How to Rename Your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog
Author’s Note: You will find a more recent, and more detailed, version of this article within our extended Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog Creation and Image Storage Fundamentals tutorial. I strongly suggest that you follow the link and read the new and improved post instead!
Many Adobe Photoshop Lightroom beginners make learning this software more difficult by creating multiple Lightroom catalogs. Multiple catalogs might help some advanced users but for most novice users, this feature only creates needless confusion. This problem is compounded when the Lightroom catalogs are given vague names. Using a descriptive catalog name makes it easier to distinguish your Lightroom catalog from the factory default.
One solution to this problem is to change the name of your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalog to something distinct and different from the factory default setting. Changing the catalog’s name to something more personal often helps the students in my workshops, and the renaming process is also a common question on our blog. By default, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalogs are always named Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat. I changed my catalog’s name to Dave’s Lightroom Catalog.lrcat instead. My catalog’s distinct name makes it easy for me to check that I am working in the right catalog just by glancing up at the top of my screen.
Renaming your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalog is easy if you know which files need to be renamed, and where they live inside of your computer. This short video tutorial demonstrates the entire process. The whole procedure will take you less than five minutes!
Here’s a rough step-by-step guide to the catalog renaming process for those who would rather read a list of steps then watch a video.
To rename an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog.
1. Launch Lightroom and open your Lightroom Catalog.
2. Go Lightroom > Catalog Settings > General (Mac) or Edit > Catalog Settings > General (Pc.)
3. Press the Show Button. This will open an operating system window.
4. Leave the operating system window open but click back into the Lightroom application.
5. Quit or Exit out of Lightroom.
6. Inside the operating system window find your Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat file.
3. Change this file’s name but be sure to keep its extension. (The “.lrcat” part of the file name is essential.)
4. Change the name of the Previews.lrdata package (Mac) or Previews.lrcat folder (Pc) so that it is now an exact match of your catalog’s new name. Be sure to keep the word “Previews” at the end of this file’s name and to preserve its .lrdata extension.
5. Double click on your .lrcat file to relaunch your catalog.
This is one of the series of tutorials that we have created to fight the “which catalog am I in now??” confusion. For more help on this topic please also watch our tutorials on catalog creation, and on Lightroom’s preference menus.
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 
Hello David, i hope you can help me with a issue in LR4.
I really only use LR4 for package print, in the print package i don’t want the LR to rename my files just keep the file name that came with the camera.
How do i do that?
Thanks.Jean-Michel.
Dear Jean-Michel,
If I understand your question correctly then I think you need to explore the File Renaming feature of the Import Dialog. You might also want to check out the File Renaming Command under the Library Menu in the Library Module.
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David Marx
Hi David, I have been using LR since the very beginning. I found your tutorials today and realize I have really messed up my catalog files. Below are the files I have. I have renamed two of them but neither contain the whole LR catalog.The 2011 file show only that year’s file. The other I renamed shows only 2009 files. I was hoping to get a catalog that showed all files from LR to LR3. Can you tell me how I can fix this? I would really appreciate cleaning up my mess.
Thanks.
Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata
Lightroom 2 Catalog-readOnly.lrcat
Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat
Lightroom 3 Catalog-2 Previews.lrdata
Lightroom 3 Catalog-2-readOnly.lrcat
Lightroom 3 Catalog-2.lrcat
Lightroom 3 Catalog-3.lrcat
Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
Lightroom Photos
Marcias Catalog 2011 Previews.lrdata
Marcias Catalog 2011.lrcat
Marcias Catalog 2011.lrcat-journal
Marcias Catalog 2011.lrcat.lock
Marcias Catalog-2 Previews.lrdata
Marcias Catalog-2.lrcat
Marcias Catalog-3 Previews.lrdata
Marcias Catalog.lrcat
Dear Marcia Fasy,
It is hard for me to help you clean up your Photoshop Lightroom Catalogs without setting up a remote support connection between our computers. If the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom application is not running then you can safely delete the all of the readOnly.lrcat files, the lrcat-journal files, ant the .lrcatlock file. After those are out of the way you can begin to open each of the recent Catalogs to see which one is the most complete. You might want to combine recent ones together using the Import from Catalog Command.
It looks to me like you had a Lightroom v1 Catalog that was upgraded to Lightroom v2 and then again to Lightroom v3. I am guessing at this from the “version number” in between the words Lightroom and Catalog. At some point you also created a Marcias Catalog and a separate Marcias Catalog 2011. I suspect that Marcias Catalog has also been upgraded for Lightroom 3 but can’t be sure…
You have done yourself no harm but it gets confusing when you have multiple Catalogs…
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David Marx
Thank you for the reply, David. I will do as you said in your reply. I suppose if I rename them all I can figure out which is best. Also, if they are renamed by the year I suppose it doesn’t hurt to keep them all.
Marcia
Dear Marcia Fasy,
If I may suggest. How about arranging them by the date created or the date modified? Work your way back from the most recent to the oldest and see which one is the most complete. Once you have a single Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog that indexes all of your photographs then the other catalogs can site idle. Eventually you can delete them but that task can wait.
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David Marx
David,
I hope you can help me. I am new to LR3 and have been working with it for a very frustrating week. I am working with 6,000+ pictures and have just put them on an external hard drive. When I import photos from an SD card to my external hard drive, frequently I cannot see the folder I want to import the photos into. LR3 will not let me scroll down to the bottom of the folder list for the hard drive. Why? How can I see these other folders? The folders just stop where the window stops.
Thanks, Mira
Dear Mira,
Two thoughts: 1. How about increasing your screen resolution so that you can see the whole dialog? 2. If you cannot change the resolution, and you cannot scroll down further in the Destination Panel, then try selecting the folder for your import using the large “To” button at the very top-right of the Import Dialog. Be sure to check your options in the Destination panel though to make sure that you are not creating extra folders.
Personally, I think that your life would be much easier if you select a top-level parent folder for your image storage and then let Lightroom build sub-folders for you based on the date of capture. Our tutorial on “Where Should I Store My Photos?” might help.
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David Marx
Dave I am experiencing a problem I can’t seem to solve. I’m not sure what got it started. When I try to open Lightroom 3 the Icon on my desktop (Mac) shows a [ ? ] on top of the Lightroom Icon and it will not open. I deleted (removed) the Icon from the desktop and then went to Applications. Clicked on it – Lightroom opened and gave me two choices. I believe the first choice (which I now know I should have chosen was “Find Catalogue.” I am now sure I made the wrong choice – it was “open default.” Of course there was nothing there i.e none of my photos.
What do I need to do. What is the name of the item I need to open (I only have one catalogue.) Will I find it on my External Drive.
I think this problem started when I turned on my Mac with the external drive for my Lightroom attached to my computer – The Mac never got to my password – all I got was a blinking ? – When I turned off and unplugged the external drive the Mac proceeded as normal.
Dear Al Joyner,
I suggest pulling the generic Lightroom program alias off your dock and replacing it with one that leads directly to your Catalog on the external hard drive. See http://thelightroomlab.com/2011/02/how-to-create-an-alias-that-leads-directly-to-your-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-catalog-mac/
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David Marx
Thanks so much. I really need to know how to do this.
Dave, I just discovered your website and even though I’ve already put a lot of photos in my catalog, I find it very helpful. I have all my folders already under a directory called Photos so that’s OK. I’ve been mainly trying to clean up my messy keywording, done over a few years in Bridge and not consistent. (I’m paranoid about backups. Have my main catalog and photos on a second interior drive and sync with Syncback to five exterior drives, one kept at my daughter’s house. I’m trying to think of a place to keep a second drive off site.)
I have a question for you. I deleted my catalog recently because I did a lot of rearranging and renaming outside lightroom. Re-imported one large directory to work on the keywords and for a short time didn’t remember that the default wasn’t set to save the info to xmp. I have that set right now, but am wondering if I need to select all the photos and choose to write the info to the folders. Or will it do that automatically on the files I deleted/changed keywords on?
Thank you so much for your wonderfully helpful guides!
Dear Peggy,
I like your email address! Clever. Turning on the “Automatically Save Changes to XMP” preference switch will tell Lightroom to save all of your changes– those made in the past and those that you are making right now–down to each file’s metadata block. Sadly, the progress bar does not light up while the program is catching up on this task so you should walk away and give it some time to write to each and every file.
If you want to be doubly sure that all your changes have been passed down to the file level select all of your photos Edit > Select All and then go Metadata > Save Metadata. You can also access this command by right-clicking on any folder–your top level Photos folder makes the most sense–and clicking the Save Metadata to File button. If you have thousands of photos you might consider using one of these commands before you call it quits for the evening and then turning on the automatically write to xmp switch right away when you next start up the program.
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David Marx
Hi
I followed he steps as outlined above to change the name of my catalogue and all of my previews in my preview file disappeared. Luckiy i have a back up of catalogue.
Thank’s for the mis-information.
Dear Mike Barlas,
I am glad to hear that you have a catalog backup. That’s a great comfort when undertaking a major change like renaming your catalog and we all make mistakes. When I make them I like to own up acknowledge my failings. (See all of the comments on my mess-up when recording the Selection Secrets video tutorial.)
In this case though I think the mistake is on your end. I suspect that either you renamed wrong file or that you were inconsistent in the name of your catalog (the .lrcat) file and the name of your previews (the .lrdata) file. Even the slightest variation in the first part of the preview’s file name will confuse the program. I don’t mean to point fingers and it’s possible that something wonky happened but I have never seen this advice create any problems in any of the workshops that I have taught for the past six years as long as the file name’s are consistent.
Fortunately, this small glitch does you no harm since Lightroom is smart enough to immediately create a new previews (.lrdata) file for you and it will automatically rebuild all your thumbnails.
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David Marx
YOU ROCK!
Thank you David. Not sure what happened between you sending this reply and being able to sit down a backup my work, re-open LR and then try to backup via LR…but this time the program backed up…and then the program closed.
Should I still be concerned? Should I still delete the preview files? What would you do?
erin
Dear Erin Newman-Long,
Sorry about the delay. I was teaching a workshop in Great Smoky. It sounds like your bug has curred itself. I would back everything up and then proceed. Deleting and rebuilding the previews seems unnecessary unless this problem persists.
Best regards,
David Marx
Hi David,
Your tutorials have proved to be so invaluable to me!
In the last few days when I have tried to close LR and Back-up my work…there is a message saying that it can’t,
“We’re sorry, Lightroom was unable to back up the catalog named “ERIN_LONG_CATALOG”
“You may wish to check folder permissions or available space”
There is more than enough space on my 1TB hard drive…I am working on a wedding in LR and am a bit freaked out about this! Suggestions?
Thanks!
Erin
Dear Erin Newman-Long,
This could be a sign of bad things too come. If I were you I would:
1. Make sure that everything is backed up.
2. Check that you have turned on the “Automatically Write Changes to XMP Metadata” preference switch. You don’t need to keep this preference on forever but if your catalog dies and you have to build a new one from scratch you will be glad that all your changes, keywords, etc. were passed down to the file level.
After these steps you could try trouble shooting. First, I would make sure that you do indeed have full permission for whatever disk you are using. Windows, especially Vista an 7, are notorious for their bizarre permission issues. Second once you are sure that everything is backed up quit Lightroom and delete your previews.lrdata file. When you restart Lightroom will begin building a new previews .lrdata file. Let it do its thing for a few hours. I have often found that catalog backup issues have more to do with corrupted image previews then anything else.
Best of luck,
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David Marx
David,
It was so far off base that I b/u everything and started over. I put my laptop next to the desktop and watched your videos while I configured everything. Followed all of the points you discussed and now feel much more confident. My initial mistake was confusing catalogs with collections.
Good timing on the response because I am now ready to import everything into “PAUL’S LIGHTROOM CATALOG” (I do everything in caps now to avoid messing with the old stuff) Thank you so much for your efforts compiling the tutorials.
Paul
David,
HELP.. I started Lightroom a few weeks ago and thought I could just start working and I would have everything working. Now, after reading your tutorial on LR catalog setup I see I’ve messed things up. Your tutorial focuses on a new “clean” set up. I have multiple catalogs, and I cannot seem to figure out how to apply your method and preserve all of the work I have done on photos.
Thanks
Paul
Dear Paul Harris,
If I were you I would 1: Turn on the “Automatically Write Changes to XMP Metadata” preference switch until you are more familiar with how Adobe Photoshop Lightroom works. 2: I would merge those catalogs together using the Import from Catalog Command. It’s much easier to learn this software if you just have Catalog.
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David Marx