5 Things I Would Tell Any Lightroom Classic User

I just returned from B&H Photo’s awesome “Depth of Field” Portrait conference in New York City. The event was a huge success – packed the whole time with some really nice people (and great instructors). Thanks to everybody who came to one of my sessions. I super enjoyed every minute of it.

I taught three sessions, including a session on Lightroom organization, and I had TONS of questions about Lightroom throughout the entire conference. Based on those questions, here are five things I would share with any Lightroom Classic user to help them make their Lightroom life easier, better, and more fun.

Interesting Observation: When I started my Lightroom session, I asked the packed room how many people were using Lightroom Classic and how many were using the ‘Cloud’ version. Only three people out of the entire crowd were using ‘Cloud.’ Even less than I expected. OK, onto our five things:

1. Only use one catalog. Just one. Put all your photos in this one catalog. It will change your world (for the better).
2. Make sure you have at least TWO backups of your photo library (your actual image files). I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories of people having their hard drive die and losing everything.
3. I would definitely have a cloud backup, too. Check out Backblaze.com – It’s around $6 a month for unlimited storage, and it backs up totally in the background all on its own. I love it.
4. Take a little time to really learn the new Masking features. When you hear us talking about “Game Changer’ in reference to them, we’re not exaggerating. It’s the biggest thing to happen to Lightroom in many years.
5. Don’t ignore the “Backup your catalog” prompt that comes up when you quit Lightroom. If your catalog becomes corrupt and can’t be fixed, all your organization, all your collections, all your sorting, all your star ratings, all your labels – it’s all gone – you’re starting over from scratch. And don’t back it up to your same computer. I would back it up to an external drive or the cloud. Do it once a week or at the least, every two weeks.

Those are all pretty simple things, but you cannot imagine what a difference doing these five simple things can do for your Lightroom life.

Save $100 on a ticket to the Outsiders Photography Conference next month in Utah

Here’s a link with more details or to get your ticket. Hope to see you there! 🙂

Have a great weekend, everybody!

-Scott