Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic For Dummies. Rob Sylvan
your catalog”). Backing up and optimization are important enough topics to warrant their own sections, so I do the smart thing and provide them next.
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 glad that you had a recent backup safely tucked away on a different drive. My laptop (refer to Figure 2-6) has only a single drive, so I save the backup copies to a local folder in my Dropbox account, which is then automatically synced to a cloud storage location.
2 Check the Test Integrity Before Backing Up and Optimize Catalog After Backing Up boxes to have the backup process check for corruption in the database.I know it adds a little time to the backup process, but it’s time well spent.
3 Click the Back Up button to begin the process.If you change your mind and just want Lightroom Classic to exit, click the Skip button to bypass the backup function. Note that you can change the backup schedule in this dialog as well.
Optimizing your catalog
I previously mention the File ⇒ Optimize Catalog command and just want to provide a little more detail. If you have a large catalog and notice that it seems sluggish, an Optimize operation might give you a performance boost. Using the Optimize command reorganizes the data in the catalog and removes unused space. The end result can be a smaller and faster catalog file.
Choosing the Optimize command opens a dialog displaying the last time the operation was run and gives you the option to proceed by clicking Optimize or bail out by clicking Cancel. If you choose Optimize, it runs the housekeeping functions on the catalog and then displays a confirmation dialog that it has finished. All you have to do is click OK to return to using Lightroom Classic.
Managing the preview cache files
When you make your way through the options in the Catalog Settings dialog, you notice the File Handling tab to the immediate right of the General tab. The File Handling tab (shown in Figure 2-7) has options to help you manage the size and quality of the regular preview files that Lightroom Classic creates for all your imported photos, as well as a running tally of the size of the cache for the optional Smart Previews (which I cover in the upcoming section “Smart Previews”).
FIGURE 2-7: The File Handling tab of the Catalog Settings dialog.
Regular previews
Before I get into what the controls do, I’d like to talk about what previews are and what they do. I was once asked a great question by a new user who was trying to understand how previews work: “If my photos are never altered and never in Lightroom Classic, then what am I looking at when I’m working?” What a great question! The answer, of course, is