For those new to the cloud-based Lightroom CC or to Lightroom Classic, naturally you want to understand how to save your editing and other work. You’ll notice that the File menu in the menu bar suspiciously does not have “File Save” and “File Save As …” options. The short answer is that all the work you do in Lightroom – adding keywords, stars, flags and other metadata; editing your photos; creating collections or albums and more, is automatically saved as you do it – so there is no need to do a “Save” before you wrap up your session – just close the program!

More on Saving and The Lightroom Catalog

It’s worth understanding this in more detail. First, both the cloud-based Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic work non-destructively – meaning that they never touch your master photo files. Instead, your  work is saved automatically behind the scenes as a set of instructions.  In Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic you are essentially seeing the instructions hovering over your master photos, but the instructions are not baked in to your  masters. This is great, as it means that you can undo all or part of your work at any time – you can’t ruin your photo as you work on it!

This work, or instructions, are automatically saved into Lightroom’s catalog. The catalog is simply a file on your computer where your work on each of your photos in Lightroom is stored, along with other information about your photos. The catalog doesn’t contain the photos themselves, just information about them.(In Lightroom CC, the catalog is stored inside the .lrlibrary file.) (Read more about the Lightroom Classic catalog and how it relates to your photos in this article.)

Is Export in Lightroom Classic or Save To in Lightroom CC Another Way to Save My Work?

When you want to share your edited photos with the outside world, of course you can’t send people the originals plus a set of Lightroom instructions. This is when you need to create copies of your photos, with the work “baked in”. In Lightroom Classic we do this through the Export dialog – usually we create JPEG copies to share online, through email, to send out to print, etc.. In Lightroom CC, we do this by clicking on the Share icon and choosing Save To. (Don’t let the “Save To” terminology confuse you though – the choice of name for this feature is unfortunate!)

Note that many users believe they need to export (or Share>Save To) all their worked files in order to save their work – this is not the case, and will simply clutter up your hard drive with unnecessary copies. Furthermore, on these copies you can’t undo your work – it has been baked in. For most people I recommend that you export (or Share>Save To) only when you want to share photos, and once you do, delete the exported copies, since you can always create new ones to share.

The Importance of Catalog Backups

You can imagine, since the Lightroom catalog contains all the work you have ever done on any of your photos, that it is important to back it up, to protect you against two potential crises: (1) the catalog file could become corrupt and be impossible to open, and (2) your hard drive could crash or be stolen or damaged.

Cloud-based Lightroom CC users, these are taken care of for you – assuming you have internet coverage, your catalog is automatically backed up to the cloud, and Lightroom CC should automatically recover from a local hard drive crash or a corrupted catalog issue. That said, having a local backup of your hard drive(s) will enable Lightroom CC to recover more quickly – use backup software outside of Lightroom (Mac Time Machine, Windows Backup, other third party software) to back up the hard drive(s) your catalog and photos are stored on.

Lightroom Classic users: you, on the other hand, need to take care of this yourself! To protect against the first, back up your catalog using the prompt when Lightroom closes – this creates a series of backups over time that you can revert to, should your main catalog become corrupt. To protect against the second, use backup software outside of Lightroom (Mac Time Machine, Windows Backup, other third party software) to back up the hard drive(s) your catalog and photos are stored on. Read more about backing up your Lightroom Classic catalog and photos in this article. To see where your catalog is stored, in the menu bar in the top left, go to Lightroom (Mac) or Edit (PC) , Catalog Settings. It is listed on the General tab:

What I have explained so far is all that I believe beginners absolutely must know. For Lightroom Classic users  who want an additional layer of protection and don’t mind delving into the topic more, there is also the option to “save to XMP“, which also puts the instruction data in the folders along with your master photos. I hope to cover this topic in another post soon, but for now understand that this is not a substitute for saving into the catalog. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter below to hear about new articles and tutorials!