Before I dive into this, please know that I have the utmost respect for Scott Kelby and his education. Recently though, he published an article that with five tips for any Lightroom Classic user. As someone who has used Lightroom Classic since its inception as well, and someone who also educates about Lightroom, I had to share my personal thoughts on the five tips.
So from here on, what you see in bold came from Scott Kelby’s article.
Only use one catalog. Just one. Put all your photos in this one catalog.
I sort of completely disagree with this. You see, Lightroom Classic gets very, very, very slow when certain things happen.
- Local adjustments
- Lens correction
- Large catalogs
The list can go on. Now, that’s not to say that Lightroom Classic sucks, because it doesn’t. It’s still amazing, and that’s why it leads the pack when it comes to Digital Asset Management tools for photographers.
The funny thing is, I also have one giant catalog. So I am not saying what was said is wrong. But I would rephrase the statement.
For many photographers having smaller catalogs can be better. For example, many event and portrait photographers would benefit from one of these setups:
- 1 catalog per month
- 1 catalog per quarter
- 1 catalog per year
- 1 catalog per client
Of course, that detailed breakdown also isn’t for everyone. So I will leave you with this. Truly sit down and think about what might be best for you, and the volume of client work you do every year. That will help you determine what is the best catalog setup for you as well.
Make sure you have at least TWO backups of your photo library (your actual image files).
Two are great, but I would argue the more the better. Here is my backup strategy at the moment.
- Main files on a RAID
- Cloned to two other RAIDS; one of which is not inside my home
- Backed up to a NAS
- Backed up to the cloud
- Backed up as JPEG to two additional clouds
I would definitely have a cloud backup, too. Check out Backblaze.com
I completely agree on this one. When I mentioned just above that I back up my RAW files to the cloud, Backblaze is where I go.
But I have additional plans in the works, which I will share when I am allowed to.
Take a little time to really learn the new Masking features.
As mentioned above, masking (local adjustments) slow down Lightroom Classic. So while they can be powerful in what you can do with your photo editing, there is the side effect of a slower application.
So while I agree that learning and using the masking features is great, I recommend always doing masking at the end of your photo editing, so that you only experience slow downs when finishing up a photo.
Don’t ignore the “Backup your catalog” prompt that comes up when you quit Lightroom.
I completely agree with what was said. But I think the most important part of what was said is your catalog backup is on an external drive. That goes for anyone doing multiple catalogs instead of one too. In fact, I would recommend having an external drive exclusively for your catalog backup. Or a cloud folder specific for your catalog backups.
For those you use Imagen’s AI photo editing app, you may or may not know that Imagen backs up your catalogs for you when sending a project for editing. Those are stored internally, and can be copied or moved to an external drive if desired.
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