Lightroom Tips

It’s Lightroom Optimize-Your-Catalog Day

Well, it’s the end of the year and this is a great time to optimize your Lightroom catalog. I know a lot of you organize Lightroom by year, so you’ll be starting out with a brand new catalog tomorrow for 2014. But for me personally, just because 1 day goes by, doesn’t mean I don’t want the photos I may take next week to be right next to the photos I took last month. One day on the calendar doesn’t change anything for me. So, since I’m not a yearly organizer, I make sure I optimize my catalog every once in a while to keep it zipping along.

While there’s no “official” rule on how often you should do it, I’d say if you use Lightroom regularly (like a few times a week), then optimizing once a month should do it. Remember that at it’s core, Lightroom’s catalog is like a database file (“snore”). And databases consistently need to be optimized and things moved around once in a while, to help them perform better. So that’s pretty much the same deal here.

To optimize, go to File > Optimize Catalog. Depending on how many photos you have in the catalog it could take a few minutes or more so go ahead and optimize and then grab a drink (hey, it’s New Years Eve right?!) 😉

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That’s all for 2013 folks! I want to wish everyone out there a very happy and safe new year. See you in 2014!

PS: Make sure you stop by on Thursday. I have an announcement for something pretty cool that I’ll be doing here on the blog for the month of January.

See ya!

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