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Lightroom - the concepts by Art P Suwansang - part 2 of 1 2 3

Published 01/02/2009

Starting with the concept of Library, this is the place in where all the images that you downloaded reside within LR; again these can be RAWs, JPEGs, TIFFs, or PSD. Think of your LR image Library as planet Earth. Some of the facts about our planet, in terms of territorial boundaries, are that we have continents, countries, states or provinces, and so forth. Currently, some of these territorial boundaries, such as continents, are set and can contain many countries, and each country's boundary is then set within its respective continent.

How does this compare to LR? If the LR Library were planet Earth then the folders can be compared to the continents, and the sub-folders within those main folders would be like the countries within the continents. Within each country there are always states or provinces, so think of the digital image files as the states or provinces. So how does all of this work? Like natural or territorial boundaries that rarely move or change, the digital images files are stored within subfolders and folders that do not change. However, if the LR Library is Earth then we are presented with one big problem, how do we know where the files are? This leads us right into the next concept of Catalog.

What is Catalog? Catalog in LR is similar to XMP sidecar files for our digital RAW files. The difference is that instead of storing all the XMP next to the image files as a sidecar, LR now consolidates all of those pertinent adjustments, keywords, and metadata information for all of your digital images into one file, known as the Catalog. Now that we know what a Catalog is, how does this relates to our concept of the Library. Let's think of our Catalog as a world map, it is only appropriate since we have the planet Earth as our Library. Essentially, the Catalog in LR is like a map of the world, which references and defines all of the boundaries so that we can easily see them.

In this case the map or Catalog tells LR the locations of the images so that they can easily be found and Catalog stores the adjustments, keywords, etc, as they are assigned to the images.

Lastly is the concept of Collection. In essence, Collection is not part of LR primary storage and digital image management system. Rather, it is a tool that allows you to organise your images differently. Continuing the analogy, Collection can be compared to the variety of maps, topographical, political, etc, but, in this case, Collection is a virtual folder in LR that allows you to consolidate images from different sessions together without physically moving the files from their storage location. The benefit of this is that your storage system takes up less space, and because the files are not accessed physically but rather just referenced, the chances of corrupting your data also decreases.

To visualise this let's look at, for example, wedding photography. Every client will have at least one kiss shot at the conclusion of the ceremony. Perhaps you've photographed 30 weddings in the current year and would like to view and organise all of the kiss shots, from all of the weddings, into one folder without moving your files on the hard drive. Before LR there were only a few ways to do this, and one of them involved making a duplicate of each of the kiss shot files and copying all those duplicates into one folder. This, however, is not the most practical use of your time or the most efficient use of your hard drive space and you will constantly run out of storage space because of the file duplication. With Collection in LR, this virtual folder works out of our map of the world, the Catalog. Since the Catalog knows where all of the images are physically located, it can just reference them in these virtual folders.

Which means that every time an image is added to the collection, it is not physically moved from the folder that it was originally stored in. The upside to this is less storage space usage, minimal image file corruptions, and easier storing of images that fit your specific needs. In other words, there can be limitless collections and each of them can contain images from many different sessions combined together.

So, to review the concepts - LR Library is the place where all of your images are located within various folders. The Catalog is the means to find the location of the images physically stored on your hard drive. This Catalog also contains all of the information pertinent to all of the stored digital image files, such as, the various adjustments, crop, keywords, star colour and flag rating, to name a few. Finally, Collection is, in essence, the virtual folders that work based on the Catalog. Inside these virtual folders, the files are only referenced and never physically moved on the hard drive. Now that we understand the concepts of storage that works in the background, we can set up Lightroom based on what we need.

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1st Published 01/02/2009
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:25

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