Comments on: Lightroom lrcat & lrdata files, & why Lightroom ROCKS!

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:09:09 +0000

Edit – 3rd paragraph from bottom – “I my example above, 2 days of backups”…”I” should be “In”

By: rkh

rkh — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:35:12 +0000

Note that the lrcat is just a sqlite file/database and can be accessed from any sqlite library, which is really handy for stuff like tagging from outside of lightroom and automating stuff in the programming language of your choice. This is what I like most about LR (btw Aparture does the same).

By: Oliver Cardona

Oliver Cardona — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:04:44 +0000

Great tips. Was wondering whether keeping the lrcat and lrdata files on the secondary hdd within my Mac makes a difference in performance, rather than on my main OS drive.

This is off topic, but I also would like to know whether you can select the images in a stack with one click instead of opening the stack and shift clicking the first and last image.

By: sharon

sharon — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:13:36 +0000

Is there a way to back up before I quit the program. I don’t like waiting until I open Lightroom up the following day. I recently lost some editing with a corrupted catalog that could not be fixed.

By: Michael Preston

Michael Preston — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:41:04 +0000

RC, thanks a million for blogging on this issue…it’s great timing for me. Last week I received my Western Digital My Book studio edition 1TB external drive, firewire 800. I’ll probably set it up this weekend, maybe next.

It was a good deal at B&H, $170… Thanks again, and keep the good stuff coming!

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:23:06 +0000

New to LR and puzzled by the following: I store my photos on external HD: Top folder “LR pix”, and subfolders by date. Twice, don’t know why/if my fault, I’ve been told it can’t find the top folder. So I point it to it, but it can’t then find the subfolders in one step, wants me to do each and every one of the several hundred. It was easier to restore from backup than do that. Any idea as to what’s up, and is there an easier way to restore the connections?
Thanks!

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:46:52 +0000

Not sure about Macs, but on Windows the .lrdata folder (which holds the previews) gets huge and unwieldy and there doesn’t seem much point in backing it up. In fact I now occasionally delete the whole folder because LR will create a clean version again automatically.

You will lose your previews of course but LR creates them again for whatever folder you looking at in the Library module.

You wouldn’t want to do this whilst in the middle of a close examination of your recent imports but as a housekeeping measure you’ll save a heap of wasted space by occasionally deleting the .lrdata folder – NOT the .lrcat file – which is, or will become the most important file on your computer for the reasons given above!