Question about Adobe Lightroom 2.

colbyjames

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Can others edit my Photos
Photos NOT OK to edit
I'm new to the program and I'm curious about the catalog back-up that it frequently asks me to perform. When I back-up my catalog to my external drive, it appears as a single icon for a file of about 97Mb. My actual catalog has something near 10,000 photos and is about 30Gb in size. Is the program compressing my files to keep them backed up somewhere, or is it only saving thumbnails of each image, or...? :confused: Help! Thanks!!
 
Your image files are not actually stored up in the catalog. The Catalog contains previews of the images, and any edits that you have made to them inside LR.

Lightroom doesn't work like most programs that we are used to using. Whether it's a word processor or an image editor, we are used to opening a file, making changes and then saving the file again...either overwriting the original file/template or saving a new copy.
Lightroom doesn't work like that. It's really only a database. When you 'import' your images, it registers the location of the image file and create a preview image to work from. Anything you do to the image in LR, is saved as it's own little file and the original image is not touched. This is often called 'non-destructive' editing.

When you print or 'output' your images from LR, that is when it uses the original files, applies the changes and creates the output files.

So yes, the catalog is much smaller than all the images in it, which makes it easy to back up. However, you should still back up your images separately.
 
Cool. That's kind of what I suspected, just wanted to make sure! Thanks!!
 

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