Читать книгу Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic For Dummies - Rob Sylvan - Страница 28

By default, the catalog is stored in a folder named Lightroom within the Pictures folder on your system. Inside the Lightroom folder, you find the catalog file, which has a .lrcat file extension, and the file that holds all the previews of your imported images (called the preview cache), which has a .lrdata file extension. These two files work together to make Lightroom Classic operational. I cover the cache files contained in this folder in the section “Managing the preview cache files,” later in this chapter. Note, there is a new file with a .lrcat-data extension for storing data related to the improved Masking functionality (see Chapter 9).

To store your catalog at a location other than the default (if your default drive is low on free space, for example, or if you prefer to keep all your photo-related files in a different location), use your computer’s file management app to move the entire Lightroom folder to a new location on your computer. The catalog works fine from any (non-network connected) location — you just have to help Lightroom Classic find the catalog in its new location the first time you access it. More on that in a bit.

A couple of things to keep in mind regarding where a catalog can live happily:

 Local drive: The catalog has to be kept on a locally connected drive (external drives are fine). Lightroom Classic can’t access a catalog stored on a network drive (though it can access photos stored on a network drive).

 Free space: Be sure to place the catalog on a drive that has a large enough amount of free space to store your work (as in hundreds or more gigabytes free). The size of your database and its companion preview caches (more on preview caches in the section “Managing the preview cache files”) need room to grow as you import new images and process them.

Chapter 4 covers where on your drive to store your photos in the sections that cover importing files. For now, keep in mind that photos are not physically stored “inside” the catalog file; they are stored, rather, on a drive of your choosing outside of Lightroom Classic. The catalog refers, or points, to the actual storage location of each imported photo.

If you move your catalog, you have to help Lightroom Classic find that catalog the next time you want to open it. Here’s how that’s done:

1 Launch Lightroom Classic.If Lightroom Classic can’t immediately locate the catalog, it displays the dialog shown in Figure 2-1.

2 Click the Choose a Different Catalog button.The Select Catalog dialog appears (see Figure 2-2).

3 Click the Choose a Different Catalog button in that dialog.

4 In the new file browsing dialog that appears, navigate to the location you chose as the new home for your catalog, select the .lrcat file, and then click Choose.You return to the Select Catalog dialog, and the path to the catalog you selected appears prominently in the Catalog Location field.

5 Click the Open (Select on Windows) button.Lightroom Classic launches with the catalog at this new location and will remember it in the future.

FIGURE 2-1: The Confirm dialog; the Lightroom Classic catalog was not found.