Taking control of your image files and the Light-room catalog is fundamental to achieving a good workflow in the program. However, it’s not uncommon to come across people who have been using Light-room for months or years without having a clue where their photos are actually located. Invariably, their filing system is bloated and disorganized with many sub-folders that each contain only a few photos.
It’s easily possible to use Lightroom’s default suggestions for folder names and locations and jump straight to the more interesting subject of image editing. This is all well and good until something goes wrong, so taking the trouble to set up a well-organized filing structure (or to tidy up a messy one), is an important step.
Organizing your files will be a huge help if you ever want to access photos from outside Light-room or when you want to backup your photos and share them with others.
Organizing Photos in Light-room
When it comes to the question of how to organize photos in Lightroom, it’s important to understand that there are two main factors to consider—the Lightroom catalog and the photos themselves.
These are completely separate entities; this article will help you understand what a Lightroom catalog is and how it works so that you can be smart and efficient when it comes to organising your photos.
The Lightroom Catalog
As you may know if you are familiar with software, the Light-room catalog is an Sq-lite database; if the term ‘database’ means little to you, it’s helpful to regard it as a box of index cards similar to the type you might have encountered in an old-fashioned public library or art gallery.
Every painting has a corresponding card in the tray that contains details about the properties and location of the painting to which it refers.
Each painting is unique but in theory, a gallery might have more than one tray of index cards, some of which may reference the same painting.
The tray itself might be located in the same room as the paintings but it doesn’t have to be—it could be located in a different room, building, or country and still tell you where the master paintings are located.
The Lightroom catalog is like a tray of index cards each effectively ‘pointing to’ a master painting.
Individual cards within the tray could be replicated and modified in various ways – the entire tray may be replicated if needed or maybe a selection of cards could be copied and stored in a new tray without affecting the actual paintings at all.
In the same way, you can move, copy and rename Lightroom catalogs without affecting the photos to which they refer.
In the illustration above, note that the cards contain a JPEG thumbnail of their corresponding photo not the photo itself.
This means that the whole catalog is much smaller than the sum of the photos it references and can easily be stored on your computer’s main internal hard drive.
How Many Catalogs do I Need?
When you open Lightroom for the first time, you’ll be prompted to make a new catalog and you’ll be able to specify the catalog name and location there and then.
By default, Light-room puts the catalog on your computer’s main internal hard drive in the ‘Pictures’ folder.
I have come across instances of people making a new catalog every time they import some photos. This is very bad practice as it will make it nearly impossible to search your entire photo collection effectively.
Light-room can only have one catalog open at any time and it only knows about the photos referenced in the currently open catalog.
You could, for example, have a different catalog for every individual country you’ve visited but if at some time you wanted to find all photos you’d ever taken of lakes and waterfalls, you’d have to laboriously open each catalog, search for the appropriate photos and then open the next catalog, search again and so on until you’d been through all your catalogs.
In addition, any presets you’d set up in one catalog would not carry over to the other catalogs and any publish services you use would need to be set up separately for each individual catalog.
Earlier versions of Lightroom used to slow down when the catalog was asked to handle over 10,000 photos and so people often made several smaller catalogs rather than one large catalog in order to keep things running faster.
This is no longer such an issue and the advantages of being able to search all your photos from a single catalog far outweigh any perceived performance benefits.
Although juggling multiple Lightroom catalogs can be a chore, there are instances where managing a few separate catalogs makes sense, for example:
- Private/Commercial – If you take photos for clients on a regular basis it makes sense to separate them from your family photos – that way, you’ll never have to look at pictures of heavy industrial valves or medical equipment while scanning for photos of your kids.
- Special Events – Weddings, concerts and other events where you’re likely to take many hundreds of photos of essentially the same subject matter also lend themselves to a unique catalog that can be archived together with its master photos.
- Timelapse and Stacking – Those familiar with astrophotography or making timelapse movies will know that the final result is often the product of thousands of very similar images. These can be much more efficiently handled using their own catalog.
Getting Catalog Info
In order to see where your currently active catalog is, go to the menu and select Lightroom > Catalog Settings… on a Mac or File > Catalog Settings… on a PC. This will pop open the Catalog Settings dialogue box:
The size and location of your currently active catalog.
This shows the name of the folder in which the catalog will be stored and the chosen file name with the suffix .lolcat (for light-room catalog).
This particular catalog references around 20,000 raw photos but only takes just over 800 MB of the available hard drive—a space that’s over 600 times smaller than the total space taken by the photos themselves.
Under the ‘Backup’ section, you can set how often Light-room backs up your catalog (Note: Light-room does not back up your actual photos—just the catalog).
Click the ‘Show’ button and Light-room will take you to the catalog’s parent folder using your computer’s filing system.
Check regularly for superfluous backups!
In this case, the Lightroom folder that contains the catalog called MainCC-2.lrcat aso contains a sub-folder created by Light-room called ‘Backups’.
Twirling the disclosure triangle open shows a number of other sub-folders named by the date on which they were created. Within each of these, is a copy of the catalog as it was at the time the backup was made.
In the Catalog Settings box, the ‘Back up catalog:’ option was set to ‘Once a week, when exiting Light-room’. This means that Light-room will pester you to allow it make a backup catalog once per week. You can skip the backup when asked but if you let Light-room proceed, it will add another folder containing another copy of the current catalog.
If you’ve set Light-room to backup each time it closes, this list of backups can grow quite long surprisingly quickly and if your catalogs are several hundred MB each, the accumulation of disk space can be somewhat alarming.
It’s unlikely that you’ll ever need more than two backup copies so check the Backups folder regularly and delete all but the most recent one or two.
Changing Where your Catalog Backups are Stored
By default, your current catalog and as many backup copies as you’ve allowed, are both stored under the same parent folder and are therefore both on the same drive. This protects against the odd corrupt catalog but if the drive on which the catalog resides fails, the backups are lost too.
For this reason, some people feel more comfortable having their catalog backup on a different drive to their main catalog.
The Catalog Settings panel doesn’t have a place to set the location of future backups directly so here are the steps to change your backup location:
- From the ‘Back up catalog:’ drop-down, select ‘When Light-room next exits’
- Exit Light-room
- Select the Choose button and select a new location from the resulting navigation dialogue box.
You can select a destination for the catalog backup when the backup dialogue is active using the ‘Choose’ button.
Moving and Renaming your Catalog
If you want to move your catalog or rename it, make sure Light-room is not using it and simply move or rename the file ending .lolcat as you would rename any other file. If you double-click the file, it will open Light-room using that catalog just as it did before.
If you open Light-room using the normal icon, it will try to find the catalog at the last known location and if it can’t find it, a pop-up message will ask you if you want to locate the catalog, use the default catalog or make a new one.
If you use multiple catalogs, you can use the general preferences dialogue box to select which catalog Light-room will open by default:
Selecting a Light-room catalog.
Most people leave this selected to ‘Load most recent catalog’ but you can opt to be prompted each time Light-room opens or to have it always default to a chosen named catalog.
Recommended Practice
It’s generally a good idea to aim to work with just one catalog initially rather than making various different catalogs for different subjects.
A single catalog may be all you ever need and if at some time in the future you find you need to move a few hundred photos to a new catalog, you can simply export your selected photos as a new catalog and then remove them from your main catalog.
The Master Photos
The Light-room catalog keeps track of real image files on your hard drive(s).
These will be either JPEG, RAW, DNG, TIFF, PSD, MOV or MPEG4. Of these, only JPEG can be considered small enough to store directly on your main computer.
The other file types contain much more information and consequently take up more space on your computer. This is an important consideration and proper file management must take into account the space needed to store your photos.
File Space Allocation
Most computers, be they laptops or desktop machines, have one main drive with perhaps a secondary drive. The main drive of your computer probably contains a folder called ‘Documents’ where you save your correspondence and spreadsheets and another folder called, for example, ‘My Pictures’ where you might naturally store photos you’ve downloaded from your camera.
It’s easy to just keep adding more and more files to these folders but if you do, your computer will begin to slow down and eventually crash. This is because the main drive contains not just your documents and photos but essential software and other resources needed to make it work.
It’s important to keep an eye on your computer’s main drive space as it needs spare capacity to work properly.
Fortunately, it’s easy to check your disk space using Light-room. In fact, all the operations you might need to perform to achieve the smooth and efficient running of your Light-room setup can and should be done from within Light-room.
Let’s start by checking your free space.
The folders panel can be configured to show the amount of free space on each drive.
When you imported your photos into Light-room, they will either have already been in a folder on your computer or they will have been copied into a folder.
In either case, that folder and the drive on which it resides, will be visible under the Folders panel on the left hand side of the Library module (if you can’t see these panels in the Library view, tap the TAB key → | ).
Twirling open the disclosure triangle on the Folders panel will show you all the drives and folders that Light-room knows about.
In the screenshot above, drives appear as bars with a (usually) green light on their left and a black arrow on their right that can be twirled open or closed to show the folders on that drive.
Just in front of the arrow, you may see some optional information regarding the drive in question. If your right-click the bar, you can select what information is shown. In this example, ‘Disk Space’ has been selected to provide a continuous readout of total disk space and the amount still available for use.
A more graphic but less precise indication of disk availability is afforded by the space status light which changes color according to the amount of free space available on the drive. The color meanings according to Adobe are as follows:
- Green: At least 10 GB remaining.
- Yellow: Less than 10 GB remaining.
- Orange: Less than 5 GB remaining.
- Red: Less than 1 GB remaining.
If you’re still storing your images on your computer’s main hard drive, the ‘green light’ is not necessarily a sign that’s all is well. This is because 10 GB of remaining space on a 1 TB drive is equivalent to saying your disk is 99% full! It’s generally safer to look at the numerical indication of space remaining.
Remember that your computer’s main drive also holds the operating system and it needs spare capacity for ‘swapping’ memory and loading various resources. For this reason, it’s best to dedicate an external USB drive that’s used exclusively to store photos and videos and thereby leave plenty of space on your computer’s main drive.
Now that you know what the Light-room catalog is, how many you need and where it should be located, you’re ready to start organizing photos.
Hello, my name is Samuel Ojo Olasehinde. I'm a 25 year old self-employed Photography Called SkyPictures.
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