Operation Manual

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Managing catalogs and folders
Last updated 11/30/2015
3 Navigate to your renamed or moved catalog, select it, and click Choose.
4 In the Select Catalog dialog box, your renamed catalog is probably the first catalog in the list. Select it and click
Open.
My catalog can't find my photos. How do I find them?
If you move image files in the Finder (Mac OS) or Explorer (Windows), the Lightroom catalog could lose track of them.
When a catalog can't find a photo, a Photo Is Missing icon appears in the photo thumbnail in the Library Grid view and
in the Filmstrip. The icon is an Exclamation Point (
) in Lightroom 5, a Question Mark ( ) in earlier versions of
Lightroom. The error "File could not be found" (Lightroom 5) or "Photo is offline or missing" (earlier versions of
Lightroom) appears over the photo preview in the Develop module.
1 In the Grid view of the Library module, click the "Photo is missing" icon in a photo thumbnail.
2 Click the Locate button and navigate to the folder that contains the photo.
3 Click Select.
You can find the contents of missing folders in a similar way: Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) a folder
in the Folders panel that has a Question Mark icon (
) and choose Find Missing Folder. Navigate to the location of
the folder and click Choose.
To avoid missing images, always move photos from within Lightroom rather than in the operating system. See Move
photos to a different folder and Locate missing photos .
How Lightroom catalogs work
What's in a catalog?
A catalog is a database that stores a record for each of your photos. This record contains three key pieces of information
about each photo:
1 A reference to where the photo is on your system
2 Instructions for how you want to process the photo
3 Metadata, such as ratings and keywords that you apply to photos to help you find or organize them
When you import photos into Lightroom, you create a link between the photo itself and the record of the photo in the
catalog. Then, any work you perform on the photo — such as adding keywords or removing red eye — is stored in the
photo's record in the catalog as additional metadata. When you're ready to share the photo outside Lightroom —
upload it to Facebook, print it, or create a slideshow, for example — Lightroom applies your metadata changes, which
are like photo-developing instructions, to a copy of the photo so that everyone can see them. Lightroom never changes
the actual photos captured by your camera. In this way, editing in Lightroom is nondestructive. You can always return
to the original, unedited photo.