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A Look Under the Hood

Lesson 7 from: Lightroom Classic: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

A Look Under the Hood

Lesson 7 from: Lightroom Classic: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

7. A Look Under the Hood

Mark explains the files and folder structure of the images he’ll be using for this class. Mark also discusses ways you can use Lightroom to organize images that already exist on your hard drives.

Lesson Info

A Look Under the Hood

let's take a look under the hood. We're gonna look actually on my hard drive and do some housecleaning so that you understand what's happening and you can replicate this on your own computer going forward so that we can both sort of work from the same starting point. So on my computer here I have an external hard drive called Light room hard drive. And what I've tried to do is replicate a real life um what it would be like to have a real life working environment and so I have this right here, it's a totally empty um fake hard drive. So this is a uh sort of the equivalent of having a hard drive plugged in to my computer with a single folder called photos. And so all the stuff that we do, we're going to be working on the fake hard drive as if it were a dedicated hard drive for all of our work. So right now, if we look, there's nothing in there, the fake hard drive is totally empty except for this one folder that's also empty that says photos. So eventually we want all of our photos to be...

inside this folder and we'll fill that up as we go along. Now. The other thing we have here, we have some music that is licensed. And so audio socket is the place to go to get your music will be using that later when we do slide shows and things like that. So I just have to have something that's licensed. So we have that on our external hard drive. We have these class materials, you can download these from the class page. And so you'll need those. Uh, from now going forward, we're going to start with this Carisa folder here. Inside of here we have some images have some logos that will be working with. And then we have some other things that will be using a little bit later on to do some exercises. So get those class materials. And so those are there. We also have our Light room catalogs. So, a little bit later on, I'll be showing you how to integrate old catalogs into a new catalog. So we have several catalogs here to choose from. We'll be bringing these into a master catalog later. So that's for later on in the class. These logos. Um, I have a few extra logos here on my hard drive that you don't need. Um, so these are things like my mark on a bike logo and my Mark Wallace logo and things like that. We'll be using those for creating watermarks and some other groovy branding in light room. And then this here is sort of where we'll be pulling from. These are random photos in all kinds of different hard drives are different folders and stuff. These are totally unorganized. They're not really in any kind of shape. So the random photos folder that I have on my external hard drive, I tried to mimic what it's like in the real world and so on your hard drive, you probably have folders of photos stashed all over the place on different hard drives. The cool thing about Light room classic is it has the ability to go and find all of those different folders and files, pull them into the catalog and organize them. And then physically on your hard drive, it can take it from one place in chaos and move or copy those images to a new place on a new hard drive and organize all those folders by date or by a specific name or however you want to do that. And so you can take chaos on your folders and create serenity on a new place. I'll show you how to do that. So that's what these random photos are. It's sort of a real world mumbo jumbo of all kinds of different photos that we need to organize. So those are there. And then the other thing I have that we'll be looking at just briefly because I have the old hard drive backups, I've just named it. Z So would show up at the very last and this is a real world um folder of my uh of a hard drive I have. So this is about a quarter million images in all kinds of different folders and stuff. And so we will be showing you one of the differences between Light Room Classic and Light Room is managing a quarter million or 300,000 images and why it's different than Light Room itself. So Light Room Classic does a much better job at managing massive amounts of images. And so I have that in there just so you can see in a real life example of how that works. Okay, so now that we know all of that stuff, we need to go in here and start working on some things. And so download those class materials. We have uh, this folder called Carisa here. So what I want to do is I'm going to go into Light Room Classic. And what I will do here is create our brand new catalog. We're going to start from scratch. And so go up to file new catalogue. So this is where you want to be file new catalog. We want to start a catalogue from scratch. And so I'm going to go up here. I'm going to click on that and the first thing you'll see and this is important to understand. This says create a folder with the new catalog. This is really important to understand. It says folder here. Because what you're doing here is, um when you create a new catalog, you're going to type in the name of the folder. And inside that folder, you're going to create the catalog itself. So if we look over here on my screen, we have this little button here that says new folder. And a lot of times people make a mistake of creating a new folder and naming that whatever they want their catalog to be, and then naming the catalog and they'll get a folder in a folder. So we just want to name the folder itself. So we're gonna name this master catalog. Okay, well that's all we need to do. And we're putting it on my fake hard drive. So on your system you should have a place that you're keeping all of your stuff. Some some place on a hard drive. I'm using my fake hard drive. You might want to use a real hard drive. So I'm creating this folder called Master catalog. So we'll go back to my computer here. I'm going to say create and now this is going to close for our Light room Classic and reopen Late Room Classic. And then it might go through and do some updating or whatever. But that's one of the things that's important to understand. You can have many, many, many number of light room Classic catalogs, an infinite number. When you go from one catalog to another one, The existing catalog closes. It shuts completely down and the new one opens. And that's true. If you create a new catalog, the one that you're working in closes and the new catalog opens up. So don't freak out if you change catalogs and it shuts down. That's by design. Okay? Now that we have our brand new catalog, your catalog should look something like this. Just nothing happening. Now. We're gonna talk about the import process in a little bit. So right now, just follow along and do the same thing from your own computer. So we're going to click on the lower left hand corner. So go all the way down here to the lower left hand corner. In the library module, there's a button here that says import. Also notice this import has an ellipsis little dots. There any time you see the little dots anywhere in light room, that means that there's something else that you have to do. So I'm going to click on imports and this screen comes up now. Your, your screen might look like this. So this might be the same case if it does, there's a little disclosure triangle here on the left and so you might have to click that to get this full view. That's what we want. We want the full view. So it's gonna say what's the source again? We're gonna go into great detail about all this. So just follow along right now. So navigate to your class materials. That's where you want to go. You want to go to the class materials and uncheck this. So if included sub folders is turned on, make sure you uncheck that that should be turned off for this. And then we want to go into this folder right here, which is Carisa. So to check that. So you should go to your class materials to Karissa and you'll see these photos right here and then by default they're all selected. That's good. And then over on the right hand side over here we need to tell light room where to put those folders. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna click up here and say other destination and then you want to navigate two wherever you're storing these files. So I'm going to my light room hard drive. I'm going to my fake hard drive and I'm going to say in my photos folder, I'm going to choose that. And then um everything else here should be, don't worry about if there's anything changed, we just want to get a catalog going at this point. And then the other thing that you need to do is on the destination way down here. Um if it says in the sub folder, Uncheck that and choose original folders. Just choose by original folders. Okay. It's organized by original folders. That's all you have to do. And so this should look something like this. You should have photos and then this little gray out Carisa. It will look something like this. Okay. That's what you should see. Six files. All right. We're gonna explain that in great detail. Once you're done, you can hit this little button right here called import. We will do that. And then this is gonna chug along And you now will have six files in your catalog and there you go. We have our six files that are all set up and good. Now, if we go back to our hard drive here and we go to our fake hard drive. Now in our folders, you'll see that there's a folder called Carisa. So in photos we now have a folder named chris and all those images were copied in there. And as we go forward in our photos folder, we're going to start having folders that start appearing and we're gonna start organizing all of these different files. Now. You have these, you can play with these files. Um, and so that's all there is to it. Okay? Now that we have a master catalog, we have something we can begin working on it's time now. Finally to start working on things in Light Room Classic. And we're going to begin by understanding workflow.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Class Materials
Tether Tools Pro Kit Discount
Tether Tools Starter Kit Discount

Ratings and Reviews

Karen Sessions
 

Great class - excellent content, excellent presentation. Thank you Mark, through this class, I finally understand the difference between Adobe Lightroom Classic, Lightroom and how they work together. And how excellent, there is so much more available to learn - photography essentials, lighting, Adobe products.

user-d55dc6
 

This is an excellent class to learn about Lightroom Classic. Since it's not the same as Photoshop, I found Lightroom Classic to be confusing and difficult to intuitively figure out. Mark Wallace is an expert and exceptional teacher for the program and I learned so much today in this free class presentation that I am planning to purchase the program so I can continue to have a solid understanding of Lightroom Classic basics. Thanks, Mark, for inspiring me to get back into computer photo editing with LR Classic!

Student Work

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