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

It)

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What is the Lightroom Catalog?The Lightroom catalog doesn’t contain any

images. Lightroom indexes images referencing where they 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:

CatalogName.lrcat has all the information about the images including development settings, collections, ratings, flags, etc.

CatalogName Previews.lrdata holds all of the JPEG image previews that are displayed within Lightroom.

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More Information About Lightroom CatalogsYou 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.

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Offline Images In Lightroom

Images that are not found in the same place as the Lightroom

catalog expects are listed as “offline.”

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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.

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How To Backup Your Lightroom Catalog

From Lightroom go to Edit > Catalog Settings

Under the General tab you will see your backup options.

Click OKRemember, 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.

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Choose Your Catalog Backup Location

Quit Lightroom. The dialog to the

right will appear.

Select “Choose” to determine a

destination for your catalog

backup.

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.

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Your Lightroom Catalog Is Now Backed UpYour development setting and metadata are a little

more secure.

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For More Helpful Tips For Serious Photographers

Check out the Mosaic Blog