Session two is all about importing and catalog management. So I'd like to start by getting you acquainted with the Lightroom catalog structure, because it's kind of important to understand what's happening behind the scenes to ensure that you manage everything as well as combate. So here I am in my Lightroom catalog. And the first thing to get clear is that, despite the fact that I'm looking at all my images right here, they're actually not here at all. They're off on my hard drive somewhere on my computer, they could be on an external hard drive, they could be on my local hard drive. In this case, they are on the local hard drive, but they're not in Lightroom.

Lightroom is just referencing them. Lightroom has made little previews of them and these are the previews. So this image here, it's actually a raw file on disk. But here in Lightroom, it's just this is just a little JPEG preview. So Lightroom actually makes two JPEG previews. If I was to zoom in, you'll see that it's a high res JPEG preview the one And there's the low res Lightroom actually gets rid of those high res JPEG previews if I haven't zoomed into it for 30 days, and then it'll have to rebuild another one later.

So it's an interesting little thing as well the way Lightroom builds it. So that's the standard size previews, it keeps forever, and the one to one previews, it just creates them on demand, sell 30 days past when I haven't zoomed into one, then it'll go ahead and delete it again. So if I go here, and I say I want my one to one, let's say zoom in, you can see it's loading. And then it's got it there. And we're back out again. So this is how Lightroom works with JPEG previews, despite the fact that it's managing RAW files.

So where are these raw files? Now, it tells me over here, they're off on my folders and in my folders tab. On my Macintosh hard drive somewhere, there's a folder called travel photos, and it's got those sub folders in it. Now we know we can right click on travel photos there and we can say show in Finder and Lightroom shows me where it is There it is in my pictures folder Lightroom and travel photos. That's where the negatives. And we noticed looking in here, there are a number of other Lightroom attributes here as well, other Lightroom assets, I should say, here is the Lightroom catalog file.

So this is the file that manages all the images in Lightroom. There's no images in there at all, no previews, no, nothing just metadata, just lots of code, managing the whole operation. And that's why it's very small. You can see here at tiny 107 and 59 megabytes very small file. We've also got a file here, that's the preview data. This is about two and a half gigabytes.

So this is a bit bigger, but still, it's not that big when you think about 1600 and 28 images. This is just the file that manages all the JPEG previews. And you can see the icon there indicating large files and small files in preview form. So these are the two key Lightroom assets. There's also these two little files here the journal file In the lock file, there's a little temp files that only appear when the Lightroom catalog is open. When it's closed, they will disappear.

And then I've got my travel photos. And these are my negatives. This is what Lightroom refers to as the negatives. These are the high res files. And if I was to just get info on that command I you'll see, this is 53 gigabytes, 53 gigabytes worth of data is my negative file, whereas the catalogs only 159 megabytes. And the preview data is two and a half gigabytes.

So the preview data and the catalog file make up about 5% of the overall data. So that leaves my negatives being 95% of the data. So that's how Lightroom manages to be so efficient, because it doesn't really use the negatives at all. It just uses its own little JPEG previews. When I change the appearance if we jump back here for a moment, when I go into an image here and I convert it to black and white, it let's just double click this Just press V and I mean black and white, it hasn't converted the negative to black and white, just the preview. So it's very quick and easy and I converted back and it's very quick and easy as well.

Everything's just temporary until we choose to export. So back in my finder here, if you're on Windows, that would be Explorer, you'd right clicking go showing explorer on a Mac, it's finder explorer and find that same thing. So looking at this catalog structure, we start to get an idea of how it all works. And the other important thing to understand also is this, I'm going to click on travel photos here. And if I grab my Bali folder, and I put it over here in my pictures folder, you can see what's going to happen when I go back to Lightroom Lightroom says, Hey, where did Bali go? So Lightroom needs to know where these negatives are.

They need to stay at the place they were at when you imported them. If you move them, you'll break the link. Maybe a few people now going on, hang on now I understand what happened. So you have to leave the Images, when you imported them from, or Lightroom will get very confused. So if I go back to my finder now, and I pop Bali back into the travel photos folder, then we say no problem. When we got back to Lightroom, the question mark has gone away.

So this is the Lightroom catalog structure, this relationship between the catalog file, the preview data, and the negatives, all working beautifully together to facilitate the workflow. So when we the negatives don't have to be on your computer, they could be off on an external drive, as I'll demonstrate in another video when we look at some other things, but for now, just showing you how that structure works and how important it is. You keep it nice and neat. If I quit Lightroom I'm just going to go command Q and quit. And you see those temp files disappeared. The temp files disappeared and we're back to just our catalog file, preview data and the negatives and now if I wanted to relaunch Lightroom I can As a launch Lightroom here or by simply double clicking on that catalog file, it's going to go ahead and open Lightroom right there.

So that tiny little catalog file is the one with all the information about the image adjustments, about the writing the ranking, the keywords, who's a mock collection, all that information is contained within that precious little catalog file. So it's important that catalog file gets backed up, and it does, you can see I've got a little backup folder here. And what's in there is just the catalog file once a week, once a week Lightroom prompts me to backup that catalog file, and it makes a little backup there. And the theory is if I was to, if my catalog was to become corrupted, or I was to have a problem with it, then I would just revert back to the previously saved catalog. So why do I have all these other backups? Well, I just haven't got around to cleaning them out.

I mean, they're tiny files, as we said, you know, 34 megabytes with compression because text files compress really well. So the most recent one, I think will be just right here, backed up on the ninth of the eighth. So I could easily go ahead and delete those and they're gone. And just to show you the backup procedure, how it works, if you go into your Lightroom, and your catalog settings, it actually tells you under General, that it's going to backup the catalog once a week, once a week when exiting Lightroom. And you can force it to backup now if you want by saying backup when Lightroom next exits, when exiting lot when was that when Lightroom next day, sorry, right that when Lightroom next exits, I choose and that will just force it back up right now. So I just wanted to show you that.

So I'm going to go command q to quit. And there's the all too familiar dialog saying, we're going to back up your catalog file and it tells you it's only backing up the catalog, not the photos. I'll talk about backing up photos in another video specifically about backups. But just now while we're talking about catalogs, structure, it's worth looking at this catalog backup principle. And you can see it's going to test the integrity before backing up. And it's going to optimize the catalog after backing up to make sure it's all good to go.

So I click back up, and we get a little bit of a dialog coming along. They're telling us it's checking and looks like it's gonna take a long time, but it picks up speed very quickly and has a fun a little think at the end when it optimizes and bang, it's done. So now if I go back to my finder, and into my pictures folder, which every operating system creates Mac or PC has a Pictures folder. When you install Lightroom. It creates the Lightroom folder. Here's my catalog file.

Here's my preview data. Here's my most recent backup, you can see now so the 10th of the month is today's date. And that's the little backup there that I can utilize. Should I run into any problems with my current catalog. And again, I'll just double click here and we're back into our catalog in order Glory managing all the photos. So, this is the catalog structure, or at least a broad overview of the catalog structure.

I hope that all makes sense. In the coming videos. In this section, we're going to get deeper and deeper into importing images from the computer, importing images from cameras, and we're going to look at working with multiple catalogs. We're going to look at merging catalogs and splitting catalogs. And I'll also do a much deeper video about backing up and talking about all the various things that you need to be sure of to make sure nothing gets lost or misplaced and everything is nice and secure. Okay, so I look forward to making the rest of the videos here for session two.

And there's the intro one for now.