In this episode I'll show you how to set up a Lightroom catalog from scratch.
AdoramaTV presents Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Exploring Photography, right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace. Well, I got a question recently from a person on Facebook that said 'Hey, I am brand new
to Lightroom. I've been using it just a little bit for the last
couple of months and I'm starting over. I'm going to set everything up from scratch
on a brand new computer. Can you walk me through the settings?'
Well, absolutely. In fact I get this question a lot and I think the key to this entire
thing is to think of Lightroom and your photos as a system. Actually think of it
as a library, and anybody that grew up and went to elementary school in the
seventies can remember how exciting the library was.
"Hi there, young fellow. How's the library business?"
"All swell, Mr. Williams. See ya!"
"So long."
"What keeps you and Steve, all the rest of your staff so... so keyed up about the library?"
"But what can be more exciting?"
Well, what could possibly be more exciting? Well its true. Once you get to
know the library and how it works it's pretty great but at first that might not be the case.
"Have you ever watched the way others use the library? There's quite a
difference in the way they go about it. Some seem lost in the library.
Now, the first thing, Jean, is to really get to know this card catalog ."
Yeah, the first thing you need to know is how to use the card catalog. Every remembers the card catalog right?
"The card catalog helps pupils locate books by author, title and subject."
So what does all this have to do with setting up Lightroom? Lightroom is a
catalog just like the card catalog and understanding this and that the whole
thing is like a library is the key to getting everything setup and working properly.
"With this beginning and with practice you can master the organization of your library."
Wait, wait no, that's not the end but I think that's the end of those vintage clips.
The point is to approach your Lightroom set up like a library system. Istead of
books, you have photos. Instead of a card catalog, you have a Lightroom catalog and just like
card catalogs in a bunch of books, your Lightroom catalog is in a bunch of
photos. And you import photos into Lightroom. What you're actually doing is you're
importing information about those photos and storing the photos somewhere else.
And that has a really big impact on where you store things on your hard drives.
Well, you can store all of your files or Lightroom catalogs and your photos all
on one hard drive but that's not a good idea for a lot of reasons. One: You use
your computer's internal hard drive for everything. If that crashes and you don't
have a backup, well you're really out of luck and sometimes if you have a small
hard drive like a laptop while your folders are going to fill up really quickly
and you're not going to have any space left. And so it's a good idea to use an external hard drive if
not more than one hard drive for backup purposes. So let me walk you through how
I've set up my laptop and you can adjust this according to your needs so on my
laptop's internal hard drive, I've created a folder in My Documents folder called
'Lightroom Catalogs'. Now, I used that folder for storing all of my Lightroom catalogs
Now at first you might only have one catalog, but as your photography grows you might
want to have a catalog, maybe, for family portraits, one for a wedding of Client A
and Client B and Client C. You might want to have a sports catalog, so you're not mixing all your photos
together or we can throw them all into one big catalog. It's up to you but I
suggest that you create a folder for at least one if not more catalogs . Now the
second thing I recommend you do is use an external hard drive for your photos
themselves and so on this external hard drive I've created a photos folder and
inside of that folder I will create several sub folders for each of my photoshoots.
Now, we're going to do all that sub folder creation in Lightroom. But the point is to have
an external hard drive with a photos folder that you can throw all of your
pictures into. Now, remember your catalog
is referencing those external photos and so you can take those photos and plug them into
different computers and it is very portable. Now, what happens if that
external hard drive crashes? Well you need a backup and that's what this third
hard drive is for. That is to create a backup of your external hard drive ,your
photos specifically, and that happens automatically when you import photos
into Lightroom. There's little box we can check to make sure that it
creates a second copy so if something happens to that external hard drive, you're going
to be just fine. Now, this last external hard drive here is to back up my
internal hard drive. So I've got a backup for my Lightroom catalog and all my stuff on my
computer and I have a backup for my external photos drive so no matter what
happens I've got a backup somewhere. So how does this all transpire when we take
our little media card or memory card out of our camera and plug it into Lightroom.
So, what happens is the photos go into Lightroom, where all the meta data is
stored. But the actual photo is stored on the external hard drive that you've
designated and then a secondary copy goes to this backup drive and then when
you make a backup of your internal hard drive using Time Machine or whatever
backup software you have, that is backed up on this last hard drive. So Lightroom
catalog goes on your internal hard drive, your photos go on an external hard drive,
a backup of your photos, a backup of your computer.
Alright, now let's put all this into practice. Now what I've done here is I've
opened three windows to show you three physical hard drives. Now, in the upper
left-hand corner of my computer here, you can see that this is my macintosh harddrive,
my internal hard drive here and in My Documents folder I have my Lightroom
catalogs folder. Inside that Lightroom catalogs folder I have another folder
called Travel Photos. That's where I'm storing my travel photos catalog. And if I open it,
you can see it right there Travel Photos-2.lrca. That stands for
Lightroom catalog. So that's where my catalog is stored. I've got two other files here, one is
called Smart previews, the other one is just called previews. I'll explain those
a little bit later.
This catalog is referencing my other external hard drives. That's over here on the
right hand side. This is my photo hard drive. That's my Lacie, orange hard drive that I showed you earlier.
If I open this photos folder, I'll just double click that and put this into
ListView you'll see that have a bunch of subfolders here. I have Argentina and Australia
and backpack and Bahamas and Bolivia and so, when you import from your memory card
from your camera when you go through Lightroom, Lightroom has the ability to
create simple there's an external hard drive and call them different things you
can organize things my name and date and all kinds of things so we'll get to that
in just a bit.
The important thing is to have a folder called photos or whatever you want to call it.
I call it photos on an external hard drive. Now my third folder down here, you can
see this third window, this is my backup drive. This is a 2TB, I just call it my
2TB orange drive. Right now it's got some videos and I'm going to create a
folder on this. So I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call it back up and that will keep a
backup of my photos and I'll show you how that works
when we zip over to Lightroom so what I'll do first here is, I'm just going to open up my travel photos
catalog and then what we're going to do is open and create a new catalog from scratch.
But I just want to show you something here. In Lightroom, notice that on the left hand
side of my library modules so we're going to library modules here under folders. Notice
that I have this photo HD, my photo hard drive and its named exactly like it was in my
finder or Windows Explorer if you have that and when you dial this open or you scroll
this open here, you can see that we have all those folders exactly like they were
on your hard drive, so Australia, Backpack Bahamas, Bolivia etcetera. That's all
there. Now I know that photos are always going to be in photos so I can actually
right click on that and i can say Hide This Parent so photos doesn't show up
anymore, it just shows me the folder names inside of that and it just makes it a
little bit cleaner. OK, let's set everything up. So the first thing I'm
going to do here is go up to File, New Catalog. We're going to start a new catalog from scratch.
New catalog and it's going to say where do I want to store that? So I'm going to store
this in my Lightroom catalogs folder, so right there, Documents, Lightroom Catalogs
and this is going to create a folder with the new catalogs so you don't have to
create a folder first. Lightroom is going to do that for you . And so if you create
a folder and then create a catalog, you're going to have a folder and then a folder inside that so
don't do that. So I'm going to save this as Adorama Catalog. So we have
something really cool and when I say create it's going to create the entire framework for me.
It's going to close my old catalog, open a new one. It's totally empty.
Let's zip over the hard drive and see what happens. Peek behind the curtain here so when we do that,
notice that now we have this Adorama catalog and when I open that I have my Adorama catalog.lrcat
(Lightroom Catalog) and then I have these previews and I have this journal and
lock. What that is doing is it's locking your catalog so if you're on a shared, you know like on a
network or something and somebody else tries to open your catalog, it won't allow them.
That's what those are. They can go away when you close your catalog, so the other
thing is where are those smart previews? We'll get to that in a second.
The next thing we want to do is import some pictures, so I've got
some really not so good pictures I just shot around really quickly I'm going to
put my memory card into my computer and once I do that I'm going to click Import
and my pictures show up here these are some I just shot around very quickly.
Now, the important thing is to know how to get these into our catalog and how to
get them stored on the external hard drive so on the right hand side over
here it's going to ask me what I want to do. Actually, on the top it's going to say do you
want to copy or move or add by default? You want to copy these from your memory
card to a hard drive, so that's by default, it's going to say Copy. And on the right hand
side here, there's a little checkbox, and it says build smart previews. I recommend
that you turn that on
I did an entire video on smart previews, so I'm not going to
cover that here, we've included a link to that video in the description of this file.
So turn that on if that makes sense to you. You can watch that video to see if it does.
Now, the second thing down here it says make a second copy too. That's where
that backup will happen and so I'm going to check that as well and then what I'm
going to do is I'm going to choose the folder and I'm going to go to this
2TB orange drive back up. And then I'm going to choose that so now that my file
comes from my memory card it's going to go to both hard drives, one, my photos
hard drive and the other, the backup hard drive and that way I have a backup
immediately and don't have to worry about if my hard drive crashes, it's all built in. Now the next
thing I can do here is rename the file. I don't want to do that. I don't want to apply
anything during import but it's saying where do I want to store these? What's the
destination. So what I'm going to do here is, first of all, I'm going to go to my photos
hard drive. My photo hard drive and I'm going to go into photos and I'm going to
put this in a subfolder. I'm going to call it a AdoramaTV and you'll notice
that now this shows up under photos, there's a little gray thing saying it's going to
create a folder for you and then you can either organize that into one folder in
other words everything's gonna drop right into that sub folder or you can
tell it to make it by date and it will look at the date of the pictures
that you took and it'll create different subdirectories by date so it's up to you.
It doesn't matter however you want to do it. Once you have that set, if it's something
that you do a lot you might want to come down here and there's this import preset
and you might want to say save current settings as a new preset, and I've done
this for most of the countries that I visit so I don't have to enter in the location data and all
that stuff every time, so I have a preset for a bunch of different places. So if
you shoot something, a different location or something a lot, and you find
yourself typing this in over and over,
you can save a preset and save yourself a lot of time. Now, once that's all done we're
going to say import. That's going to bring everything into Lightroom, all the
metadata, all the photos are going to be
copied to the second hard drive. A copy is going to be made to the third hard drive,
everything's going to be updated and the smart previews are going to be created.
That will take just a little bit of time but if we go over here now to our finder
let's look and see what's happening on your hard drive. In the Adorama catalog,
notice we have previews here and then we actually have smart previews. Those were
built on our first import so once you do that you're always going to have the smart
previews and then we have our catalog in our backup folder here we have imported
on August 20th 2015 and we can see a backup of all of those files, so each
time you import it's going to create a little back up and then over here on my
photos hard drive you can see that it's created a new sub folder called AdoramaTV so
everything is neat and tidy and works just fine. So those are the basics for
creating a Lightroom catalog from scratch. There's a lot more that we can
talk about but it would take us an hour or two or three or four to go through all
the different nuances and settings and things like that and so what we've done
is we've talked about a lot of those things in the past on Adoramatv,
so again I've linked you to those. The important thing is remember it's a
library system. Lightroom is a catalog for referencing external files. You
should create those files on an external hard drive and have a backup. Keep your
Lightroom catalog on your internal hard drive that way you can disconnect your
external hard drive and still keep working and updating and then connect
later and update those files and then make sure you keep a backup copy of your
Lightroom catalog on your normal hard drive backup. Well, there you have it.
That's all you have to do to set up a very basic Lightroom system. Once you do
that it's going to grow with you over the years. You have room to create new
Lightroom catalogs. You have room to create lots of different sub folders,
an organizational structure on your photos hard drive and
you can do all kinds of things that we'll get to in future episodes, right here on
Exploring Photography.
Well, thank you so much for joining me this week. Don't forget to subscribe to
AdoramaTV so you don't miss a single episode.
We've got tons of content from a lot of different people and you don't want to miss
any of that so click the subscribe button.
It's absolutely free and don't forget to check out the Adorama Learning Center.
There are tons of articles and videos and tutorials on things like smart
previews in Lightroom and setting up external hard drives all that kind of
stuff so check that out. Thanks again for joining me and I will see you again next week.
Do you want great-looking prints at low-cost? Be sure to visit our easy to use online printing service.
Adorama Pix has professionals who treat your images with the utmost
care that you can count on. For a quick turnaround on photos, cards or albums use
adoramapix.com