Lightroom 4: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Chapter 2: IMPORT: Indexing Photos and Videos With Lightroom Catalogs

To work with photos and videos in Lightroom you must first import them. During the import, Lightroom reads the files on disk and creates a database entry for each file. These records are stored within the currently open catalog. A catalog record contains all the information about the image or video file—but not the file itself (see Figure 2–1).

Regardless of the settings you use for the import, the actual images and video files are never stored inside the catalog. They are always stored outside the catalog, in a folder on your hard disk.

⌘+Shift+I or Ctrl+Shift+I Import photos and videos

 

The image data from the imported files is not stored in the catalog, either. A Lightroom catalog only stores textual and numeric data: file names, paths to their locations on disk, and all associated metadata (such as keywords and adjustment settings) are saved in the catalog as text entries. (There’s no functionality provided to directly access this data; you only see the effects of the data—visually—as you work in the Lightroom modules.)

Figure 2-1

The original image data in the files on the hard drive is never altered by Lightroom.

As you work, Lightroom continually renders and saves previews for the photos and ...