There are many settings you can adjust with your Lightroom catalog and some of these can help you run Lightroom more efficiently. Lets take a look at 5 quick tips to optimize your Lightroom catalog settings.
1) Before we get into your Lightroom catalog do you know where your catalog is currently stored? If you go into the Lightroom –> Catalog Settings menu you will see the location of your catalog listed in the General tab. You can store this catalog anywhere so if you have a external network drive or even a cloud based storage solution this can be stored anywhere you want.
2) Next lets head on over to the Metadata tab under Lightroom –> Catalog Settings. Here you will see a checkbox for Automatically write changes to XMP. If this is checked off Lightroom will automatically be writing all of your changes you are performing to the file to it’s XMP file. This way if you open up the image in Photoshop or another program it will see the edits and apply them to the image. This will slow down the performance of Lightroom so really depends on what your normal workflow is. Since I rarely open up images from Lightroom in another image editing program I leave this turned off. Then at the end of my editing for a shoot i’ll click the save button to write the data to the XMP files.
3) Use Smart Previews. Smart previews are part of Lightroom 5 and are one of the best additions they added. This basically adds a high resolution preview of the image to your catalog so you can edit any image even if you don’t have the original with you. For example if your images are on a external drive and you are traveling with your laptop but don’t have the drive of originals. In the past you would be stuck and not able to edit the images at all. Now with smart previews you can fully edit the images still from these preview files. It’s very handy and something I do with all of my shoots. You can check a box to build smart previews when you import the images but if you already have things imported then go to Library –> Preview –> Build Smart Previews.
4) Move images from Lightroom not from your computers finder (or windows explorer) view. As I work on a shoot it’s normally in a temp. work drive that I have connected. Once I am done with the editing i’ll move the folder of images over to my NAS drive (if you are looking for a great NAS drive check out my review of the Ready NAS NV+). If I were to drag and drop the folder with my Mac finder from one drive to another Lightroom will not know that i’ve moved the files and next time I try to edit an image will ask me to show where I moved the files to. Many people don’t know that you can simply drag and drop right from the Library folders pane on the left hand side. Just drag any folder into another folder on a different drive and Lightroom will move all of your files.
5) Over time your Lightroom catalog can get very large and the performance will start to slow down. One thing you can do to improve performance is optimize the catalog. To do this just click on File –> Optimize Catalog. This will take a few minutes to run and clean up any data that isn’t needed anymore. It’s a good idea to run this from time to time and something I put in my calendar to do on a monthly basis.
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