This slideshow discusses what is contained in the Lightroom catalog, why it is important to backup your Lightroom catalog, and how to backup your catalog.

1. Why Backing Up Your Lightroom Catalog Is Important (And How To Do It) Presented By

2. What is the Lightroom Catalog? The Lightroom catalog doesn’t contain any images. Lightroom indexes images referencing where they are on your hard drive. When you do any work in Lightroom the changes are automatically saved in the catalog. The catalog has two components: CatalogName.lrcat has all the information about the images including development settings, collections, ratings, flags, etc. CatalogNamePreviews.lrdata holds all of the JPEG image previews that are displayed within Lightroom.

3. More Information About Lightroom Catalogs You can only have one catalog open at a time but you can create multiple Lightroom catalogs. You can open your Lightroom catalog on different computers. You are able to browse your images previews but to use any of the development settings the images need to be local on that computer. Images that Lightroom cannot find on the computer are listed as “offline.” You can make catalog changes to offline images but not development changes. Catalog changes include keywords, flags, ratings or collections.

4. Offline Images In Lightroom Images that are not found in the same place as the Lightroom catalog expects are listed as “offline.”

6. If your catalog becomes corrupted or missing your work done in Lightroom will be lost.

7. You can become less reliant on your catalog by pushing your changes to the images metadata.

9. Choose Your Catalog Backup Location Quit Lightroom. The dialog to the right will appear. Select “Choose” to determine a destination for your catalog backup. Recommended that you choose a separate drive than where your catalog is currently saved to protect against hard drive failure. External hard drives or online services like Dropbox are a good option. (Remember your catalog doesn’t contain your images, so it is a fairly small file size.) Select Backup.

10. Your Lightroom Catalog Is Now Backed Up Your development setting and metadata are a little more secure.

11. For More Helpful Tips For Serious Photographers Check out the Mosaic Blog