How to Properly Set up a Lightroom Classic Catalog

hello I'm Mike Bordin ski with nature Mike calm and today I'm going to show you how to set up a Lightroom classic catalog so I'm on a Mac computer here but the process is pretty much the same if you're on a Mac or a PC so even if you're on a PC you should be to follow along just fine and one thing I want to point out before we even get started here is it's really important to know where Lightroom is storing your catalog and your photos it's not like the Photos app on a Mac where every time you import it kind of just goes into this nested folder underneath that app Lightroom puts the photos wherever you tell it to so if you're not paying attention to where those photos are going you're gonna have photos all over the place and you might lose them eventually we're gonna eliminate that from happening by doing the steps that I tell you about today so the first thing we need to do is open up Lightroom so here we are Lightroom classic and I already have some photos imported into this catalog but we're going to create a new catalog by going to file new catalog and the first thing we need to do is give it a name so I'm going to call this Mike's Lightroom and now we need to tell our computer where to store this catalog so I'm going to store on an external drive some people like to store their catalogs on the computer drive because it is a slight bit faster when loading the previews but the reason I prefer to store my catalog and photos on an external drive is I do a lot of traveling I'm kind of bouncing back between desktop and and laptop quite often and when I'm on the road I'd like full access to my files and I'd like to be able to use Photoshop when traveling and the only way to do that is to store your catalog and photos on an external drive so I'm gonna go down here to 2020 word in ski photo and I'm going to create a new folder within this drive just by clicking the new folder icon and lower left-hand corner and we're gonna call this light room okay so now my Mike's Lightroom catalog is gonna go into the Lightroom folder but I actually want to put it into another subfolder underneath Lightroom so I'm going to create a new folder again and call this one l had a log and I'll open up the columns view so you can kind of see what's happening so here's going into Lightroom Lightroom catalog and then in Lightroom catalog will be Mike's Lightroom catalog so we're no heading hit create and it's gonna reopen Lightroom with nothing in it kind of how you would see it if you open up Lightroom for the very first time so now we need to import our photos so we can go to file import photos and videos or I could just come down to the lower left hand corner and click import now it is important to note to note that I am in the library module not the develop you notice women the develop module there is no import button here so I'm gonna go back to library and choose import okay so now we need to tell Lightroom where we want to import our photos from so right now I've got Mac HD my 20 20 external hard drive my google drive and another external hard drive I actually want to import from a SD card so I'm going to insert my SD card here ok so now you can see the u.s. digital SD card has popped up if I click on that that's gonna show me all of the photos on that card and they're already checked for me because Lightroom knows that I'm probably gonna want to bring those all into my catalog if I didn't for some reason I could just choose this little checkbox up next to all photos and that will uncheck all photos so right now if I click import I can't even do it cuz it's grayed out so I could have to come back and choose all photos again or I just manually come in here and start clicking on ones that I want to bring in and now you'll see that import box is back whenever you're bringing in media from any sort of external card Lightroom is only going to give you the option to copy that information from the card to your new destination it's not going to allow you to move it or add it because it knows that it's on an external media that's very temporary such as an SD card and so it's going to leave that media on the card but also create it in that new destination you could copy as a DNG and what a DNG stands for it's a digital negative and it's Adobe's standard raw file typically I'm gonna leave my photos as my camera's raw file and a fuse and cans can be CR to a fusion icon probably an EF and so on and so forth let me show you now what would happen if I was trying to import from one of my drives already connected to my computer so we'll just go over down here to photography 2019 and click here and right now no photos are in this folder but if I choose include subfolders that's going to show me every single photo that falls within a subfolder of this parent folder and press ok so here's a bunch of dog photos I could check all or uncheck all so maybe I just want to bring in this photo and this photo now I have the option to move these photos which is going to move them from this 2019 drive to wherever I specify over here or I could add them which would leave the photos where they are on this Drive it would just tell Lightroom where they are and would reference them from that current folder that they're in and then of course I could always go to copy or copy as DNG as well but I don't want to import these photos so I'm just gonna back out of this go back to my SD card check all photos and now we're going to tell Lightroom where to import these photos so I'm go ahead and click we can choose the desktop pictures movies or other destinations so we're going to go to other destinations and we're gonna go to that Lightroom folder we created create a new folder now our photos there it is and so now we got our Lightroom catalog which is right here and then our Lightroom photos which is going to house all of the photos so they're kind of in the same spot under the Lightroom parent folder but in two separate sub folders so I'm going to choose LR photos now we'll take a look at some of the other tabs on the right hand side so file handling the most important thing here is don't import suspected duplicates typically you don't want to import the same photo twice into your catalog you could tell Lightroom to make a backup copy if you wanted I don't typically do this because I just make clones of my working drive as I go and build smart previews that's an option for folks who don't store their photos and catalogs all in the same place on the same Drive you might be interested in that but typically I don't use the the smart previews file renaming I don't pre name my files while importing I do that afterwards applied during import this is actually a pretty cool feature so by default this would be set to none but I can go to develop settings and if you have a preset already made you can apply it right at the time of import and so I have the landscape photographers toolkit over here if I go to import settings if you go chromatic aberration removal so what this is gonna do is it's gonna check the chromatic aberration box in the develop module on every single photo that I import and that's just gonna save me a little bit of extra time when I'm in the editing process so if you don't have any presets don't worry just leave that set to none but if you do you can come in here and apply any one that you'd like and lastly destination this just kind of shows you where your photos are going just sort of a double check before you actually click the import button so I recommend leaving this tab expanded all the time that way you can see where your what's happening with your photos so right here we have the Lightroom folder we created underneath that Lightroom catalog and Lightroom photos and then underneath that Lightroom photos folder is that our 2020 and then the days date that the photos were shot on you could create a subfolder if you wanted but typically I don't I leave everything organized by date the way it is and then after the photos are imported then I'll rename the folders so let's go ahead everything's set now let's go ahead and just choose import so we get the little progress bar here on the left that's telling us that it's importing our photos here they come and by default Lightroom takes you to the catalog tab and puts you in the previous import section but if I come down to my folders tab I can also see that here we are in the twenty twenty word insky photo hard drive the 20/20 folder and then the days date that the photos are in now you remember that I put these in the LR photos folder but it's not showing up here if I control click here or right-click on a PC I can choose show parent folder and there we go LR photos 2020 and the daystate now if we want to rename the folder all I have to do is control click or right click on a PC rename call this Mike's first import and I could erase this date here if I wanted but a lot of times I'd like to have that there that's just a personal preference so that's that's your call and then press save so now that we have our Lightroom catalog started it's really really important to never move these folders on your hard drive or rename them or move the photos that are within the folders on your hard drive all that needs to be done within Lightroom so if I want to rename a folder you do just like I did ctrl click rename if I want to move this folder I can just click and drag here or really into any other folder that I want but don't do that on your hard drive because the Lightroom is going to lose your photos and then you have to tell Lightroom where those photos are again and that can get quite confusing a little messy and then you really run the risk of losing your photos forever so now that we have our Lightroom catalog set up it's important to talk about backing up you should always have your photos and catalog backed up in a more than one spot ideally three places so what I typically do is I got my my 2020 hard drive here I open that up inside there organized by name this is all of my Lightroom information here 20/20 nature mic photography you can see my 20/20 Lightroom catalog and then my Lightroom photos so if I want to backup my catalogue and all my photos all I have to do is make a copy of this drive onto another drive so I can just click and drag this over to this other drive if I wanted to or if there's other programs out there my personal favorite one for a Mac is Carbon Copy cloner that's really good for duplicating hard drives the last thing I want to talk about is cloud storage Backblaze is my personal favorite because it's relatively inexpensive it's only $60 per year and gives you unlimited storage space so you can see if I go to my account here in a second it'll load and it's going to show me all my hard drives that are connected to this computer it's the last time that we're backed up it'll also show me how many files I have backed up and how many files have yet to be backed up so go ahead and check out Backblaze comm for your online backup solution and other than that I hope you enjoyed the video hopefully you learned a thing or two and don't forget to subscribe to this channel and of course visit me at www.nadex.com

Channel: Mike Wardynski

Views: 20,102

Keywords: lightroom, cc, classic, adobe, how to, importing, photos, photography, editing, beginner, tutorial, set up, mac, pc, uploading

Id: SqwAq3f7W_8

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020