Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - How to Set New Catalog

Learn how to set a new catalog in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Essentials.

Back to general for a second. We want to look at these new Catalog Settings, so go ahead and click on those. Now, these are all settings that are specific to the New Catalogs. Number one, you have got the information on which catalog you are in, the file name, when you've created it, backed it up, optimized it and its current size. Believe me, you will never see this figure again, backing up. Well, this one is kind of confusing. I still haven't figured out why Lightroom backs up at the beginning of every session. You can choose once a month, a week, a day, every time or next time. I usually back up at the end after I have already done my work. But, the Lightroom engineers are smarter than I am, so they must have a good reason for it. I am going to go ahead and have it prompt me every time Lightroom starts to back up. Now, after you have been working for a while and you have developed a large catalog, 1000s or 10000 or 15000 images, and your catalog seems to slow down, they have given you an option now to optimize it. Think about it like resetting your permissions or defragging your disk. We haven't done anything, so we are not going to Relaunch and Optimize yet. We will go up to File Handling. Here we have some options that are very important. We have an option to set the preview, size, and quality. Now, this will really affect the size of the cache and how big those files are getting wherever you have them stored. Believe me, when you bring in hundreds of images everyday, those files can get large real quick. So Standard preview sizes, you have a choice from what I consider the Laptop on the first two, a normal desktop say a 20-23 inch monitor. And for those of you who are lucky enough to have 30 inch screen, you can go with the 2048. Well, we are working with the smaller monitor, so I am going to stick with the 1440. I am going to change my preview quality to High. Even though that increases the size of the cache, I want to make sure I am working on the highest preview quality possible. Now, this next one, Automatically discard your one to one previews. You have a number of options in here. You may never want to if you have unlimited hard-dive space, but it does build up quick, After one day, One week, well I find that a job will less than an importance, I will be going in and out of that job less often after about a month. So I am going to leave that on 30 days. Import Sequence Numbers, we will leave that set to 1 and 1. Over to the Metadata panel. Now, this one I like to think about as type ahead. It will offer suggestions from recently entered values. So if you've typed a word before, it will go ahead and start. As you type in the first couple of letters, it will go ahead and complete that for you. We want to write the Develop Settings to XMP for the JPEGs, TIFFs and PSDs, not just the RAWs. This is probably the most important option. We want to automatically write our changes to XMP. As you can see from the little warning down here, if you don't automatically write your changes to XMP, if you take the image into Bridge or Photoshop in a different way and you haven't saved those changes you have made, you may not see them in the other programs. So let's just take care of that, get it off of our heads. We don't have to think about it anymore. We'll get it automatically write. Metadata Browser Categories, I want all the information I can get, so I am going to leave all of those checked, binding through all of that. Next step, we will go ahead and personalize the Lightroom Interface, and we will be ready to get started.