Usually you do not need to keep old Lighroom backups, but it depends. As a photographer, backups should be an essential part of your workflow; and Lightroom does help with that by offering to create backups of your catalog(s).
Do I need to keep all of my Lightroom catalog backups?
However, you only need a few catalog backups to have peace of mind, and if you haven’t configured Lightroom settings effectively, you might end up with a hundred of them. So, to answer the question, you don’t need to keep all your Lightroom Catalog backups ; only the most recent 2-3 should be good enough.
Does lightroom auto save?
The short answer is that as you work in Lightroom – adding keywords, stars, flags and other metadata; developing your photos; creating collections and more, your work is being saved automatically, so there is no need to do a “Save” before you wrap up your session.
One of the next things we wanted the answer to was: how do I make Lightroom automatically save my photos to XMP?
You can set Adobe Photoshop Lightroom so that all of your work is automatically, and continuously, saved for you into your image files and also stored within your Lightroom Catalog (.lrcat) file by turning on the Automatically Write Changes Into XMP Catalog Settings preference switch.
How do I apply auto settings to multiple images in Lightroom?
There is already a preset in the default “Lightroom General Presets” set of presets called “Auto Settings” which will apply auto to your images. In order to use this on multiple images at once, you need to be in the Library module. There are multiple ways to apply auto settings in the Library module.
How do I Find my backup files in Lightroom?
To check the current location, open the Catalog Settings dialog, which you’ll find under Edit menu (Windows) / Lightroom menu (Mac), and change the Backup pop-up to When Lightroom Next Exits. Then quit Lightroom and the backup dialog will appear, where you can view and change the current location of the catalog backups.
A lot of beginners in Lightroom fail to realize that Lightroom doesn’t actually store your photos. You decide where you want to keep your photos. Lightroom simply stores information about your photographs in a catalog. So even though your images aren’t technically “inside” Lightroom, you still need to backup your Lightroom catalogs .
Another frequently asked question is “How do I save my work in Lightroom?”.
You can choose to save your work only at the Lightroom Catalog level (not recommended). You can choose to save your work within your actual images when you manually trigger the Save Metadata to File Command while still keeping a copy of your work within your Lightroom Catalog (.lrcat) file.
Unlike most other programs, with Lightroom you have three choices determining when and where your work is saved. You can choose to save your work only at the Lightroom Catalog level (not recommended).
Does Lightroom slow down your computer when editing?
Keep in mind though that the history of your edits is not stored in the XMP file which is one of the benefits of the Lightroom catalog. So if you don’t already have that box checked in the Lightroom Catalog Settings, stop what you are doing and go turn it on now. Do some editing and see if you notice it slowing your computer down.
It might take an extra second to write to the xmp file (or so I’m told) but I’ve never noticed Lightroom to be any slower with the option turned on, and the XMP sidecar files it creates are tiny and take up virtually no space.