When theres a shiny new program on the market, its often easy to install it right away and start using it. The Adobe team did a lot of work reengineering how Lightroom works to improve its speed and efficiency, so when you upgrade from Lightroom 5 to Lightroom CC you’ll need to update your catalog. Don’t just click upgrade.

Your Lightroom catalog is a vast database that contains all the metadata, organization and edits youve done to your photo library. Should something happen when upgrading, you don’t want to take the chance that you might lose something due to a corrupted file. Fortunately, its really easy to make a backup of your catalog and optimize it before upgrading the catalog for Lightroom CC.

Getting Started

On a Mac, choose the Lightroom menu and choose Catalog Settings. On a PC, choose Edit, then Catalog Settings. In the dialog box, navigate down to the Backup section. Click the dropdown and tell Lightroom to back up catalog when Lightroom next exits.

Close out of that dialog box and proceed to exit out of Lightroom. When you exit, a popup box will appear asking you to back up your catalog.

Click the Choose button to select a folder to store your Lightroom backup file. Make sure to check the boxes for Test integrity before backing up and Optimize catalog after backing up. This way, you know you have a good backup file.

Next Steps

Once you have Lightroom CC installed, you can now choose to open up your original Lightroom catalog. When youre asked to upgrade it, you know you have a safe backup and can continue to upgrade it to Lightroom CC.

Have any questions about Lightroom CC? Drop us a comment below.

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