GETTING STARTED - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 13

7. Optimize your database
periodically—maybe every
eight to ten days of work—
using the command on File
menu; see Figure 1-7.

1

Figure 1-7

8. When working in Lightroom, try not to select folders/subfolders with
large numbers of images when you don't need to, because Lightroom will
re-read all the i les in the chosen source, attempting to get information
about all previews and metadata. For example, if you click the All
Photographs source from the Catalog panel, and you have many
thousands of photos in the catalog, reading all those i les can take a while.
Click on a folder that contains only the images you want to work with.
(Using Collections; see Chapter 3; is a more ei cient way to organize your
edited photos.)

Avoid force-quitting Lightroom whenever possible
If you experience what appears to be a crash in Lightroom, especially if you
can still move the cursor, give it a few minutes to see if the application and/
or operating system recover from the condition. Force-quitting Lightroom
at any time and for any reason dramatically increases the likelihood of data
corruption. Of course, sometimes force-quitting can't be helped… keep good
backups!

What to do after a crash
If Lightroom unexpectedly quits on you, or you have to force quit or restart
your machine, you need to proceed with care the next time you launch
Lightroom.

While Lightroom has a catalog open, a “lock” i le (shown in Figure 1-1) is
placed in the catalog folder to ensure other programs on your computer can't
tamper with the Lightroom data.

At er a crash, the previous lock i le may remain, and you may also see a Journal
i le. Do not delete these i les! Lightroom will them to help restore the previous
work session when the program is restarted.

Also, in these situations, there is the possibility of catalog corruption. If
Lightroom tells you the catalog is corrupt and needs to be repaired, let it
proceed. At er a successful repair, optimize and back up the catalog. If the
repair is unsuccessful, or the catalog is acting quirky, you may need to restore a
previous catalog backup to use as your new master working catalog.