Today’s Question: Where do you recommend placing the Lightroom Classic catalog file? I had placed it in a file on OneDrive but I am now trying to no longer use OneDrive. Do you recommend putting it on an SSD drive or just any location other than where the images are stored?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I recommend storing the folder that contains all catalog files for Lightroom Classic in a location on your computer’s internal hard drive to maximize performance. If you need to be able to move the catalog between more than one computer, you can use an external drive. I very, very, very strongly recommend that you never store the catalog in a cloud storage platform such as OneDrive or Dropbox.
More Detail: For maximum convenience and performance, I recommend storing the Lightroom Classic catalog on the internal hard drive of your computer. For example, the default location is a folder within the Pictures folder on the internal drive. This enables you to review (and even update) the information in the catalog even when the source photos aren’t available, such as if the external drive containing photos is not connected. It also ensures optimal performance in most cases.
If you need to be able to access your catalog on more than one computer, you can store it on an external hard drive. In this scenario I recommend storing the catalog on the same drive that contains your photos. You can then switch that drive between computers to access your catalog and photos on more than one computer with relative ease.
I very strongly recommend that the catalog files never be stored in the cloud, as doing so includes a considerable risk of information not being updated properly or the catalog becoming corrupted. I recently tested this issue out using OneDrive and was able to corrupt the catalog through normal use of Lightroom Classic on two computers in about five minutes.
If you want to move the Lightroom Classic catalog, I recommend that you first back up the catalog to a separate storage location using the feature built into Lightroom Classic. Then quit Lightroom Classic, and copy the entire folder containing your catalog files to the new location. I then recommend renaming the folder from the original location to indicate it is a backup, and hold on to that backup until you’re sure everything is working properly from the new location. Once the catalog folder has been copied, you can double-click the file with the “lrcat” filename extension in that folder to launch Lightroom Classic with the catalog.
