Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic For Dummies. Rob Sylvan
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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.
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.
Backing up your catalog
When the Catalog Backup function runs, it creates a fully operational and identical copy of your working catalog file (and the new .lrcat-data
file), and then compresses them into a ZIP file to reduce file size. Should you have a problem with your working catalog (file corruption or data loss), you must swap the bad files with the latest versions extracted (unzipped) from the backup. The next time you launch Lightroom Classic, your work will be in the exact state it was in at the time the backup was created.
Note that Lightroom Classic does not back up the preview caches (more on these in the “Managing the preview cache files” section) in this process. I suggest you exclude it from your system backup strategy as well because the cache file will grow quite large as you continue to import new photos (I’m talking gigabytes of space here). If you ever “lose” your preview cache, Lightroom Classic automatically creates a new one for you.
Thankfully, you can automate the catalog backup process so that you don’t have to think about it. In the Catalog Settings dialog, click the Back Up Catalog drop-down menu to see your scheduling choices, which range from Never to Every Time Lightroom Classic Exits, as shown in Figure 2-5. The first thing you might notice is that the backup can run only when Lightroom Classic exits. If you want to force a backup after a good day’s work, set the backup to run Every Time Lightroom Exits; then close Lightroom Classic when you finish working to trigger the backup.
FIGURE 2-5: The Back Up Catalog drop-down menu.
The next time you exit Lightroom Classic in the period for the backup function to run, you’re greeted with the Back Up Catalog dialog, shown in Figure 2-6.
FIGURE 2-6: The Back Up Catalog dialog.
Here’s how you handle the Back Up Catalog dialog:
1 Specify where you want the backup catalog saved by clicking the Choose button and then navigating to your desired location.I suggest having your backup saved to a different drive (if possible) than where your working catalog is located. The reason is that if you lose the drive containing your working catalog, you’ll be very