Getting Started: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3′s Preference Menus
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
Skip these buttons at your own risk! Adobe Photoshop Lightroom assumes that you know what you are doing from the moment that you import your very first file. This is professional level software. These software engineers respect your intelligence. They assume that you bring a lot of background knowledge to the table from the moment that you first start up this program. The Photoshop Lightroom engineers assume that you already understand Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog Creation and Image Storage Fundamentals and how to implement Professional-Grade Backup Plans to protect all of your precious digital files.
Before you step up to bat you need to know what the Lightroom Catalog is and exactly where it lives inside of your computer. You need to know the name of your Catalog file and you need to know what information it stores. This the most intellectually challenging part of the whole new digital workflow. You also need to know:
- Why the “Automatically write changes into XMP” is such a great switch for beginning Lightroom users to activate?
- What the “store presets with catalog” preference switch does and how it could simplify your life?
- Why Lightroom is worried about your use of “illegal characters” in your file’s name?
None of these switches sound like a big deal until something bad happens. If you skip the critical “write changes into XMP” switch; if you never find Lightroom’s other hidden save buttons, and if your Lightroom Catalog file ever gets corrupted, do you know that you could lose all of your work? Years of effort in Lightroom could vanish in an instant. Are you keenly aware that if things go haywire, and that if you haven’t planned for a disaster, that every repair, that every keyword, and that every star rating would be gone?
To truly understand the advantages, and disadvantages, of the “Automatically Write Changes to XMP” preference switch please watch this excellent tutorial from Adobe Evangelist Julieanne Kost.
Once you have all your switches set, I suggest checking out this tutorial on how to build a Metadata Preset so that Lightroom can automatically add your copyright information into each and every photo that it ever references!
2011-06-21 Update:
Michael W Gray over at the x-equals.com blog has written his own series of excellent detailed articles on the Lightroom 3 preferences. Check out:
Setting Your Settings- Tuning Lightroom Part 1 of 3
Setting Your Settings- Tuning Lightroom Part 2 of 3
Setting Your Settings- Tuning Lightroom Part 3 of 3
Filed Under: (01) Getting Started • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorials
About the Author: David Marx is a digital photography instructor whose engaging teaching style inspires photographers of all skill levels. David is an Adobe Certified Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom Expert. David has led Adobe Photoshop / Photoshop Lightroom seminars and digital photography field workshops for The Rocky Mountain School of Photography, FirstLight Workshops, The American Society of Media Photographers, and the world-renowned Blackberry Farm Resort. To learn more about David's software seminars and field photography workshops, please visit 
Thanks for this tutorial.
I have recently switch to my canon’s raw setting (.cr2).
I’ve enabled the xmp setting and restarted lightroom 3 a number of times.
But, the only way I get an .xmp file, and have the .xmp file updated, is to manually choose to “save metadata to file”.
I thought I understood this to mean it would happen automatically with each change. It is not doing that for me, even though the checkbox is checked. ?
Thanks.
Dear Cory,
Turning on the “Automatically Write to XMP” preference switch should force Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to start creating XMP files for all your .CR2′s assuming that you have indeed made changes. It might take the program quite a while though to create a sidecar for each one though if a: there are a lot of images in your catalog or b: you are working with a slow hard drive / computer combo. You might try leaving Photoshop Lightroom running in the background with this preference switch turned on for a night or two.
You might also be interested in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 beta’s new filter by metadata status ability.
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David Marx
Thanks for the reply. I did make the change, but nothing was happening for some time. Only manual.
After a bunch of digging around myself, I found that there was an update to Lightroom, and that fixed my problem. Once it was updated, the .xmp files were created/updated with each change.
Thanks so much.
David,
With your help I have made an alias on my external drive that I use with my laptop (macbook pro). But I am setting up a drobo for backup off of my desktop (imac). I would like to work on the images on both, plus I have allot of images that I need to move out of iphoto on the desktop to the Lr catalog. Do I have to make another alias for the drobo to recognize my catalog. I am trying to have one catalog work on both external and drobo. I am just trying to make it simple. I have moved the images from iphoto on the laptop to the external with the Lr catalog alias no problem, I just need to do the same thing on the desktop. I am an old film guy trying to catch up been out of the game for a while.
Thanks
Paul
Dear Paul,
If keeping things simple is your goal then I have to urge you to use the Drobo for backup only. Store the primary copy of all your images, the copy that your Lightroom index references, on the regular external drive. Teach your Drobo to backup this external drive and your computer’s internal disk. Using the Drobo as a working disk–meaning adding files that live on it into your Lightroom Catalog–adds a lot of complexity that I don’t think you need. My article on My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives and our article on Where Should I Keep My Lightroom Catalog might help.
Again, my advice is to use the regular external drive as your primary storage and the Drobo solely for backup. By the way, I fear that you missed a key point in the tutorial on how to create an alias that leads to your Lightroom Catalog. The goal here is to prevent you from having multiple Lightroom Catalogs. If you create an alias to a Catalog on the Drobo and keep the alias to the Catalog on your regular external disk then you must have multiple Catalogs and thus we have not accomplished anything…
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David Marx
David,
I guess my main question is that since I set up my drive “D” per your instructions, with the LR catalog as a seperate folder and a folder that I import image files to, why can’t I see that “Images” folder when I open bridge and navigate to that “D” drive. As previously stated, the only thing showing is the folder for the LR catalog, not both.
I will be looking at the referenced video,s later this evening.
Dear Keith Randolph,
I am not sure why you can’t see the Images folder in Bridge. In Bridge, do you have the “View Folders” and the “View Items from Sub-Folders” options turned on?
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David Marx
Hi David,
HELP!
I asked A few questions back in April and you were helpful.
To refresh:
I’m running a new Win 7-64 w/ssd as my C drive for OS and programs. My D drive is for images and LR catalog. A raid 0 set up on drive E for cache.
I folowed your advise and am using a second drive for my images and the LR catalog. It’s drive “D” and is labled LR & Images. It contains 2 folders, one labled “Images” & the 2nd labled “Keith’s LR Catalog”. With that stated, Last night I imported(ofF CF cards)images to the “Images” folder and made some adjustments in LR. I wanted to see these in CS5 and opened PS and opened the Browser, clicked on computer, the “D” drive and the only thing showing is the folder labled “Keith’s LR Catalog”. There is no folder labled “Images”. What did I do wrong. Why won’t this show up. I set up this new “D” drive per your video. If I click on the start button>computer>LR & Images(D:} it lists both files. Clicking on the “Image Files” folder brings up the two folders I created(MISC & NFL). Clicking on Keith’s LR Catalog, it has 2 folders labled LR3 Catalog Previes.lrcat and LR3 Catalog.lrcat. When I click on the preview catalog, It has folders labled 0 thru 9 and A thru F. and also previews.db and root-pixel.db What are all these folders? where are the previews? What am I doing wrong?
Dear Keith Randolph,
Your Catalog (the .lrcat) and it’s preview files (the .lrdata folder and sub-folders) are not going to show anything useful for you in the Adobe Bridge or in the Windows Explorer. These are database files, and thumbnail caches, that Lightroom uses but that no other program will understand. This article http://thelightroomlab.com/2008/12/understanding-lightrooms-non-destructive-image-enhancement-system/ and this video tutorial http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-with-julieanne-kost/saving-changes-to-your-photographs-in-lightroom-3/ from Julieanne Kost might help you understand more about how Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop interact.
Hope this helps,
David Marx
Hi Marx,
After recently upgrading to LR3 I just observed the message, Sheila was talking about: The “Error Saving Metadata” icon at the top right of one Album thumbnail.
Clicking on the icon the default action seemed to be “Read to overwrite catalog settings” (which according to Adobe should “apply the changes made in Bridge or Camera Raw”), but I found it suspicious, so instead I clicked “Metadata From File”. I shouldn’t have done that! Now all my external editing of the photo (Photoshop CS4 with LR rendering/NIK Dynamic Skin Softener/NIK Output Sharpener/Additional LR editing) was lost!
I didn’t as yet mark the “Automatic write changes to XMP” not having had this problem with LR2. (I did follow your advice for a period of time, but I wasn’t happy about the very many XMP sidecar files that were generated from my NEF and CR2 files. Instead I backup my LR catalog.)
Luckily I had previously exported the file. So in the EXIF information I could see that the change was: The field “Subsec time digitized: 00″ had changed to: “Colorspace: Uncalibrated”. That made all my editing go away.
I tried Undoing as much as I could, but this change seemed to be for ever. Do you know of any method to get the matadata back for this one file? (Otherwise I will just have to redevelop it.) Or perhaps any reason why suddenly this occurs given the circumstances described above?
Thank you in advance,
Henrik
PS. Adobe has an article on the subject, but the don’t explain it very deeply: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/2.0/WS3B7C007A-4A38-4063-863A-80DB6AAB4812.html
Dear Henrik,
I don’t think that your work outside of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has been lost. I believe that only Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw store Develop changes within each file’s Metadata block or XMP sidecar. Adobe Photoshop CS4 is a pixel editor so any changes that you made using that software are stored within the file’s pixel block. The work that you did within Lightroom may have been lost but I would not panic yet. Couple of things to try:
1. Go to History panel with one of these files and see if you can step back one moment in time. This might undo the update metadata from file move.
2. Try generating new thumbnails for your images. Go Library > Previews > Render Standard Previews.
3. Launch the most recent catalog backup that you have from before this event occurred. If everything looks right then perhaps you will want to replace your current catalog file with a copy of this backup.
Best of luck,
David Marx
David,
I do a lot of location work where need to work from the laptop battery, therefore using an eSata external drive isn’t an option on these shoots. How can this external drive system work in such a scenario? Do I create to LR catalogs; 1 on internal HDD and then when back in the studio import the shoot the the external HDD catalog?
Thanks for your wonderful articles,
Brett Gilmour
Dear Brett Gilmour,
Why bother with Lightroom at all when you are working with the laptop on location? Why use an application designed for long term image management and the complete workflow–import, organize, edit, print, web, etc.–when all your really need is a way to empty your memory cards and make quick judgments about the quality of your captures? My advice is to stick to software like the Adobe Bridge until you get home. Stick to quick and easy programs while you are out on the road. Save the complete workflow stuff until you get home.
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David Marx
Hi David.
Will do (and have been!)
Do you have any experience of using JBODs with Lightroom3?
I know you said there is an issue with networked drives in a previous article but I wondered if I stay wired as it were, if this would be a good way of increasing capacity and making failing drives easier to replace?.I have found one with eSATA connections,I don’t have USB3 and I can still use a DROBO for backup.
Dear Sheila,
JBOD = Just a Bunch of Disks. I use one external drive (a RAID 1 performance drive) for my primary image storage and back this up to multiple single external drives. See http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/05/my-photo-storage-system-two-external-hard-drives/ for more details. Although I am using a RAID 1 drive for the primary storage it is separate from all of the backup disks hence they all function as just a bunch of separate disks.
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David Marx
Hi David.
Thankyou once again for the tips.
The external drive is connnected to our new computer using an eSATA port.It is a Lacie Big Disk Quadra but it is about 3-4 years old,had a lot of LR use on our old system using USB so maybe I should replace it.I did wonder if it would be up to the job.The capacity is 2TB,the write speed 3GBs and it is just over half full.I havn’t had the write delay warning nor have I been using another application other than Photoshop but not on all of the affected files.I first noticed the problem when I had imported and processed a large backlog of files and changed to LR3 after we had the last hard drive failure on the PC so I suspected it might be something to do with speed and/or volume of data.
Dear Sheila,
Ahh the mysteries of computers and hard drives. There isn’t any reason why that disk shouldn’t still be working just fine. On the other hand, I am not sitting at your at computer so maybe it really is on the edge of dying. All mechanical devices, like human’s, have a lifespan and we don’t get to know how long that life will last until it is over. Best thing to do is to back everything up religiously so that if the drive dies suddenly you will suffer minimal data loss.
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David Marx
Hi David.
Just wondered if you could help resolve a query.I have the most recent versions of Lightroom and Photoshop installed,work off an external drive and have set up Lightroom as per your guidance above.I backup every time I leave the program and backup the backup with a Drobo.Recently I have started to find I am getting errors in files I have worked on which show up in the top right corner of the file as ‘error writing metadata’ and then ‘one or more of these photos has been changed in an external application’.I noticed it in a few files a couple of weeks ago but now it has become more of an issue and a lot of the work I did last week has not been saved.Do you know of any outside applications that might interfere with the writing of the metadata or is it more likely something I have overlooked on setup.Also I have asked the program to launch the catalogue I have on the external drive under preferences but it has a habit of switching to an empty one on the SSD.Should I delete it as the program automatically launches this empty one every time I connect a downloading device to the computer especially if I do not have the external drive in operation at the same time?
Thankyou.
Dear Sheila,
Sorry about the delay. If I were you I would set your preferences so that Lightroom never launches the default catalog. In addition, I would create an alias that leads directly to your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog on the external disk so that launching any other catalog isn’t even an option.
Those external application metadata warnings maybe significant or they may not. If you indeed did work with those files using another application like the Adobe Bridge then the warning is doing its job and you have nothing to worry about. If, on the other hand, you didn’t do anything to these files then I would start to question the health of your external hard drive. Is it a cheap USB disk or is connected via a much faster connection? Are you getting other errors like the Windows “Write Delay Failure” warning. I assume that this entire disk is being backed up to your Drobo so I am not worried that you will loose anything but a slow drive on a slow port might cause you extra hassles.
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David Marx
Hi David,
As a follow up about the cache location that I recently asked about, I’d like your opinion on using a Raid 0 set up for the cache. With the help of my son in law(he’s an IT) were going to utilize the hard drives-a pair of 250gb drives(reformatted of course)from my previous computer to set up the raid. My understanding is that these 2 drives(in raid) will show up as one drive and was wondering your opinion as to their use for LR & ACR cache. Both drives are 7200rpm sata II.
Dear KeithR,
If top-performance is your goal then I would definitely put the Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw Cache on the new RAID 0 disk. You might also want to store your images and your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalog on this drive. Storing the catalog on your SSD startup disk might boost its performance a little but having everything on a single disk (or disk array) makes for a clean and easy backup strategy. Do not forget to back everything up especially files on that RAID 0 drive. Doubling the drive’s performance via the RAID configuration arguably halves its reliability. If either of the drives in the array fail then you will loss everything. RAID 0 is great for performance but always back these drives up!
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David Marx
Hello again
Ok I’ve gone through the tutorial again and found the section on cache location but I’m still not clear on it. In the video, you show your location as the external hd, but it lists Location:…./Photo Library/Caches/ACR. I understand the you created this library on the external hd, but it’s the “Caches/ACR” I don’t understand. When you created the library did it also create the cache location? Keep in mind, I’m on a PC(w7-64) and installed LR on the C(default)hd. When I open LR(for now just to set up-haven’t imported anything yet) and go through the preferences I see C:….\App Date\Local\Adobe\Camera Raw\Cache\.
Hello David,
I just found this site and have started to look at a few of the videos, have been reading comments and I’m finding them very helpful. I recently set up a new computer(win7-64b) with a ssd(for programs and os) along with an internal hd(1tb, 7200rpm w/sata 6gb/s). I’ve installed LR3 & CS5. Before I started using my new computer, I moved file to an external hd but have not begun moving anything to the new computer. Before I do, I want to make sure that I set up this new internal hd correctly so nothing has been moved to it. Similar to another poster(Sheila Devlin)I am also asking about cache location and my first thought was the 1tb drive. In your response to Ms. Devlin, you state “The Camera RAW Cache folder can go on any of these drive but if I were you I would set its size to 200 GB in Lightroom’s preference menus and then pick the second internal drive.” How do I do this? Is LR using the PS(ACR) cache? Where do I set it in LR? I don’t see this option in the preference menus.
Dear Keith Randolph,
Sounds like you just put together a very nice computer and you deserve credit too for carefully studying this issue! You are absolutely right too. I created the Caches folder for Lightroom to use on my external drive. The program did not create it for me but as you discovered it is easy to tell the program to use this folder for its calculation scratch space.
I chose to put this folder on my external drive so that I could give Lightroom the full 200GB of scratch space. Sadly, my laptop’s internal hard drive is not big enough to hold a Cache this size. Moving the Cache to the external drive also makes it portable–meaning it travels with my images and my catalog files so it never needs to be regenerated.
In a perfect world, I would love to use your SSD drive for Lightroom’s raw processing scratch space and for all the caches that other program’s secretly create. The SSD is by far the fastest computational disk but this is an expensive proposition and the benefits to using this drive are unlikely to justify the costs in terms of disk space on this drive. I doubt that you will notice any difference in real world performance with your hardware no matter where you decide to keep the Cache files. My advice for you is to use the second drive for the Cache and keep that SSD as clean as possible.
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David Marx
Hi David.
Thankyou.I will give this a try and thankyou for the link.
Hi David.
I have just been watching your highly instructive videos after installing Lightroom 3 on a new computer because of hard drive failure.(LR was fine because I had been following your advice about XMP and backing up)
Two questions.In the preferences where it says camera RAW cache settings and size of cache which drive should I choose to place the cache?I work from an external hard drive for the catalogue,we now have an SSD for programs on the desktop and an internal hard drive of large capacity on the desktop as well which I use for photoshop.Should I choose this one to gain best performance/safety or place the cache on the SSD?
Secondly.I have installed LR catalogue on the external drive but have been having a little trouble with the presets.When I locate the presets folder it tells me it is in a backup of the catalogue on the external drive.Should it be there or with the main catalogue?
Dear Sheila Devlin,
The Camera RAW Cache folder can go on any of these drive but if I were you I would set its size to 200 GB in Lightroom’s preference menus and then pick the second internal drive. I would love to tell you to keep it on the SSD startup disk but that’s an awfully large chunk of disk space to tie up on that drive. Plus, the real world performance difference between the SSD, the second internal drive, and an external disk connected via a fast drive connector is probably insignificant.
Locating your presets folder can be a little tricky. First, there is a preference switch in Lighroom to turn on / off that asks is the presets should be stored with the Catalog. I suggest turning this on so that your presets are stored with the Catalog on the external disk. This makes it easier to move from computer to computer and take your presets with you. This article will help you find their default locations http://www.lightroomqueen.com/blog/2008/12/15/default-file-locations-lightroom-2/
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David Marx
…my appologies in advance for those offended by the “stupid” comments. I was trying to enforce the point that BACKUPS ARE GOD when it comes to securing data.
Sure, David is aiming to help, but there is a point where too much information can be harmful and this article is a prime example. Case and point; read about the grief Jill Adams went through a few comments up. She is a LR newbie and changed a bunch of settings that were, by default, set to safe, newbie standards. All she had to do was back up her catalog and presets, but she was talked into messing with functions that she knew nothing about.
Forget about XMP unless you need it and then do it manually. If you are editing in photoshop, you can open a copy of the image with lightroom settings applied and then save it from there.
Dear Joseph,
I am delighted that you so vehemently disagree with my advice. I am a big believer that there are two sides to every debate. I believe that student’s often learn best by listening carefully to each side of a debate, doing some fact checking, and then reaching their own conclusions. I will go further and add that there is some small element of truth to everything that you say here. It is true that turning this preference switch can reduce Lightroom’s performance. It is also true that it is redundant though I would suggest that this is a good thing since it makes it more likely that some of your hard work will survive after a catastrophic disk failure.
Most of all, your advice on the importance of catalog backups is absolutely correct. The trouble though is that most of the photographers that I have taught for the past decade, and clearly the vast majority of the 90,000 visitors who stop by this site each month, have no idea how to build a rock-solid off-site backup system that dynamically protects both their Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog and their digital images. I have taught Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to students at every level from professional photographers down to brand new digital camera owners. In my decade in front of the chalkboard I have seen one universal truths with every audience. What I have seen is that only 1% of any audience truly understands how to back up all of their critical data.
I am going to go out on a limb here and make an accusation. I believe that you too are not amongst that 1% either. Your comments do not convince me that you truly understand what is included in a Lightroom Catalog backup. I fear that you, like so many others out there, believe that a Lightroom’s Catalog backup will somehow magically protect your images. Let’s be clear– it will not. Lightroom Catalog backups are wonderful but they do absolutely nothing to protect your images!
Setting this switch to the “auto-save” position, or using the Metadata > Save Metadata to File Command within Lightroom, increases the odds that something useful will survive if you suffer catastrophic disk failure. They also free you from being stuck with Lightroom for life. By saving all of your changes down to the metadata level you can work with your images in other applications like the Adobe Bridge. Once your metadata has been saved down you can also move files from one disk to another at the operating system level without losing critical data.
Yes, this preference switch can slow Lightroom down but it makes your files more useful–case in point with this preference turn on your images actually contain your copyright information–but most of all it makes your image backups more robust!
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David Marx
I’m wondering if David just wrote this article as a twisted means of getting off on other peoples misery. Thats a lot of effort just to mislead people.
Here’s some food for thought;
The “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox could just as easily be called the “I’m too stupid to backup my catalog on a regular basis” checkbox.
If you are not backing up your catalog (and presets) then, your data is not secured… which would make you stupid, in which case you would want to check this box.
By default, auto-writing to XMP is unchecked. There are three reasons for this; it is redundant, it can produce an undesirable UI experience and it can corrupt non-RAW images.
Further more, writing directly to XMP is a huge resource hog and can cause system lag and instability during memory/cpu intensive operations such as preview rendering and “Spot Removal”. Google “lightroom spot removal crash” and read up on it.
Unless you are worried that you’ll lose data during editing, there is no need to continually write data to file. Set your catalog preferences to backup every time you exit LR. Skip it if you don’t need to backup your session. Backup your catalog (and presets) on external media. Keep a copy of your backup in a safe, remote location.
Your catalog backup can be openned on any machine, at any time, anywhere as long as you have the original image files that go with it… and those are backed up right along side of the LR Catalog Backup, right?
Good… now, forget that you even stumbled on this entirely useless article and go make art.
Users, don’t restore to factory settings. David why would you ever advise that???? A new user has no need for that– it’s already to factory settings and somebody who has spent hours upon hours (days here) setting up presets and web pages will have all of their hard work erased in a moment.
Not a big deal to re-import downloaded settings. But my website layout is gone. I worked hard on that and for advice that doesn’t even ever improve things. Your tutorial was so, “hey everybody, follow along and I’ll make sure you’re settings are where they need to be.” I was wrongly on auto pilot, but please BIG and BOLD caution users not to erase their hard worked for presets.
Dude… I don’t even know what to say.
Please use a little more caution, or at least advise user of deleterious effects of your advice. Particularly for intermediate users, like myself, who are looking for an edge but are capable of setting up things like user presets. Your advice to “restore all 7″ of the lightroom presets has done me bad.
That willy nilly advice, without a cautionary word, has all of my presets gone. I have spent much time and work fine tuning/acquiring those presets and now they are gone. You spoke with such certainty that this is the best way to set up your system and I believe you even said this will work well for someone who has been using the catalogue.
Not happy with the “expert” giving me advice that leads to some very disappointing loses. Please be careful to provide caveats and let the user know when something bad will happen. We put a lot of trust in you guys and perhaps follow your advice a little too readily?
Frustrated.
Dear Jill Adams,
Sorry to hear about your frustrations but my advice did you no permanent harm. If you followed my advice and turned on the “Store Presets with Catalog” preference switch before hitting any of the restore buttons then your old presets were not deleted and they are still sitting on your hard drive in their factory default location. If you want them back then all you need to do is to track them down and copy them into the new folders that were created within the Lightroom Settings folder that now exists inside of your Catalog folder.
Drag the old presets into the appropriate place and restart the Lightroom application. All will be well and nothing has been permanently lost…. Sorry though about the inconvenience.
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David Marx
David,
I am hoping you can elaborate on setting Lightroom 3 up to locate the Camera Raw Cache Location to my external hard drive where I have my photos and the Lightroom catalog. you touched on this in the above video but without detail for choosing a Location on the external drive. I am thinking maybe it would go in the Lightroom Catalog folder, and maybe one would create a “Cache” folder within the “Catalog Previews.lrdata” folder..? I don’t like to assume though.
You’ve really been a great help for learning Lightroom 3. The topics related to using a high speed external drive for my photos and catalog, and with all the settings and preferences has been a treasure. I work with a desktop, and with a laptop. It’s great to have the same work wherever I am using the external drive.
I really appreciate your teaching on Lightroom Lab, and I hope I can schedule for one of your workshops or classes in the future.
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Bud
Dear Bud,
Sorry about the delay. I believe that increasing the Camera Raw Cache size can improve Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s performance and in your case storing it externally makes sense. I need to be clear though that storing the Cache on an external hard drive does not necessarily make sense for everyone. Like you, I created a Cache folder on my external hard drive. Storing this folder inside of the Lightroom Catalog folder makes good sense too and this mimics the system that Adobe Premiere usually uses for its various video and audio file caches.
Using a high speed external hard drive and a super fast drive connection is critical if you are going to store the Cache externally. Storing these files on a drive with a slower connection, or a slow rotational speed, does little to boast Lightroom’s performance.
Thanks for the kinds words and insightful questions. I hope that we will meet at a workshop somewhere soon.
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David Marx
A bit off the subject here, but I am trying to learn lightroom and have two computers at home a macbook and a pc. I find at this stage doing a lot of changes with presets,collections and so forth – things that can’t be written to file. I am wondering if anyone here knows a way to export your Lightroom settings into a file – i’d like to match my workflow on both computers. Thanks so much.
Dear Darya,
If you were to store your Lightroom catalog on an external hard drive, and if you were to install the appropriate software so that the drive could be used with either operating system, then you could maintain the same catalog, same collections, same settings, etc. on either machine. Our article on how to format an external hard drive might help you with the steps required for this setup. An alternative would be to store your catalog in a synchronized folder using a network utility like Dropbox.
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David Marx
Thanks so much for your tutorials, David. Invaluable advice here on checking those all important boxes, especially the “Austomatically write changes into xmp”, which I learned about from you when I started off some time back with Lightroom 2.
A while ago, I had a corrupted catalog, and that was after backing it up from my principal external drive to my copy drive before asking Lightroom to check its integrity. Thanks to your advice, I able to simply let Lightroom build me a new catalog, complete with keywords, colour labels and develop settings. Nothing vital lost, then.
For most users, it would probably be better to not get into this state at all, as I understand that the rebuilt catalog would be lacking any virtual copies and collections, although in my case, I don’t depend on these, so there was no real problem.
I will place a link to The Lightroom Lab, and to this tutorial on the Equipment and Postprocessing page of my website for the benefit of my visitors.
All the best…
Dear Andrew Graeme Gould,
Thank you for the kind words and the support for my tutorials. Like you, I am a big believer in the importance of that “Automatically write to XMP” switch as the ultimate fall back. Losing my collections and my collection sets would be a major disaster– these features plus pick / reject flags, and virtual copies are stored only at the catalog level– but at least I could build a whole new catalog without having to re-keyword a single file. Likewise, with that switch turned on, I will never have to remove the same dust spot twice!
In an ideal world, catalogs would never get corrupted but this is not a perfect world. Ideally, my backups would save me but again mistakes happen. Having my work saved into each and every file so that I can rebuild if I must just seems like a good idea. Thanks again for the links!
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David Marx
I like your website and your clear way of communicating very dense matter. I’ve been a LR2 and LR3 user for a number of years and should know this – but don’t.
How do I get back to the original image after various adjustments were made in the Develop mode? Where do these original RAW images exist? Where do I go to get back those images?
Thanks very much,
Bob W
Dear Bob,
Our tutorial on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s non-destructive image enhancement system should answer this question. The quick version though is that your original raw file is always available in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. To see the original image again you just need to press the Reset button in the Develop Module.
You might also want to read our tutorial on using Snapshots to store multiple versions of your file within Lightroom’s Develop Module too so that you can quickly access the original and the current version.
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David Marx
Dear David,
I have been photographing raw+jpeg simultaneously for about a year now,
because I wanted to have a send-able photo to use before I start the editing on the raw.
Now that I got much better at photographing and editing raw I think that I can go to raw-only system.
(-:
I will now uncheck this box
Alon
on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v2 Preferences Menu video u wrote:
Treat JPEG files next to raw files as separate photos
(If you’re shooting in RAW+JPEG mode on your camera (DON’T!!!), having this box checked would allow you to import both the RAW and JPEG versions of each image you shot without Lightroom warning you about duplicates.)
****** I can’t think of any good reason to have this checked.****
and now u check the same option… what’s the difference?
Alon
Dear Alon,
The “treat Jpeg files next raw files as separate photos” preference switch is an important one for photographers who have set their digital cameras to create both a raw and a jpeg version of each capture. When you activate the raw + jpeg feature inside of your digital camera you get two files per shutter click. If you want Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to copy both of these files, the raw and the jpeg, over to your computer during an import then you need to turn this preference switch on. With this switch turned off Lightroom will copy the raw file over to your computer but it will skip over the jpeg version.
This switch has no effect if you shoot all in jpeg, all in raw, or use a mix of the two on the same card. It only has an effect when the raw file and the jpeg version are created simultaneously from a single shutter click.
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David Marx
Hi David,
You are awesome. Thank you for your quick respond with your busy schedule.
I can see my work in Photoshop and Photoshop Element now.
Thank you for the info.
Ali
David these videos are absolutely fantastic. My Lightroom arrived today and I am LOVING setting it up. How lucky I was go find this your videos when researching some how to stuff. I no longer need any other how to stuff LOL. You don’t scare ME by the way. I think it is good to be really emphatic and warn people of consequences of not starting out right. thank you very very much
Dear Writerman242,
Thanks for the compliments. I’m glad that our videos are not too scary. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is not a hard program to learn but a little instruction really helps especially with the initial setup. I wish that our site would teach you all that need to know but sadly we are not there yet. Click here to see our recommended books on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and although I hate to send traffic over to my competitors, you might also want to check out Chris Orwig’s excellent Adobe Photoshop video tutorials over at lynda.com.
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David Marx
Hi Dave,
XMP topic was really great it was my question for a while without answer. So it did turn on the switch and did some stuff like save metadata and synchronize metadata to a file but still I cannot see changes outside of LR3 (and windows 7). I would appreciate it if you could send me a hint to update all previous works in LR3.
Many Thanks,
Ali
Dear Ali,
Saving your work down to the file level should solve your troubles. Saving your work down to the file’s XMP metadata block should make your Lightroom work visible to any other applications that can read Adobe’s metadata notes. This raises the question what other applications are you trying to use?
Saving your work down to the file level will make your changes immediately visible to the Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Photoshop Elements but these changes will not be visible though for raw files simply at the operating system level. This article on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’s non-destructive image enhancement system might also help.
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David Marx
Dave,
Finally back thinking about Lightroom again, so found your response. Yup, I sure think this is a “bug”, too – I did increase the cache size and still had this trouble. And I am using version 3.2 . . . Laura Shoe had suggested that I look for this problem on Lightroom Forums and post my issue there if someone hasn’t already . . .
Thanks for the help!
Deb
David,
OK, another question for you . . .
In the video tutorial about setting LR3 preferences you mention changing the Camera Raw Cache Settings, both in turns of location and size, and I think you say something about you’ll provide more about that in another tutorial. But I haven’t seemed to find that tutorial . . .
And I don’t even know if changing this is going to fix the problem that I’m experiencing, which is that when I’m spot editing an image in the Develop module, I’m getting a delay happening, especially if I click-and-drag so that I select the area to be used. I initially suspected that this was due to the older/slower external drive that I’m currently using, so to test this out I moved my catalog to my internal drive and turned off the auto save to xmp – and I’m still seeing a delay.
I’m on a fairly new (arrived last December) robust Dell Precision T3500 with a dual core processor, 6GB of ram, an ATI video card . . . everything that should make Lightroom lightening fast!
I should also add that this has only started happening after I upgraded to version 3 (I initially suspected my external drive because I recently did some rearranging and this drive now holds my image files and catalog, which happened about the same time as my upgrade to version 3).
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Deb
Dear Deb,
Scott talks about the advantages to changing the Adobe Camera Raw Cache in this post. I don’t know if this will solve your delay troubles though. What you ahve sounds more like a bug too me. Have you updated to Adobe Photoshop Lighroom 3.2 yet? I don’t know about your specific troubles but I do know that they fixed hundreds of Lightroom 3 bugs in this update.
Hope this helps.
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David Marx
Dear TK,
Let’s check a couple of things. First, have you made a change to photos. Until you do something like adding keywords, adding a star rating or colored label, or changing the look of the photo in the develop module then there isn’t anything to write to the xmp sidecar. Second, are your files stile in .CR2 or have you converted them to DNG (See http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/06/converting-digital-camera-raw-files-to-the-dng-format-using-adobe-photoshop-lightroom/ for more on why I prefer DNG files.) Third, have you turned on the “Automatically write to XMP preference switch” or figured out how another way in Lightroom to save your metadata down to the file level?
I bet that either your files are now in DNG or that your metadata was never saved down to the file level. Let us know if my guesses are wrong!
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David Marx
I use CR2, but noticed there are no xmp files. When I tried to backup a series to a CD, I am scared that I can’t find the xmp files for all the changes I did. How can I find these, or how can I apply the auto write to xmp to photos I have already editted?
Dear Nik,
Sorry about the delay and many thanks to Scott for his insightful comments. I have two complaints about the Pick / Reject flags.
1. These markings are stored at the catalog level only. They are never passed down to the file level. This is great since it keeps your markings private but it is a disaster if your catalog file gets corrupted. Obviously, if you have a rock solid catalog and file backup strategy then this problem is minimal but in my experience most people do not have three copies of every file (including the catalog) stored on two different types of media with one version offsite. See for more on backups and archives.
2. The flags are collection specific and they are not automatically passed from collection to collection. Time after time this has burned me. Flag a file as a pick in a collection and then switch back to seeing all of your photographs. Poof the pick flag is gone. Well, it’s not gone but it is collection specific.
It goes the other way too. Flag something in “All Photographs” and then add it into a collection. Within the collection sadly it is not flagged. Once you understand this design strategy it makes sense but it still drives me nuts.
Easier and safer to me are the stars and colored labels. I love and use the colored labels because these can be written to the file’s metadata and because they do not change with each collection.
Hope this helps,
David
Nik,
You’re correct about only .xmp “sidecar” files being changed when not using DNG. That, in itself, does not overcome the benefits of DNG for me, however. The smaller file size, lack of separate metadata files, and cross-compatibility make DNG my preferred file format.
That choice isn’t for everyone, though. David talks a bit about his choice to use DNG in the article Converting Digital Camera Raw Files to the Dng Format using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
-Scott
bkhl,
I’m sure David has a different way of going about it, but here’s my method of editing down a shoot using the Pick and Reject flags:
Using Pick and Reject Flags in Lightroom
-Scott
If you set Auto Write to XMP to ‘on’ and don’t use DNG files then only the xmp files get backed up each time they change. This saves a lot of time and space for those using apps like Time Machine.
In some of your videos you talk about how you don’t like pick/reject flag system in Lightroom. I also sort of find the implementation of the flag thing annoying, though hard to replace by other means. I would love to see a video or something on how you suggest one should approach picking out one’s favorite images and cleaning out the useless ones.
Thanks very much, Scott and David for your advice. I´ll try that as soon as I get my new external HDD. Thanks again!
Inaki,
I’m sure David will jump in with his own answer, but I’ll say that there’s no need to create a new catalog. You can just move the existing catalog to the new preferred storage location.
Refer to the article How to get your Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive for more information on moving your catalog to a new location.
-Scott
Dear David,
Now that I´ve watched your first videos, I´ve realised that it would have been a better idea if I had used an external drive in which to place all my photos and my Lr catalogue. Now my question is: Can I create a new catalogue in an external drive from scratch (as you showed in your video) and then import/append…my old catalogue into the new one without loosing any work?
Thanks in advance.
Dear Inaki,
As Scott pointed out you could just move your existing catalog over to an external disk. Be sure to move the whole folder though. Those preview files, and the other sub-folders, are important. Don’t forget though that the catalog is separate from your actual images and that we want both on our external drive. See My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives for more details.
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David Marx
Dear John Hayes,
There is an easy way but you won’t like it. The easiest way is to build a new Lightroom catalog and then import all your files over again. On the second go round you could pick one of the other folder naming systems. (I like the Year-Month-Day all in numbers with dashes best.)
Warning: Before you take this advice think about all the work that you will have to do over. All your pick flags, virtual copies, collections, and preferences will be gone.
DOUBLE WARNING: You had better save all your work down to the file level before you try this procedure or you could lose everything!
Rather than all this hassle I would suggest picking a new system moving forward and not worrying about the old folder names. Just let them be….
David
Great stuff. I am in the process of “correcting” my set up and have a question. Is there an easy way to convert my file structure from unstructured to date based….2020..June 15 etc.? Thanks and keep up the great content.
Dear David and Merrill,
You are asking an excellent question and one that is created by Adobe’s ambiguous use of the word “XMP.” You are absolutely right that by re-wrapping your digital camera raw files in the DNG file format that you do not need a separate .XMP sidecar file.
In this case though, Adobe is using the word XMP to represent the Metadata block for any type of file. If you don’t turn this switch on, or figure out the other ways to save your work down to the file level, then your DNG files lack critical metadata like your copyright, your contact info, your keywords, and your develop settings.
You may have added this data within Lightroom but until this switch is turned on, or you find one of the other save metadata buttons, nothing has been written down to the file level. Until you use this switch, or hit save elsewhere, your work exists only at the Lightroom Catalog level for all of your files including your DNG’s.
If you have not turned on this switch, or found one of the other save buttons, try this experiment:
Add your Copyright info to a .jpg, .tif, or .dgn file using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
Quit Lightroom and find this file on your hard drive.
Copy this file to your desktop and slightly change its name. Add the word test, or a number, to end of its file name but be sure to keep its extension.
Restart Lightroom and import this file with your Metadata Preset rubber stamp (the Metadata to Apply After Import Switch) turned off.
Now look at the new file’s metadata. See how it’s all missing?
If you try this experiment you will see that your Copyright field is blank because the information that you added to the original image was never recorded down to the file level. The XMP data block is where this information would have been recorded. For proprietary raw files this data block is an external file. For all other formats including DNG this data block is inside the file itself.
Turning this switch on will start saving your work down to the file’s XMP block level even for work that you did weeks ago in Lightroom. The other easy way to save all of your old work down is to right click on your folder names and select the “Save Metadata” button.
I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion over this ambiguous term.
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David Marx
I also am questioning if I need to check to box to Automatically write changes to XMP if I am using the DNG format.
Merrill
David,
When I import my files from a CF card, I always “Copy photos as Digital Negative (DNG) and add to catalog.” Since I do that, is it still necessary to check the box to “Automatically write changes to XMP”? (I always thought that the DNG files contained everything with the photos making this auto write changes to XMP feature unneeded.)
If it is still necessary to have it checked, is there a way to make corrections for all of the photos I already imported and developed without this feature being checked?
Thank you in advance!
David, and others,
I’ve been writing all changes to XMP files during all of my time with Lightroom. For me, that extra layer of security is worth a little bit of performance. When my performance is significantly effected, I have upgraded hardware.
I will admit that I am a little anal about backing up all of my work in multiple places, and thought that I was always covered wherever I was. However, I was away from my office for several weeks last winter and my Lightroom catalog got corrupted. No problem, I had been backing up most every day on the road. However, when I loaded my backup catalog I found that it was also corrupted. A bit of panic set in. I had been on the road for almost 5 weeks, and had put many hours into working on a couple of thousand images.
I was able to have a friend send me my latest backup from my home office that day. I loaded it onto my laptop and re-imported all of my photos from the previous 5 weeks, and like magic, all of my work was there….thanks to the XMP files.
So while I feel that it’s pretty easy to just hit Ctrl-S, I’m really sold on one more layer of protection for saving my work.
Thanks for all of your work and help with my Lightroom experience.
I admit that your advice is good for beginners who don’t understand yet how the catalog works and are still learning Lightroom basics. When I was starting with Lightroom, it confused me why my changes weren’t reflected outside of LR. So I understand why you make the recommendation, but I wanted to offer a counterpoint. Sorry if I came across as overly critical.
And, to answer your question about how I came to this knowledge, I have to give credit to Peter Krogh. His book on asset management has been an invaluable resource for me. http://www.thedambook.com/
There is one issue that needs to be mentioned and that is that LR will save to XMP immediately upon a change. Most applications, when set to “auto save” will save every few minutes, not the instant you change your document (or image in the case of LR).
Why does this matter? Because it can have a drastic impact on performance! Consider, as an example, a user trying to find a good white balance. Typically this is done by moving the slider back and forth, trying to find a good WB. The problem is that every time the user lets go of the slider, LR will save to file. The same goes for all sliders, buttons, switches, etc..
If your hardware is fast enough, it will hardly affect you. For a lot of people it will, and it is a fair guess that this is why the checkbox is off by default. I know of several people who enabled the option and later complained that LR was too slow.
The concept of saving changes to a document/image has been around forever. Surely it can’t be that hard to teach or understand, right? Ctrl-S and you’re done
Dear DigitalOxygen, David, and all of the others who will soon object to my XMP advice,
You are absolutely right. I am taking a scare tactic here. If it gets a beginner Lightroom user interested in their preference menus then perhaps it is an effective teaching technique.
I think that all of the points you raise are right but I am sure that none of you are new to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. When you were learning to ride a bicycle did you use training wheels? I have never said that advanced users should always keep this switch turned on and I will readily admit that I often turn it off.
But you and I are bringing a ton of experience and background knowledge to the table here. My job as an educator is to ease the learning curve. I am on my way to the classroom right now to teach aspiring professionals for the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. Teaching Lightroom beginners is what I do for a living and my experience has convinced me that beginners need the extra help.
Setting the software so that your work is automatically saved down to the file level is a huge plus when you are learning. With this switch active, the work that you do in Lightroom is immediately visible if you look at the same files using the Adobe Bridge. Likewise, since the metadata has been pressed down to the file level you can move you can your files around the computer or from computer to computer, or build a whole new catalog, without loosing your work. [Yes, you would loose your Flags, Virtual Copies, Copy Names, and Collections since these features are stored only at the Catalog Level but your image’s metadata and your develop settings would survive.]
Again, I think that you are doing other readers a great service and giving out great advice but I have to ask how did come to this knowledge? You certainly didn’t learn it from George Jardine’s “Five Rules”– the initial Lightroom tutorial screen. You didn’t learn it from within the software since there is basically no internal help documentation I doubt that you learned it from either of these articles on the Adobe Community Help Site either:
About metadata and XMP from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Community Help
Work with Camera Raw and Lightroom
I suspect that you acquired your excellent and sophisticated understanding of the Lightroom Catalog / the XMP switch through years of experience and probably a couple of Catalog disasters. If I can ease that learning curve then I have done a good job for my students.
Once you have this level of sophisticated knowledge about the Catalog, about the variety of ways to save your work within the software, about the complexities of different backup systems, and of how to restore from a corrupted .lrcat file, then by all means please turn this switch off! But if Lightroom is brand new to you then I suggest starting your learning process with it active.
For more on this topic in general see Making Sense of Metadata Settings in Lightroom.
David
I agree that this will scare people unnecessarily, although I think your advice isn’t bad for beginners who don’t understand how Lightroom’s catalog works. But for what it’s worth, here’s the argument against enabling “Automatically write changes…”
When you aren’t writing changes to your images, you only need to backup your image files one time. I don’t mean you only need one copy; you should have multiple copies, including off-site, but you only need to do it once. Of course you still need to keep your backup archives up to date, adding your new photos as you create them, but once you’ve got your images backed up, those individual files won’t change. So you won’t have to make another backup of an image file every time you change it, and worry about which backup is the most recent one with all your most recent changes.
When you keep all your work in the catalog, you can go back and rework on old images without changing anything but the catalog file. And as long as you frequently backup the catalog (multiple backup copies, one off-site), you can always restore your work in the event of catastrophic loss. You simply restore all those image files you backed up when you initially imported them, and you restore the catalog that you backed up continuously. Voilà, you’re back in business.
Also, if your backup method includes Time Machine, or a similar program that uses versioning, it can fill up your backup drives very quickly with multiple copies of images where all you’ve changed is the metadata. By keeping all your work in the catalog, you don’t create multiple versions of your images when you re-work them, so you get more out of your backup hard drives.
The caveat to this method is that if you need to make a copy of the file for a client, you need to remember to always export the file from Lightroom so metadata will be applied, instead of just finding the file with Finder and copying it from there. But that’s not a bad habit to be in.
Wow, I really think this is going to scare people unnecessarily. Parts of the approach you’re taking with the “automatically write changes…” option are really a functions of proper catalog backups. Lightroom (at least in version 2 and earlier) does not write all changes in XMP files. Virtual copies, collections, and several other things in the catalog are not written to XMP thus writing changes to XMP is not a complete backup of all your settings. I agree with some of what you’re saying but you should really stress that users should *always* have proper backups of the catalogs themselves. That is more complete and I would argue more important that using the above mentioned setting as a backup method. Yes there are other benefits to the setting as you mentioned, but from a backup perspective catalog backups are more complete. That does lead into a whole other topic on catalog backup procedures though…