extensive information on Lightroom Classic, see Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
If you have the Photography Plan, then as well as Classic you have access to the Lightroom cloud ecosystem including the mobile apps and web interface. For more information on these apps, see Adobe Lightroom – Edit on the Go.
Note: purchase of these books includes the first year’s Classic or cloud-based Premium Membership (depending on the book purchased), giving access to download the latest eBook (each time Adobe updates the software), email assistance for the applicable Lightroom version if you hit a problem, and other bonuses.
We also have a special bundle offer for the two books. This includes Premium Membership for the first year as described above for the whole Lightroom family!
Originally posted 21 November 2016, updated for Lightroom Classic in 2019.
I don’t know the proper place to ask this question, so I will try here. After I have finished processing my original raw file and have a finished rendition of the image, if I want later to start over with the raw file while keeping the first completed file, how do I return to the raw file?
The forum (linked in the menubar) is the best place to ask questions unless they’re directly related to the topic of a blog post. In this case, the answer will depend on which LR version you’re using.
Apologies if this is a dumb question. My subscription gives me 1TB cloud storage but I see only tens of GB used. I assumed this was for image backup but obviously not. If images not stored in cloud, how does one use 1TB. I use Classic for editing from my camera and LR Mobile for iPhone, which I am beginning to use more. It seems that possibly Mobile photos are stored in cloud. Is that right? In that case maybe I should import from camera to Mobile. But I cannot seem to sync Mobile photos to Classic. Can you shed light?
The cloud storage is for photos that come from Lightroom Desktop (the cloud version) and mobile. It is not a backup for Lightroom Classic.
A Classic catalog can be synced with the cloud and then photos taken on, for example, mobile will download to Classic.
Ensure you have a proper and robust local system in place for the backup of your photos.
Hi Paul, re your reply to Bruce, when you say that a Classic catalog can be synced to the cloud, am I correct in assuming you do not mean the Adobe Cloud that is used for syncing LR desktop/ mobile photos ? I’m guessing you’re referring to third party cloud storage such as Dropbox, One Drive etc …. ?
Hi
No. You can sync selected Collections in a Classic catalog (only one catalog) up to the Adobe cloud; and if you have the catalog synced (to the Adobe cloud) then any mobile photos that are taken with or ingested to Lightroom Mobile will sync down from the Adobe cloud to Classic.
Hi Victoria, I love your site, it is such an awesome resource. I do have a question about catalogs. How big is too big? At one point several years ago I tried splitting my catalogs into years but soon realized that was a pain in the ass and went back to a single catalog. Now it has ballooned to 240k images. And this is really only 10-15% of what I have shot over the last 10 years – I shoot theatre productions – the balance of the images get deleted forever. I regularly optimize the catalog and back it up every couple of weeks but especially with the latest release, it feels very sluggish. So can the catalog get too big to handle?
Tracy
There isn’t a specific size catalogs can go to (I have one with nearly 2 million photos in) but there can develop performance issues dependent on hardware, simply because so much resource can be needed when loading / reading the catalog. 240k isn’t that massive, although if you have masses more you might end up deciding to keep catalogs for a range of years.
Hi, Victoria, Paul. I keep all my original images on a Lacie rugged drive and backup on an identical drive. On both these drives I keep copies of catalogue backups, the oldest being six to eight months old to the present backup. I keep about the last ten copies of the cat. backups on a USB Drive and the last four backups on my Laptop. Yes I am paranoid!! How long do you recommend you keep these catalogue backups ? I read some well known LT users and Adobe Guru’s only keep about half dozen and trash the old ones. Your thoughts are much appreciated.
On subscription, I am still downloading cataloguing on LT standalone 6.14 on a early 2011 MBPro. as my 2017 is running Catalina. Is there anyway I can subscribe to LT CC and not photoshop or Adobe Cloud as I don’t need the last two and have never used Photoshop or want to. Thanks and regards.
I’d recommend keeping a couple of older backups in addition to the current ones, for example, 1 year old, 6 months old, 3 months old, 1 month old, plus the most recent 4 or 5 backups. You never know when you might discover a mistake you made a few months ago, and want to retrieve settings for some photos from a much older backup.
A subscription for Lightroom alone would cost basically the same as the extra-special bargain price for the Photography Plan, so you might as well just jump on board!
Excellent article! I should warn though – I have lost ‘final edits’ several times when adobe updated their colour profiles and suddenly all the previous edits I’d done didn’t look the same, as the new base profile was being applied to them. I never found the way to just keep the old profile installed…
That sounds odd, which profile were you using? When they release a new one, they usually name it v2. I’ve never known them remove existing profiles, other than beta ones.
I am afraid my question may be too obvious. However, here goes…My LR catalog backups are on my PC internal drive. I have been making a copy of that backup to an external hard drive assuming that I could use that to restore if something happened to my PC. But some of your explanations and answers to the questions make me suspect that that will not work. Is this true? If so, what should I be doing instead?
Hi Janet
Keeping the backups on a different drive is a good idea – then not only have you covered the possibility of a catalog corruption but also a hard disk failure. However, it’s essential to also have a backup of the photos themselves; as the blog states, the catalog is purely the catalog that points to photos, not the actual photos themselves.
I shoot raw so that I have all the data information to work with. However, in Lightroom it seems that I am working with a small JPEG preview. Yet I still have the dynamic range of a raw image. How does that work?
Hi Fred
What makes you believe you’re working on small JPG’s?
That’s my confusion. I’m looking at the preview but am I working on the sql data within the catalog?
The previews in the Library module are stored as JPEG format, but when you’re working in the Develop module, Lightroom loads the raw data.
Thank you. The dots are now connected.
It is more of a question than a comment. I had my photo’s on an external hard drive which i intended to use on another PC. Unfortunately the drive got struck by lightning and i lost all of my photo’s. My catalogue still have the lost photo’s data. Is there a way to “build” a new photo out of the backup catalogue?
Hi Jean
If you mean you have no backup of your photos…you can extract a low res one from the LR Previews using a Plug-in by Jeffrey Friedl
https://www.Lrq.me/friedl-extractpreviews
Obviously it will only be the quality of what LR holds, these aren’t the actual files (that’s what backups are for)
Hi Victoria,
This is beyond the scope of this discussion but I think it is good to understand its utility.
I do a lot of post processing in other programs like Alienskin Exposure and Topaz Labs. For me I like to see these edited image files inside the Lightroom catalog so in this case I definitely add them and keep them.
A good idea might also be to apply external program edits as Smart Filters in Photoshop and add the resulting PSD files to Lightroom. This way would provide a non-destrusctive image and the flexibility to modify the edits from Alienskin or whatever external program you use as a filter in Photoshop.
Michael
12-months scare
Hi Victoria, I read somewhere that “images older than 12 months will be automatically removed” from a Smart Collection. Is that really true?
If so, does some similar statute of limitations apply to other items like Collections, Catalogs, slide shows?
Best,
Joachim
No, that’s not true. I haven’t heard of that one before, but images older than 12 months would only be removed from a smart collection if that was part of the smart collection criteria you chose.
I Carbon Copied my external HD that I keep all of my all of my LR files on to another Ext. Drive so I could work on images will traveling. When I opened LR and went to my original catalog there is a ! mark for all 24,000 files. Is there a way to relink without sorting through all the images?
Which operating system Blaine? The answer is yes probably, by relinking the parent folder of a folder hierarchy. A screenshot of the Folders panel would allow me to give you a definitive answer, so feel free to post on the forum and we can walk you through it.
Hi There, I was wondering what your thoughts are about storing my LR catalog in Dropbox. I use multiple computers and this seems to be a popular option for many photographers for easy access. Thanks in advance for your reply.
I’ve worked that way for years. Just have to be careful that both computers have finished syncing before you switch.
That’s ok, we can disagree! 😉
Software subscription ending isn’t a problem, because most of LR carries on working, so you could export the file with all its edits even after the subscription expires. Equally, with the end of support of a file format (which has never happened), you could export the file when that happened, as there would be plenty of warning.
In all the years of camera raw, the only change I can remember that affected existing photos was a change to the demosiac which made slight changes to the detail available in an image. This may be important to a few people, but is of no consequence to most.
Another format as backup has some merit, although I’d still recommend using that extra hard drive space as backup of the originals and settings, rather than a rasterized edited copy. But yes, having an edited copy could be valuable in some circumstances, for example, if we died and our family wanted to access the photos without any Lightroom knowledge.
In that circumstance you could change “could be valuable” to “almost essential” and it is one of the reasons I export HQ JPEGs whenever I finish an edit. The other circumstance is in case you accidentally corrupt a RAW file with Lens Tagger as happens to me now and again. The only problem when exporting a JPEG copy is that it makes a new copy of the keywords which really messes up the keyword list. Is there a way to fix this problem? It seems the only way is to spend hours cleaning up the keyword list every few days.
Exporting a JPEG copy wouldn’t mess up the keywords, but adding the exported JPEG back into the catalog might, if some keywords are set to not export. So the simple answer would be just don’t import the exported copies, just keep the originals in LR. Oh, and only ever edit copies of raw files, if you’re going to mess with them!!
I have to empirically disagree with #10
Creating a master file from an edited image (e.g. A 16-bit TIFF) safeguards you against Adobe changes, File format changes, Software subscription ending, and a number of other things I can think of.
Keeping a master TIFF or full quality JPEG of the finished result guarantees that no matter what happens to Lightroom in the future, you are not tied in to Adobe if you want to use that image as it is/was.
It can also save you from disaster as it is yet another form of backup. Even if it is rasterized.
When you compare disk space costs versus LR subscription costs versus the cost to you if you lose all access to data, keeping a high quality final, even if like mine, many are in the 2-4GB size, is not something to lightly dismiss.
A 4TB disk that is offline for backups costs less than LR+PS does for 2 years.
Never confuse backups and data access with money.
One you can earn and replace, the other, when lost, is gone forever.
This has always been one of my annoyances. The term backup seems to indicate that it’s there just in case, that is a secondary file. But it’s really not. It’s just a version of your catalog with the newly imported images. So periodically I change the location of the backup to an external hard drive and then always have my cloud storage backup everything. So worst case there is always a recent uncorrupted version. I really wish Lightroom allowed you to automatically put a second copy of the backed up catalog on another drive the way you can make a copy of the imported images to a second drive (even though I don’t like how that feature renames the files).
Just to be absolutely clear, the backup catalog is just a copy of the entire catalog, not just the new records. No images are included. I do agree that a second copy of the catalog backup could be useful in some situations, although we should be running full computer backups anyway.
One thing about backing up the catalog folder, do you mean the backup won’t be good (or corrupted) when LR is open, if I use another backup application to back up the entire catalog folder?
There are a couple of potential issues:
1. If the catalog gets corrupted without you realizing it, and then your backup software overwrites your previous backup, you end up with a backup of a corrupted catalog.
2. If Lightroom is open when the backup application runs, then the resulting catalog backup can be corrupted.
The easiest solution is to let LR run its own backups, and then let the backup software back up those backups along with the catalog. That way, if there’s a problem with the backup of the working catalog, you can just go back to one of the backup catalogs that were created when LR was definitely closed.
Great! Thanks a lot!
Hi Victoria,
I have about 15000 photos and these are catalogued in LR. The photos and catalogue are on the iMac internal drive but I need to carry out a full erase and reinitialise my iMac. I dont want to risk the photos or the catalogue. I do backup my hardrive both in Time Machine but also to a Cloud backup system as well
Could you advise on the best way to manage my photos during the move? Should I move the photos off under LR or Finder and if so what about the catalogue?
Thanks in advance
If you follow the instructions to move to a new computer, you can be sure you’re safe. https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-move-lightroom-to-new-computer/
So is the Catalog backup and additional backup or the main backup. For all my photos I back them up to a second drive after uploading them to LR. I also let Crashplan backup to a third drive and to their cloud (Just a little paranoid). But the catalog backup then is not a true 2nd backup–or is it.
Sounds like you’re well covered Frank. I’d suggest doing the catalog backup in addition to your other backups, simply because it’s versioned (it keeps older versions of the catalog too, just in case you need to “step back in time”)
I’m more concerned for if and when the drive with the catalog backups dies or gets corrupted. Thanks for the advice.
Thanks for the information, Victoria. Any chance you can provide a concise and easy- to- follow set of instructions on how to move Lightroom application and photos to a new hard drive?
Hi Mike. You’d probably want to keep the application files on the boot drive, but if you want to move those, you’d need to uninstall and then reinstall to the new location.
To move your catalog to the new drive, try this: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/find-move-rename-catalog/
And to move the photos: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/articles-page/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/
Custom camera profiles are also important to back up
Absolutely right Rich. The full list is here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/backup-lightroom-files/
In regards to having the catalogue backed up on the local drive and then losing the local drive, causing the loss of edits, I’d like the option of having my catalogue backup written to two different drives. One would be the local drive and the other would be the external drive where all the files reside. I occasionally change the location of the catalogue backup to accomplish this but then I never remember where the latest catalogue was written. I also use Crashplan to back everything up to an external drive and to Crashplan central.
Hi Ken. You’d probably be better to leave LR’s backup set to a single location and then let your backup software create your second copy.
Thank you ! Good work ! I am always interested when i receive your newsletter.
I know this is maybe a little morbid, but one reason for keeping exported files is … well… in case I die unexpectedly. I publish my favorite photos to a special folder (full of sub folders) for such a reason, in case my wife would like to look at them or print them at some point in the future when I am no longer around. She might be able to figure out how to do that from Lightroom, but it would be a lot easier for her to do what she wanted with them if she can find them in Finder.
If you have a better way to d o this, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
That’s the most sensible reason I’ve heard Dan!
Thank you for this article. Very useful.
Looking forward to the rest of this series! Great info, as always.
Speaking of catalog…. Any idea why Adobe does not take that extra step and allow users to store the catalog in the Adobe Cloud so we could access on the road or at home the one Catalog? I know Dropbox can be used for that but it seems like something Adobe should be doing?
I think it’ll be a matter of time before we can do cloud sync George – did you see the Project Nimbus blog post last week? It’s not exactly the same as keeping a LR catalog in the cloud, because they couldn’t officially support a Dropbox-type sync, but it’ll still allow a cloud sync to multiple computers.
Thank you Victoria, I will look forward to future additions on this subject! I have one comment on this part concerning automated backups. I use the automated backup in the Norton Security Suite, it has a funny way of having you select files to backup and I was shocked to find out it wasn’t by default backing up all the files associated with my images and Lightroom such as certain raw file suffixes, xmp files, lightroom catalog and preset and other associated file types. I actually had to add these file types manually by suffix type to be added to the default file types that Norton was backing up, others should be aware of this!
Thanks for sharing that info Larry. Yes, it’s definitely worth double checking everything is included in backups. Here’s the full list of files to check: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/backup-lightroom-files/
Great stuff, Victoria, as always. One thing about exporting though. A lot of us keep the catalog on a local drive even though we store photos on an external. But, since the stored photos are the original version (straight out of the camera), if you lose the internal hard drive, you’ve lost all your edits, even though you still have the RAW files. I sometimes store the final edit to protect against this. Thoughts?
I’d hope that you’d have catalog backups on another drive (or at least a backup of the internal drive) in which case you’d just open the catalog from the backup and it’d find the originals. You don’t want to lose your catalog, wherever it’s stored.