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your catalog”). Backing up and optimization are important enough topics to warrant their own sections, so I do the smart thing and provide them next.

      Backing up your catalog

      

Lightroom Classic’s backup function does not back up your photos (because your photos are never in the catalog), but it can help protect you against data loss (meaning all the work you do in Lightroom Classic) by automating the process of creating backup copies of your catalog (or catalogs). A full computer system backup procedure outside of Lightroom Classic is still required to protect all your data (including your photos).

When the Catalog Backup function runs, it creates a fully operational and identical copy of your working catalog file (and the new .lrcat-data file), and then compresses them into a ZIP file to reduce file size. Should you have a problem with your working catalog (file corruption or data loss), you must swap the bad files with the latest versions extracted (unzipped) from the backup. The next time you launch Lightroom Classic, your work will be in the exact state it was in at the time the backup was created.

      Note that Lightroom Classic does not back up the preview caches (more on these in the “Managing the preview cache files” section) in this process. I suggest you exclude it from your system backup strategy as well because the cache file will grow quite large as you continue to import new photos (I’m talking gigabytes of space here). If you ever “lose” your preview cache, Lightroom Classic automatically creates a new one for you.

Thankfully, you can automate the catalog backup process so that you don’t have to think about it. In the Catalog Settings dialog, click the Back Up Catalog drop-down menu to see your scheduling choices, which range from Never to Every Time Lightroom Classic Exits, as shown in Figure 2-5. The first thing you might notice is that the backup can run only when Lightroom Classic exits. If you want to force a backup after a good day’s work, set the backup to run Every Time Lightroom Exits; then close Lightroom Classic when you finish working to trigger the backup.

      FIGURE 2-5: The Back Up Catalog drop-down menu.

When considering the frequency with which to schedule a backup, just imagine what would happen if your catalog went kerflooey. You want your backup catalog to be as fresh as possible, right? Setting it to run once per day is a safe choice. I personally have mine set to Every Time Lightroom Exits. It may seem like overkill, but the backup dialog you get on exit is equipped with a Skip button. The result is that I get a constant reminder to back up every time I quit Lightroom Classic and the option to skip if I haven’t done much work since the last time I backed up. It also makes it easy to force a backup by simply closing the program after a big work session.

The next time you exit Lightroom Classic in the period for the backup function to run, you’re greeted with the Back Up Catalog dialog, shown in Figure 2-6.

      FIGURE 2-6: The Back Up Catalog dialog.

      Here’s how you handle the Back Up Catalog dialog:

      1 Specify where you want the backup catalog saved by clicking the Choose button and then navigating to your desired location.I suggest having your backup saved to a different drive (if possible) than where your working catalog is located. The reason is that if you lose the drive containing your working catalog, you’ll be very glad that you had a recent backup safely tucked away on a different drive. My laptop (refer to Figure 2-6) has only a single drive, so I save the backup copies to a local folder in my Dropbox account, which is then automatically synced to a cloud storage location.

      2 Check the Test Integrity Before Backing Up and Optimize Catalog After Backing Up boxes to have the backup process check for corruption in the database.I know it adds a little time to the backup process, but it’s time well spent.

      3 Click the Back Up button to begin the process.If you change your mind and just want Lightroom Classic to exit, click the Skip button to bypass the backup function. Note that you can change the backup schedule in this dialog as well.

      

Each backup function creates a new copy without touching the existing backup files. It’s up to you to manage the backup files so that they don’t fill the destination hard drive. If you run your backups regularly without clearing the old ones, you might just have several gigs of hard drive space waiting to be recovered! I periodically delete all but the most recent two or three backup copies.

      Optimizing your catalog

      I previously mention the File ⇒ Optimize Catalog command and just want to provide a little more detail. If you have a large catalog and notice that it seems sluggish, an Optimize operation might give you a performance boost. Using the Optimize command reorganizes the data in the catalog and removes unused space. The end result can be a smaller and faster catalog file.

      Choosing the Optimize command opens a dialog displaying the last time the operation was run and gives you the option to proceed by clicking Optimize or bail out by clicking Cancel. If you choose Optimize, it runs the housekeeping functions on the catalog and then displays a confirmation dialog that it has finished. All you have to do is click OK to return to using Lightroom Classic.

      

The whole Optimize process was originally put in place by Lightroom Classic’s designers to speed up slow-pokey catalogs, but I’ve seen circumstances where Optimize has corrected problems ranging from catalog exports to identity plates, so I regularly include this as a troubleshooting step for people with strange catalog behaviors. If you are new to Lightroom Classic, you probably won’t need this for a while, so just file it away for the future.

      Managing the preview cache files

When you make your way through the options in the Catalog Settings dialog, you notice the File Handling tab to the immediate right of the General tab. The File Handling tab (shown in Figure 2-7) has options to help you manage the size and quality of the regular preview files that Lightroom Classic creates for all your imported photos, as well as a running tally of the size of the cache for the optional Smart Previews (which I cover in the upcoming section “Smart Previews”).

      FIGURE 2-7: The File Handling tab of the Catalog Settings dialog.

      Regular previews

      Before I get into what the controls do, I’d like to talk about what previews are and what they do. I was once asked a great question by a new user who was trying to understand how previews work: “If my photos are never altered and never in Lightroom Classic, then what am I looking at when I’m working?” What a great question! The answer, of course, is

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