How to Properly Set up a Lightroom Classic Catalog

Learn how to properly set up a Lightroom catalog. This tutorial will explain everything that you need to know about importing photos into Adobe Lightroom Classic. Watch this video to avoid losing your photos and other digital disasters.

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[rogercooper]

Thanks for taking the time Mike. Really appreciate your teaching style in this early stage of my lightroom journey. Very comprehensive & helpful.👍🙂

[PrafulDeshmukh-er]

Cant get better than this. Thanks a lot for creating such a detailed video.

[BjarteKFrnsdal]

Just what I needed! Easy to understand. Great tutorial. Thank you!

[richhughes]

This is helpful, Mike. However, I have reorganized all of my photos on a 2 TB hard drive with a copy on an identical external. My old catalog was disorganized. Now I am working on a brand new catalog and want to import all of my pictures' locations into the new catalog. You mention this here, but I was hoping you would provide more information. Importing from a card is pretty easy and I am guessing that once I know how bringing in my external hard drive will be easy too, just time consuming.

[symo]

Hey Mike, my catalogue is huge is there a way to create a new catalogue with just my photos from 2024 still in it with the edited files still saved? I`m super scared of starting a new and everything being deleted

[orlandojonesphotography]

Thank you for sharing. This information is really helpful.

[MrJMAshraff]

Great tutorial video; trust there aren't many step by step tutorial for setting up a catalog on YouTube.

[crn]

Thank you, very helpful. Love your images as well!

[charliemcelveen]

Thanks Mike, I appreciate it! I am new to LrC and just starting out. MacBook Air with TINY onboard storage. Just purchased a 1TB Lacie EDD. Do you recommend storing photos and catalog there and work from that? I do a lot of video as well and I eat up that 128GB pretty quickly rendering video.

[jimk]

Thanks for this video Mike, I stumbled upon it as I'm still new to LrC. If I wanted to use my existing, growing LR catalog on a desktop as well as my laptop, how would that work? Right now my LR catalog is on my internal HD but all my pictures are on my external SSD. Thanks!

[RobertPoletick]

Great video. My photos are stored on an ext. drive in specified folders. How do I integrate them with Lightroom?

[ericlawrie]

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 sharing it as my Lightroom Catalog location. Or ii) install the 2TB SSD as a 2nd local drive dedicated exclusively to the Lightroom Catalog. So existing smaller 1TB SSD is for system files only and the new 2nd drive is Lightroom Catalog only. Would there be any loss in performance having a dedicated, in this case 2nd internal SSD, for the Lightroom Catalog rather than sharing the system drive with Lightroom?

[robgerety]

Thanks for this very helpful. You indicate that the only way to use photoshop when on the road is to use an external drive for you catalogue and photo storage. Is that true if like me you only use a single laptop, both at home and when traveling?

[toslinked]

why did you create an extra LR Photos Folder and did not use the LR Catalogue folder that you made first?

[gary_michael_flanagan_wildlife]

Hey friend. I panicked today because I had a scratch disc full error so I deleted all the cache files. When I opened lightroom it looked brand new and I can’t find my photos. I don’t know what to do. Can I create a new catalog or how do I find the old one? I am using an 8TB external hard drive where I draw all photos from. Thanks. Please help

[kaizajac]

Say I did this on computer hard drive instead of external hard drive. When changing computers in the future would it be as simple as just transferring that “Lightroom” parent folder containing the catalog and photos?

[alwayskangta]

I need your help . When I open the new catalog, all my pervious edited photos are gone. Do you Know where I can find them? Thank you so much!

[drewh]

is this your photo on your desktop? if so... its amazing

[katk]

Yes, ive been fighting "B" external hard drive..and its different each time. Thanks!

[ericdablakeh]

Can I get this tutorial on hp laptop
I like the above but I can’t apply it here