Lightroom 4: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Chapter 11: WORKING WITH LIGHTROOM CATALOGS: Advanced Photo Management Techniques

Although we’ve discussed catalog-related issues at various points throughout this book, the topic of working with Lightroom catalogs deserves its own chapter. For most photographers, there comes a point when working with just one catalog is not ideal for their workflow. Unfortunately, for other folks, even correctly managing a single catalog becomes confusing and difficult. In my teaching and consulting work I’ve repeatedly seen how most people struggle with catalog management at one point or another. It doesn’t need to be so difficult!

Since Lightroom relies on the catalog to function, ignoring this aspect of Lightroom can be a recipe for disaster. The good folks at Adobe have gone to great efforts to make using Lightroom (and catalogs) as easy as possible (and it usually is), but when something goes wrong, many photographers find themselves in uncharted territory. Most people simply have no prior experience dealing with image databases. In this chapter, you’ll learn lots more about Lightroom catalogs and how to use them to manage your photo library.

Review of Lightroom Data Architecture

Always bear in mind that a Lightroom catalog is a database file on your hard drive. When Lightroom is installed, an empty catalog is created in the Pictures folder under your user account. When you launch Lightroom, ...