Lightroom: Dude! Where are my car photos?

8 Replies to “Lightroom: Dude! Where are my car photos?”

1. That was very helpful! I had almost written your techblog off as nothing more than a shill for Apple when you drop this on me. Thank you very much for this excellent post. I hope you can do more and more of these.

2. I am on of those people that have been hesitant to use Lightroom – mainly because I didn’t understand how it works. I still don’t understand, but this introduction was a great help. You didn’t mention what happens to your files when you actually manipulate them. Adobe’s Lightroom site says: “Create incredible shots using state-of-the-art nondestructive editing tools — your original photos are never altered.” So my question is if my ‘original’ files are never altered (and are always in my designated folder), then where are my edited versions of a file saved? In the same folder or elsewhere in the catalog/database? In what format are these edits saved (i.e. jpeg, DNG, NEF, etc.)? Will I have a revised jpeg that I can use in my folder or have the option to commit my edit changes to my ‘original’ jpeg? Thanks.

   1. Hi Matt,
      Great question! Your edits are stored in Lightroom’s database (your catalog) by default as metadata. For example, let’s say you take one your photos in LR and increase the exposure by 10%. That change will display in LR and Print from LR. However, your original photo is still the same exposure and you can always undo or remove this adjustment. If you would like to make this adjustment permanent (say you want to send it to a client), when you do an EXPORT of that photo, LR will make a JPG (or whatever format you choose) and put it wherever you tell it to. In this case your original photo is still technically unchanged.

      Think of it as the way Adobe Camera RAW works with RAW files. You are NEVER actually changing the RAW file. You are making adjustments that don’t become real until you save those “adjusted versions” as different files and the only time you need to do that is to use it somewhere outside of LR.

      Lastly, if you do want LR to write these metadata adjustments to your photo (for example, perhaps you want to also be able to view those adjustments outside of LR in say Bridge), then you can either manually hit Command-S (PC: CTRL-S) whenever you want OR turn on the option in your catalog to Always Write the Metadata changes to your files. This is still a non-destructive workflow because you can always at any point remove those changes or edit them.

      Hope that helps.

3. Thanks Terry for the clarification; it really helped me understand LR more. I’ll give it a try and start creating some catalogs.

4. Great podcast, very understandable, straight forward, and I got it!

5. This was helpful but confusing too. Please explain the difference between a Catalog and a Collection-which comes first and why do you need the other? Thanks in advance, I’m starting to catch on. Oh yes, if you did not set up catalogs prior to importing into LR, but just imported by date, are the dated folders considered Catalogs or Collections?

6. A catalog is the main database file that LR uses to keep track of your photos. It comes first. You can have one catalog with everything in it or multiple catalogs (which I prefer) organized by category ie. Travel, family, work, etc. The collections in each catalog are the groupings of photos within the catalog that you create. Let’s say the family catalog has every picture of my daughter that I have. However, for a slideshow I’d like to put together a “collection” of 1 birthday photo for each birthday she’s had to date. So that “collection” would have 16 photos in it from the overall “catalog called Family” The same photos might be in another Collection called “birthday parties” in the Family catalog.
   Hope that helps.

7. hello
   can I ask you one thing
   how can I do image with paragraph text publishing e pub.
   and e pub like folio file how can I do?

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