- [Instructor] Lightroom Classic uses a catalog system
to manage and keep track of our photographs.
But before we can learn how to use Lightroom Classic,
we need to understand what a catalog is, specifically,
what Lightroom Classic's catalog is.
The first time you launch
the Lightroom Classic application,
a catalog file is automatically created for you,
and the catalog is not the same thing as the application.
New users often misunderstand this
because opening the Lightroom Classic application
automatically opens a catalog file,
and it doesn't work like other applications
we might be familiar with.
For example, the Photoshop application can be opened
without a document or a file,
but Lightroom Classic cannot be opened without a catalog.
I like to think of the catalog as a brain
that stores information about your photos.
The photos themselves are not inside of the catalog.
And this is probably the number one most misunderstood fact
about Lightroom Classic,
and it's really important to understand this
before you even get started.
It's probably because of that term import
that makes us think that Lightroom Classic
is ingesting the photos, but in truth,
the import only ingests information about the photos,
not the photos themselves.
So the catalog is the brain that knows the location
of the photos after you have imported them.
What the catalog contains is image previews,
edit adjustments, or developed settings,
which are really just a set of instructions
and metadata information like copyright,
keywords or ratings, and saved presets.
All of this stuff is stored in the Lightroom catalog,
but the actual image files are located somewhere
on a local hard drive.
So there's three separate parts to this puzzle:
the Lightroom Classic application, the catalog,
and then the photos or image files.
But the most important thing to understand here
is that the catalog does not hold your photos.
It only has previews of them and information,
including where they are located out on a local hard drive.
Now that we understand what a catalog is,
we're finally ready to get started with Lightroom Classic.