Why Backing Up Your Lightroom Catalog Is Important (And How To Do It)

Gerard Murphy - July 15, 2011 | Uncategorized

How To Backup Your Lightroom Catalog Presented By Mosaic

How To Backup Your Lightroom Catalog Presented By Mosaic – Presentation Transcript

What is the Lightroom Catalog?

  • The Lightroom catalog doesn’t contain any images. Lightroom indexes images referencing where the are on your hard drive.
  • When you do any work in Lightroom the changes are automatically saved in the catalog.
  • The catalog has two components:
    1. CatalogName.lrcat has all the information about the images including development settings, collections, ratings, flags, etc.
    2. CatalogNamePreviews.lrdata holds all of the JPEG image previews that are displayed within Lightroom.

    More Information About Lightroom Catalogs

  • You can only have one catalog open at a time but you can create multiple Lightroom catalogs.
  • You can open your Lightroom catalog on different computers. You are able to browse your images previews but to use any of the development settings the images need to be local on that computer.
  • Images that Lightroom cannot find on the computer are listed as “offline.”
  • You can make catalog changes to offline images but not development changes.
  • Catalog changes include keywords, flags, ratings or collections.

    • Offline Images In Lightroom

  • Images that are not found in the same place as the Lightroom catalog expects are listed as “offline.”

    • Why Should I Backup My Lightroom Catalog?

    Because a lot of your work is saved there!

  • By default all of your development and metadata settings are saved in your Lightroom catalog.
  • If your catalog becomes corrupted or missing your work done in Lightroom will be lost.
  • You can become less reliant on your catalog by pushing your changes to the images metadata.
  • See this blog post on how to save your metadata to your files.

    • How To Backup Your Lightroom Catalog

  • From Lightroom go to Edit > Catalog Settings
  • Under the General tab you will see your backup options.
  • Click OK

    • Remember, backing up your Lightroom catalog is not the same as backing up your images! You should have a different process for backing up your images.

    Choose Your Catalog Backup Location

  • Quit Lightroom. The dialog to the right will appear.
  • Select “Choose” to determine a destination for your catalog backup.
    1. Recommended that you choose a separate drive than where your catalog is currently saved to protect against hard drive failure. External hard drives or online services like Dropbox are a good option. (Remember your catalog doesn’t contain your images, so it is a fairly small file size.)
  • Select Backup.

    • Your Lightroom Catalog Is Now Backed Up

  • Your development setting and metadata are a little more secure.

  • For More Helpful Tips For Serious Photographers

    Check out the Mosaic Blog

    • About:

    Mosaic was founded by prosumer photographers Andy and Gerard in 2010 because they were frustrated with the existing options for managing their photos. Andy and Gerard are on a mission to make digital asset management easier for photographers, while enabling the anywhere access that we have come to expect. Mosaic is located in the beautiful state of New Hampshire where Andy and Gerard met over 20 years ago.

    Blog:

    Are You A LeBron James or Tim Duncan Photographer? Gerard Murphy – June 17, 2013

    My Major Issues With Lightroom 5 Smart Previews Gerard Murphy – June 13, 2013

    When Should I Use Smart Previews in Lightroom 5? Gerard Murphy – June 12, 2013

    The Lightroom 5 Top 5 With The Jackson 5 Gerard Murphy – June 11, 2013

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