GETTING STARTED - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 7

About Lightroom catalogs
As mentioned previously, Lightroom uses database i les, called catalogs, to
manage your i les and store the work you do on them. Any time you're working
in Lightroom, you're working within a catalog.

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Image i les must be imported into a Lightroom catalog before you can work
with them, during which Lightroom creates records of the photos within the
catalog. (Importing photos is covered in Chapter 2.)

It might help to think of a Lightroom catalog like a department store catalog:
it contains all the information about the items but not the items themselves .
Maintaining these symbolic links between a Lightroom catalog and the actual
i les on disk is essential.

Lightroom catalogs are stored on the computer's hard drive as sqli te i les with
the extension .lrcat. Lightroom also uses other special i les to work with your
photos, which are located in the same folder as the catalog; see Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2

Let's take a look at how the Lightroom program works with its catalogs and
your image i les on disk.

The default catalog's location on disk
When the Lightroom application is i rst installed, it creates a new (empty)
catalog i le in these default locations:

• Mac OS X: User/Pictures/Lightroom 3 Catalog/Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat

• Windows XP: User\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom 3 Catalog\
Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat

• Windows Vista and 7: User\Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 3 Catalog\
Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat

If you've never moved the default catalog, or haven't created a new one, you will
be working within the default catalog.

However, you can make additional catalogs, and store them on any hard drive,
even one that's dif erent from where your image i les reside. h e name and