best external drive for lightroom on mac

#Best external drive for lightroom on mac how to#
#Best external drive for lightroom on mac professional#

How Do I Change the Backup Location in Lightroom Catalog? Just be sure to delete all but your last two backups, so multiple, unnecessary backups don’t take space on your computer. The safest solution is to backup every time you use Lightroom. Some people opt to do this every week, while others backup every time they exit Lightroom. It would be best if you regularly backed up your Lightroom catalog. You can even save it in a Dropbox folder.Ĭommon Lightroom Catalog Backup Questions Do I Need to Backup the Lightroom Catalog? This will allow you to navigate to an external drive or a cloud system. The other method is to close Lightroom and do a Catalog backup.Ĭlick on the >Choose button by Backup folder in the Back Up Catalog dialog box. So a copy of the catalog backup needs to be stored elsewhere. As mentioned, your computer hard drive can fail, get damaged, or stolen. Great! The thing is, by default, your Lightroom Catalog is being saved to your Pictures folder on your computer’s hard drive.

#Best external drive for lightroom on mac how to#

How to BackUp Lightroom Catalog to an External Drive How often you want to backup is up to you, but if you choose “once a week” yet you edit almost every day, you’ll lose everything from the time of the last backup if your Lightroom catalog becomes corrupted. This can be done in the >General tab under >Catalog Settings. To backup your Lightroom catalog, you’ll first need to set up how often you want to backup. How to Backup Your Lightroom Catalog on Your Computer

To find where any single image is located, go up to >Photo and choose >Show in Finder (Mac) or >Show in Explorer (Windows). In my case, I chose “Every time Lightroom exits”. Under this tab, you can also choose how often you want to backup the Lightroom catalog. Here I can also see the catalog size, and the last time it was backed up and optimized. I also keep other backups, on another external hard drive and in a cloud-based system, for extra assurance. This is where I store all my files to avoid clogging up my computer with thousands of large RAW image files. In my case, the catalog is stored on an external 4TB hard drive. The backup of your catalog is stored in the same location as your Lightroom catalog, in a “Backups” folder. If you click on >Show, it will take you to where the catalog is stored. You’ll find the location of your Lightroom catalog under >General, by >Location.

This will bring up a box with three tabs: General, File Handling and Metadata. To find where your Lightroom catalog is currently stored, go to >Catalog Settings. Whatever you decide, make sure that you regularly backup your Lightroom catalog/s. You don’t need to have various catalogs, just for organization. If you have one catalog, you can arrange your photos into Collections. Backing up multiple catalogs can be tedious and confusing, and take more time than simply backing up one catalog. However, as long as you are backing up your Lightroom catalog, you can be sure not to lose your edits. Or you can have different catalogs for different genres of work or different clients.Īlso, if a catalog becomes corrupt, you won’t lose everything.

#Best external drive for lightroom on mac professional#

The benefit of having several Lightroom catalogs is that you can organize your photos in a way that makes sense to you.įor example, you can have a catalog for your personal photos and another for your professional photos. There is a lot of debate on this one point. Should I Use One Lightroom Catalog or Multiple Catalogs?Ī big factor in your backup process is your decision to use one Lightroom catalog or multiple ones.

Professional photographers usually have a backup off-site as well, should a natural disaster, fire, or theft occur. I use Backblaze, which is very inexpensive and easy to use. Ideally, you should have two external backups and a backup in a cloud-based program. Therefore, knowing how to backup up your catalog is really important because if anything were to happen to your computer, such as it getting stolen or it experiencing hard drive failure, you’d have to start from scratch.īacking up your photos and backing up your Lightroom catalogs are two separate processes and you should do both on a regular basis. Lightroom backs up your catalog, but not your photos or a preview of them. This could be the edits or presets applied to the photo, stars, labels, metadata etc. Any information added to an image gets stored with the image file. The Lightroom Catalog functions as a database and references where your images are stored. To effectively backup your Lightroom Catalog, you first need to understand how Lightroom works.