Catalog FAQ | Lightroom

A catalog is a database that tracks the location of photos and information about them. See About Lightroom catalogs in Lightroom 3 Help and watch George Jardine's video The Lightroom catalog for more information.

Note: Catalogs were called libraries in Lightroom 1.

Note: Catalogs are different from collections. Collections are an organizational tool within a catalog. See About collections in Lightroom 3 Help.

First, make sure that you understand what a catalog is and how it works (see What is a catalog?). Then, determine where you want to keep your photos, and copy or move your photos to that location. Finally, start Lightroom, create a catalog, and import photos into the catalog.

For instructions on these tasks, see the Lightroom 3 Help topics Create a catalog and Importing photos into Lightroom: Basic workflow. Also, watch David Marx's video Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 setup and catalog and creation.

Yes. When you start Lightroom, you can set up a new catalog or choose a catalog to use. You can also set these options from within Lightroom preferences. See Creating and managing catalogs in Lightroom 3 Help.

Unless you're working with thousands of photos and performance is a concern, try not to use multiple catalogs. Multiple catalogs can become complicated to manage. Lightroom offers myriad ways to sort, filter, and otherwise organize and find photos within one catalog. For example, you can use folders, collections, keywords, labels, and ratings. With a little thought and practice, you can probably find ways to organize and manage all of your photos successfully in one catalog.

No. There are too many variables in a network configuration to guarantee that the catalog won't get corrupted.

Keep your catalog on an external drive and set the preferences in Lightroom to use the external catalog. If you keep your photos on the same external drive, you can edit them in the Develop module. Then, you can use them in the rest of the application. If the original photos are not available to Lightroom, you can use all modules except the Develop module.

For a tutorial on synchronizing a catalog using the catalog export feature, see Scott Kelby's From Laptop to Desktop: Syncing Catalogs on Two Computers in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.

There is no specific maximum number of photos you can store in a Lightroom catalog. Your computer could run out of address space for your photos anywhere from 100,000 through 1,000,000 photos.

Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 2 support photos up to 65,000 pixels long or wide or up to 512 megapixels, whichever is smaller. For information on the types of files you can import into Lightroom 3, see File formats in Lightroom 3 Help.

Lightroom 1 imports photos up to 10,000 x 10,000 pixels.

You can move photos from one catalog to another in Lightroom. Moving photos can be especially useful when managing photos from photo shoots. You import photos into a catalog on a laptop at the shoot, and then bring those photos into a master catalog on a desktop computer. To do so, export photos from the shoot catalog (on the laptop) into a new catalog. Then, import that new catalog into the master catalog (on the desktop system). See Combine or merge catalogs in Lightroom 3 Help and Using the Import From Catalog Command in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom by David Marx.

Move the catalog file (.lrcat), the previews file (.lrdata), and possibly your image files, depending on where they're located. See Copy or move a catalog in Lightroom 3 Help for instructions on moving a catalog and its preview files from one computer to another. For more in-depth community tutorials, see How do I move Lightroom to a new computer? by Victoria Bampton and The easiest way to share Lightroom catalogs with different computers by Matt Kloskowski. (The community tutorials are written for Lightroom 2 but still apply to Lightroom 3.)

Note: If all of the files reside on an external hard drive that both Mac OS and Windows can read, you don't have to move anything. Open Lightroom on the second computer and navigate to the catalog on the external drive. See How can I use my catalog on multiple computers, such as a laptop and a desktop?

Upgrade catalogs from previous versions of Lightroom before using them in Lightroom 3. For instructions, see the Lightroom 3 Help topic Upgrade a catalog and the tutorial Upgrading from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3 by Scott Rouse.  

You can back up your catalog automatically when you quit Lightroom 3 (or when you start Lightroom 1 or 2). See Backing up the catalog in Lightroom 3 Help.

If you move files in the Finder (Mac OS) or Explorer (Windows), Lightroom can lose track of them. If your catalog cannot find a photo, there's a Photo Is Missing icon () in the photo thumbnail in the Grid view and Filmstrip. You can also encounter the error "Photo is offline or missing" when you try to edit the photo in the Develop module. You can avoid this error by moving photos from within Lightroom rather than in the operating system. 

If your photo is on an external hard drive, make sure that the drive is powered on.

See Locate missing photos in Lightroom 3 Help.