GETTING STARTED - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 8

location of catalog i les have no direct ef ect on Lightroom's operation, so you can
name your catalog whatever you like, and put it wherever you choose. (I keep my
master catalog on the same external hard drive with the image i les; it makes sense
to keep the catalog i le with the image i les it relates to. h is makes backups easier,
as well as migrating to larger drives when necessary.)

1

Use Preferences or hold the Option or Alt key when launching Lightroom
You can set the preference for the default catalog in Lightroom Preferences. Or,
press Option/Alt when launching Lightroom to see the Open Catalog… dialog
box, in which you can load the default catalog, select another catalog or make a
new one.

Catalog corruption
If you don't have a lot of experience using databases—especially for image editing
and management—it may come as a shock if a problem with the Lightroom catalog
makes your photos inaccessible. It is entirely possible that a Lightroom catalog
could become corrupted and not be able to be opened or worked with in any way.
But in the vast majority of cases, a problem with the Lightroom catalog does not
necessarily indicate a problem with the image i les. (Of course, in some cases an
image i le could itself be corrupt.)

⌘ +Shift+O
or Ctrl+O
Open a dif erent
catalog

USING MULTIPLE CATALOGS
You can use one or many catalogs to manage your photo library, though as of this
writing the Lightroom application can only have one catalog open at a time. For
example, some photographers might use dif erent catalogs for work and personal
photos, or a unique catalog for each specii c client. Also, using temporary
“working catalogs” you can maximize the potential of your workl ow. One
example of how using multiple catalogs can greatly enable your workl ow is when
traveling, and using Lightroom on a laptop, then returning home to your main
computer. h ese scenarios are discussed in Chapter 9.

However, regardless of the numerous catalogs you may employ for specii c
purposes, for most photographers, using a single, “master” catalog for your
complete library of photos is usually the best solution.

A Lightroom catalog can only contain one instance of a given image i le, based
entirely on the i le name. And though a single image can be imported into any
number of catalogs, this is something you need to do deliberately and carefully.
Working on the same i le—or worse yet, copies of the same i le—in dif erent
catalogs can lead to real trouble.