Keeping your Lightroom catalog safe is essential to preserving your hard work. After all, your catalog contains your organization (and possibly the bulk of your edits).
The Quick Answer on Location
So where should you store the catalog? The answer is it depends.
- Single computer: create a folder on your local hard drive, name it Lightroom Catalog and save the catalog to this location. This is the fastest way Lightroom can access the catalog.
- Multiple computers: create a folder on an external hard drive, name it Lightroom Catalog and save the catalog to this location. This setup trades speed for portability allowing access to any computer connected to the hard drive.
Understanding Catalogs
When you start Lightroom the first time, it automatically creates an empty catalog file (Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrcat) for you on your main hard drive in Lightroom’s folder. Let’s take a step back for a moment and explain what a catalog is. A catalog is a database that tracks the location of your photos and information about them. When you edit photos, rate them, add keywords to them, or do other things to photos in Lightroom, all of those changes are stored in the catalog. The photo files themselves are not touched. This understanding of a catalogs helps us to determine where we should store it.
Single Computer
Since a catalog is a database that stores the location of our photos, we can have the catalog file; ending in the extension .lrcat, saved in one location and our photos stored in another. If you only access Lightroom on a single computer, create a folder on your local hard drive, name it Lightroom Catalog and save the catalog to this location. This is the fastest way for Lightroom to access the catalog. Your photos should be stored on an external drive. There are many reasons for this, “Why Store Photos on a Separate Hard Drive” explains why.
Multiple Computers
Imagine we have a Desktop computer as our main computer and a Laptop as our secondary or travel computer. We want to access Lightroom’s catalog from both computers. Changes we make on the Desktop computer needs to be seen on the Laptop computer or any computer that opens the catalog. For this to happen, we create a folder on an external hard drive, name it Lightroom Catalog and save the catalog to this location. This setup trades speed for portability allowing access from any computer connected to the hard drive. Your photos must be stored on the external drive. Once the catalog is opened from either computer, changes to the photo are saved to the catalog and can be seen from both devices.
Network access BUT not network compatible.
You can open a Lightroom catalog from a NAS (Network attached storage) but Lightroom places a lock on the file. This prevents simultaneous access. When you exit from Lightroom, the other computer can access the catalog.
*August 21, 2015 This no longer can be accomplished. Your images can reside on the network drive, but the catalog must be on a local drive to the computer. Some people use dropbox.
Recap
- For the best performance, store your Lightroom catalog on your local hard drive. A Solid State Hard Drive (SSD) is even better.
- If you need to be portable, store your Lightroom catalog and photos on a fast external hard drive.
Extra Resources
- Why store photos on a separate drive?
- Understanding Lightroom Catalogs
- 5 Common “Lightroom Lost my Photos!” Mistakes
I use the second method with the catalog on the USB drive where I store my images. The only gotcha with that is that there are some preferences that lightroom doesn’t store with the catalog so you need to make sure that the preferences are the same on both machines. For instance when you export using a preset that is not stored with the catalog so you images could end up in different places on the different machines.
Jim, great point!
Reblogged this on Voomolo.
Just a side note. Sharing the same catalog between Mac and Windows doesn’t work quite as well due to the differences in how Mac (and BSD/Linux/et al) and Windows handle volume mounting (i.e., external drives and USB sticks). Even sharing the catalog across different Windows computers or different Mac computers, make sure your drive letters or mount points are the same across computers. Same with NAS devices. Although, even more issues in a multi-platform scenario, with locations of mount points. And it’s a real pain to work on large Photoshop files across the network, and 1:1 previews don’t load up… Read more »
Can you back up to multiple and different drives? I would like to backup first version of catalog every time I use it and then a backup of that once a week button a separate drive.
Just lost my main catalog due to problems with computer wiping my backups on d drive and my and copy was from oct due to issues I had had with that, BACKUPS ARE IMPORTANT!
Fortunately I didn’t lose any photos ?
There are lots of utilities that allow you to choose a file or director and set it to back up elsewhere. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this and Crashplan.
No mention of Dropbox? I’ve been storing mine there and have been able to access it from all my Macs. Just have to be careful about CLOSING and SYNCING before opening on another Mac.
So how large are the catalogue files? I’ve got a 480gb SSD and worry it would fill up fast with loads of large files. My currant photo library is close to 75k images.
The Catalog doesn’t mean the images. Its jut the database
The Catalog also stores the previews so the catalog can grow really large over time. You just need to either have it only keep previews for 1 day or remember to periodically remove the preview folder directory.
I’d really like to know how did you manage to open a catalog from a NAS. I’d tried mapping the folder as well, Lightroom still won’t let me open it.
This no longer can be accomplished. Your images can reside on the network drive, but the catalog must be on a local drive to the computer. Some people use dropbox.
I don’t trust my catalog to maintain my changes, I use the XMP function which IMO is a better plan and highly recommended. This way if my catalog is ever corrupted I’ve lost only keywords and can rebuild my catalog from scratch with all my edits in the XMP files. All of my files, raw and xmp are backup to a 2nd hard drive in sync as to not lose anything.
I only need to use a second computer ocassionaly….does it work to simply copy the catalog over to the external drive when traveleing or using a second machine? Also, how much speed do you sacrifice having the catalog on the external drive? (Especially considering my internal is an SSD)
Thanks
Jon
No mention of Dropbox? I’ve been storing mine there and have been able to access it from all my Macs. Just have to be careful about CLOSING and SYNCING before opening on another Mac.
Reblogged this on Voomolo.
Can you back up to multiple and different drives? I would like to backup first version of catalog every time I use it and then a backup of that once a week button a separate drive.
Just lost my main catalog due to problems with computer wiping my backups on d drive and my and copy was from oct due to issues I had had with that, BACKUPS ARE IMPORTANT!
Fortunately I didn’t lose any photos ?
There are lots of utilities that allow you to choose a file or director and set it to back up elsewhere. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this and Crashplan.
I use the second method with the catalog on the USB drive where I store my images. The only gotcha with that is that there are some preferences that lightroom doesn’t store with the catalog so you need to make sure that the preferences are the same on both machines. For instance when you export using a preset that is not stored with the catalog so you images could end up in different places on the different machines.
Jim, great point!
So how large are the catalogue files? I’ve got a 480gb SSD and worry it would fill up fast with loads of large files. My currant photo library is close to 75k images.
The Catalog doesn’t mean the images. Its jut the database
The Catalog also stores the previews so the catalog can grow really large over time. You just need to either have it only keep previews for 1 day or remember to periodically remove the preview folder directory.
Just a side note. Sharing the same catalog between Mac and Windows doesn’t work quite as well due to the differences in how Mac (and BSD/Linux/et al) and Windows handle volume mounting (i.e., external drives and USB sticks). Even sharing the catalog across different Windows computers or different Mac computers, make sure your drive letters or mount points are the same across computers. Same with NAS devices. Although, even more issues in a multi-platform scenario, with locations of mount points. And it’s a real pain to work on large Photoshop files across the network, and 1:1 previews don’t load up… Read more »
I don’t trust my catalog to maintain my changes, I use the XMP function which IMO is a better plan and highly recommended. This way if my catalog is ever corrupted I’ve lost only keywords and can rebuild my catalog from scratch with all my edits in the XMP files. All of my files, raw and xmp are backup to a 2nd hard drive in sync as to not lose anything.
I’d really like to know how did you manage to open a catalog from a NAS. I’d tried mapping the folder as well, Lightroom still won’t let me open it.
This no longer can be accomplished. Your images can reside on the network drive, but the catalog must be on a local drive to the computer. Some people use dropbox.
I only need to use a second computer ocassionaly….does it work to simply copy the catalog over to the external drive when traveleing or using a second machine? Also, how much speed do you sacrifice having the catalog on the external drive? (Especially considering my internal is an SSD)
Thanks
Jon
I need to store my Lightroom catalog on a new drive as my 1TB local system drive is running out of space. I tried running the catalog from a regular internal HDD drive but Lightroom speed suffered badly – the lag I got was a pain. I am purchasing a second SSD, this time 2TB. I have considered two options, however. i) Use the new 2TB drive as my new local system drive and also as my Lightroom Catalog location. And ii) install the 2TB SSD as a 2nd local drive dedicated exclusively to the Lightroom Catalog. So existing smaller… Read more »