- [Instructor] I'm going to create a brand new catalog
that we'll use just for this course.
So let's open Lightroom Classic to get started.
I've got the Creative Cloud desktop application open here,
and I'm going to use it to launch Lightroom Classic.
This is one way to open Lightroom Classic
or any of your other Creative Cloud applications.
I'll just click on the Open button.
And that opens Lightroom Classic as well as a catalog.
The first time you open the Lightroom Classic application,
a catalog is automatically created for you.
If you've used Lightroom Classic
before starting this course,
you already have a catalog file.
So let's take a look at how to find out where that is.
For starters, look at the top of the screen here,
we'll see the name of the catalog.
It's named Lightroom Catalog.
How fancy is that?
By default, that's what Lightroom does.
It just creates this catalog, names it Lightroom Catalog,
and it puts it in your pictures folder.
And let's see how you can find that.
I'm going to go up to Lightroom Classic
and come down here to Catalog Settings.
If you're on a Windows machine,
you'll find that in that Edit menu.
In the Catalog Settings in the General tab,
at the top, we have information
about the location of the catalog file.
It shows us that it's in the user folder
in the pictures folder.
If we click over here on Show,
we can see that we're in the pictures folder here,
there's actually a folder named Lightroom.
So Lightroom Classic created not just a file but a folder.
Inside of this folder are several files.
I'll switch to the list views
so that we can see this better.
The catalog file is the one with the icon on it
that's got the extension dot lrcat.
These other two files are needed to run the catalog.
And these last two files are just temporary files
that are created when you open a catalog.
As soon as you quit out of Lightroom Classic,
these will get deleted.
So they're just there,
if you see them, then you know that you have a catalog open.
Okay, I'm going to click back here
to go back to Lightroom Classic.
And then we're going to create a brand new catalog.
If you'd like to follow along with me
using the exercise files that I provided,
I recommend that you do the same.
This way you won't mix your images with mine,
and it'll be easy to remove them
when you're done with the course.
So we're going to come up here to File and New Catalog.
Now it's asking us here to give the catalog a name
as well as choose a location for it.
I'm going to go ahead and create this catalog on my desktop.
And you could do the same
if you're following along with the course,
but I don't recommend that you do that
for your master catalog for your real workflow.
Just for following along in this course,
it'll be fine to put that catalog folder on your desktop,
it'll make it easy to throw it away when it's all done.
So I'm going to call this Lightroom Essential Training,
and this is going to be the name of my catalog.
And I'll say Create.
Now what this is doing is it's asking us
what we want to do when we close the current catalog,
because Lightroom Classic
can only have one catalog open at a time.
It's wanting to do a backup,
but there isn't anything in this catalog,
there's no reason to back it up.
So we'll just skip this time.
It closed out of the default empty catalog
and it created a brand new catalog.
We can see at the top of the screen here,
that it now has the name Lightroom Essential Training.
And let's go back to the catalog settings here.
And the location is the desktop, and here's the name.
If I click on Show, it'll jump us out to the desktop,
and we'll see the folder that it created
with the name I gave it,
and inside all the files in here
have the same name as that folder.
There's one last thing that we want to do
back inside of Lightroom.
So I'll click on Lightroom behind here to bring it forward.
And I'm going to go up to the Preferences.
Again, if you're on a Windows machine,
you'll find that under the Edit menu.
On a Mac, it's under the Lightroom Classic menu.
And then here where it says Default Catalog,
make sure you're on that General tab,
where it says Default Catalog,
I'm going to change this to the catalog we just created.
So if we leave it on the default load most recent,
whatever the last catalog you opened
is what's going to open when you launch the application.
But I'm going to change this to the new catalog I just created.
So when I quit out of Lightroom
and come back to it at a later time
by going through the Creative Cloud application,
it'll automatically open this catalog for this course.
So as you can see here, Lightroom Classic
allows you to create multiple catalogs on your computer.
But this doesn't mean that you have to or you should.
I use different catalogs for teaching
but I have a single master catalog
for all of my photography,
and I recommend that you do the same.
We'll use this new catalog for the remainder of the course.
And when you have completed the lessons,
you can throw this catalog away and return to using your own
or you can start over from the beginning
creating a new master catalog for yourself
and importing your own photos.